For this project I decided to go with option one. I really enjoyed making that mini-documentary and wanted to try my hand at it again. It took me about a week to finally figure out who or want I wanted the documentary to be about. I remembered a conversation I had with my professor about the project and he mentioned how he thought someone should do a mini-documentary about me. So I thought that is exactly what I will do. I am creating a mini-documentary about myself if I were a single mother going to college in the 1980’s. One way I thought would help create the feel of it being set in the 80’s is smoking cigarettes. I figured if I were a single mom in the 80’s, I would probably be a smoker. Smoking was very common for me to see and be around as a child and I think it will help add to the atmosphere of this video project. I also decided to incorporate photography into the project since that is another medium that we focused on this semester.
For footage I took video of my kids spanning over about a week of various situations. I also wanted to capture myself interacting with the kids which can be hard to do since I don’t have anyone to be my cameraman for me. I also did video of myself preparing dinner one night, but I don’t really care for the angle that much. I think I will invest in a tripod to help me not only get the angle I desire, but a steady shot as well.
My mini-documentary is based on a true story about a single mom who is going to college for the first time in the 1980s. It was interesting trying to shoot my own interview. It’s a little challenging for me to act and not look at the camera. It was also challenging to look like I am actually a smoker. Again the angle definitely could’ve been better, but I think it will work. I decided to try something new by doing a lot of cropping of my shots. I also decided to do a small box on just a part of my face. I was also intentional about there being no music for the body of the video(only in the intro and outro). I wanted to create the feeling that life as a single mom is very isolating.
I put the entire video together in Premier Rush first, then put the video into Pro and created 3 layers of the video, one over the other. I changed the color of each one to be Red, Green, and Blue. Positioned the red the left and the blue to the right slightly, then added the effect Noise to recreate the VHS look. I think my video turned out nice and am very happy with it.
Here’s the tutorial I watched for how to get the VHS look.
shealanclark 