For this project my group wanted to take advantage of the fact that we could film over Thanksgiving break. We wanted to use our crowd in a way that we could get a little sneak peak of how different families celebrate Thanksgiving. There is such a tradition behind this holiday of certain things your supposed to eat, decorating the table in fall colors, etc but we wanted to see how much different families actually follow this tradition.
To get our crowd we resorted to facebook where we invited all together over 1,000 people and from that 96 people said they were attending and out of that only about 25 people ended up actually filming. Most of the people that did end up filming were our close friends that we had to text and nag to get them to do it. And out of those 25 people we were only able to use about 15 clips. We weren't able to use all of the clips because a lot of people shot in really dark lighting or at weird angles. If we were to do it again we would give the crowd a template to follow so they would all film it in the same way and it would flow together better.
To get all the clips together we asked our crowd to use http://www.2shared.com/ to upload their clips. Once we got all the clips together we begain the editing process. We started out by organizing the clips into categories based on the angle they shot or whether they filmed more of people or of food. We wanted to group the similar clips together so the video would flow together better. We started out with the clips of the food and then gradually progressed to the clips with more people in them. The clips of the food kind of gave an insite into how people don't necessarily follow typical Thankgiving traditions. Some people did have the traditional turkey and mashed potatoes but other people went a whole nother route and had pizza, waffles or spring rolls. As the video progressed to show more of the people it gave this aspect of family, and togetherness. We intended for this progression to show that although people may eat very different things on Thanksgiving, the point is to bring friends or family together. The cool thing about this crowd sourcing project is that we had no idea what we were going to get to edit. We couldn't plan to far in advance what we were going to portray exactly, but once we got our clips we figured out the direction we wanted to take the video in.
We kept the editing simple to get the raw type of feeling of being inside someone elses home. Everyone using their own camera filming in their own way made it seem almost like a home video, giving it more of a warm, family type feel. Overall I liked doing this project and working with material that other people film. There is something very powerful of getting a whole group involved to create one piece of artwork.
Last blog, very sad. I am going to miss this class and all the talented and inspiring people in it. I can say with convidence that I learned something new and was inspired by each person in this class.
Miss you guys!
Gina
