When taking part in the video reporting experience, I really enjoyed being able to develop a story that was going to be important to tell. When planning what I wanted to be told in the video, I wanted to make sure that their voices were heard. There were a lot of important questions that needed to be answered for this story, so it was very interesting determining what was the most important and needed to be told. I personally enjoyed being able to capture the interviews and edit them to turn the video into something very special.
The topic of my video storytelling assignment is to highlight what it took for business owners Buffy Helwig and Jaki Gustaf to survive a pandemic from their aspect. The Coronavirus Pandemic was a hard time in everybody’s lives, but extremely hard for these two, as they took over the grocery store in Upton, Wyoming just three months before the pandemic began. This assignment takes a deeper look into some of the struggles that they faced as business owners trying to survive as business and the steps it took to keep their doors open. This journalistic approach to the assignment was designed to tell a story on how they survived the challenging and hard times at the beginning of the pandemic. I chose this approach because there is a story to tell on the emotions and mental battles they faced when trying to survive as business owners.
When editing the video, I really struggled with making sure that the B-roll footage was good enough to be included in specific sections of the interview. It was very difficult to work with the B-roll footage to make sure there wasn’t any overlapping in the sound or video when implementing the footage into the video. Although I did not personally excel in adding the B-roll footage into the video, I was generally pleased with the end result of the video.
When completing the video process, I was very surprised in how challenging the individual clips and B-roll footage would be to put together to create one video. With the previous experience I have had creating videos for organizations on campus, I was not expecting this assignment to be challenging, but I was wrong. The process of putting everything together did take more time than I was expecting and required me to focus on making an excellent video.
After completing this assignment, I wish that I would have spent more time capturing B-roll footage for the video. Coming into this assignment, I really didn’t have a good idea of exactly what B-roll footage is, so I didn’t really feel comfortable with working with it. Over the course of the assignment, I did capture some good footage that I was able to use in my assignment. However, I wish I would have captured even more footage to use.
While this assignment was very interesting and fun to complete, I don’t think that I can see myself doing much work with video in the future. I personally found this process very long to complete, and it was very difficult to do. I do believe that I could see myself using video to capture my life and traveling opportunities, as a reminder of where I have been and where I plan to go in the future.
Kade McMillan 