Re: Creating ‘Funny’ Videos

To kick off the year in true PLP fashion, we got right in to making videos. Last year, our focus was finding stories, and creating videos, and for the beginning of this year, we’re enhancing our video production skills by focusing on the details and learning how to up the quality. Our first assignment was a video recreation project, in which we were tasked with recreating a video given to us by Ms. Willemse, right down to every last detail. The idea was to learn more about video production by not just looking at the video as a whole, but breaking it down, layer by layer.

The video we were given to recreate was a pretty odd video that is supposed to be funny, however I think for the majority of the class, it fell short of that term. After being put in groups for this project – my group consisting of Maggie, Morgan and I – we began to dissect the video to figure out how the heck we were going to get this thing done.

Here’s the thing, the goal of me writing this isn’t to tell you step by step how to do exactly what we did, if you’re in to that kind of thing go watch a cooking video or something. What I’m here to do is tell you how this whole process went, and how I would do it differently next time. All in all, I do think this assignment went pretty well. I’ll be honest, this probably shows in our video as we were missing quite a few details in our recreation, so I think if we were to make a more exact recreation it would have been more stressful, in turn making the entire process a negative experience. Our group divided the work up well and in the end our video was something I’m not afraid to put up here.

After tackling our first recreation video, of course Ms. Willemse had to give us another one to do! The premise was the same, to recreate a funny video with as much attention to detail as possible, the only difference was that this time we got to choose the video we recreate. You would think this would be super fun and relatively easy because there’s thousands and thousands of funny videos to choose from, however you’d be wrong. Choosing a video that was short enough, had the right amount of characters, etc. was super difficult and was probably the hardest part of the whole assignment.

After searching and searching, Maggie suggested a super random video that I honestly have no idea how she found, and it fit the criteria for what we needed. Basically, the video is made my two teenagers and it’s a skit about what it’s like when there’s no food in the fridge. It follows a plot line very clearly and it’s a pretty well structured video.

It was pretty easy to film, especially because the whole video takes place in a house. Maggie and Morgan played the two boys in the video and I filmed as well as doing a storyboard. I’ll be honest because there’s no point not to, I didn’t do a whole lot of the filming as I had to get back to class (which I was still late getting back to and was marked absent for the class). Maggie and Morgan did really well to get the filming done with the help of Melika and I did the editing.

Once again this went really well and I think our second video was, overall, more successful than the first, and the reception by the class, Ms. Willemse, and Simon was very positive.

Through (re)creating these two videos, I’ve learned that it is very important to pay attention to detail when it comes to filmmaking. Aspects that may seem small and pointless can have a huge affect on the outcome. As this is obviously not the last time we will be filmmaking, there are quite a few things I will be making sure my future videos include, most importantly audio, because if I hear Mr. Hughes use the camera lens cap comparison one more time I’m gonna lose it!

Last but certainly not least is this fun, little, random funny video. Pretty much the only directions we were given was to make this video short and funny. There are so many ways this could’ve gone, and being honest, a lot of me and Kai’s ideas were probably not the most appropriate for putting up on YouTube on behalf of PLP. It took us a little while to come up with something but eventually we did, and it sure was random. Honestly, I don’t have much to say other than that Kai filmed and I acted and this is what our brains came up with…