Self Portrait:
For my self-portrait I decided that the best way to portray an aspect of my life would be through a show reel, as I feel a huge part of my life is my love of film and film making and wanted to present that in a way that showed I was more than just a fan. I created a show reel from scratch using some of the projects I have worked on over the past 4 years as a hobby mainly. It also shows my ability to work individually as I was the main creator of the majority of the projects I have presented.
I chose to present my self-portrait this way as I felt it was an effective way of showing an understanding of the production of video due to the different uses of camera and editing within. This project was one of the easiest to create as all the footage was already collected, rendered and graded, all I needed to do was cut them all down into my favourite clips from each project file and compile them into a 60 second window.
Although it is a simple idea, and didn’t require any filming specifically for it, it does show how I am able to adapt previously filmed work to suit different purposes and portray different meanings. I also found it was the perfect way of incorporating online media into my work as a show reel works well on multiple platforms and unlike other videos it is short and easy to watch getting across a very simple point effectively and engagingly.
I shared my show reel through the medium of Instagram, I did this because it is easily shareable and accessible through a multitude of other media formats such as Facebook and Twitter. This is an effective way of advertising myself and my previous work, as any potential employer can simply find everything they need to know by searching one of my social media accounts.
Another aspect of presenting my show reel through Instagram that I found useful and effectively made the most of was the letterboxing of the images, the black bars on the top and bottom of the video. Rather than leaving these empty narrowing the field of view, I decided to use this space to incorporate the title of each project I worked on at the top and the role I played on the bottom, this allows the audience to still be able to see the full image without distraction, but yet also gives the audience more information about what they are seeing, helping to understand and I also feel it makes it look a lot nicer by filling the blank space.
February 25, 2017