Unit 3 Evaluation - Ken

Unit 3 Evaluation

James, Ollie and myself have created video of ourselves mountain biking at our local trails.
Working as a team was useful as we could look at each others work and see what we could improve, as well as spot mistakes.  On the downside, we sometimes felt that three people was too many, and we only really needed one person for most of the editing, although we needed everyone during filming as there was often. We only had a very rough plan, so we kept an open mind when filming and editing, and tried a variety of shots and editing techniques to see what worked and what didn’t. We all had slightly different ideas of what the finished product should look like so we had some minor disagreements that probably could have been avoided if we had created a more detailed plan before going out shooting, but I do not think that this affected the outcome of the video

Our Finished product was a video promoting the mountain biking trails on Grinshill.
We used a combination of POV and stationary camera shots with video effects, such as freeze frames and text over the video, as well as having two videos playing at the same time, with the background music synced to the video. Research for the video as relatively simple, looking at different videos similar to what we planned to do, taking note of camera angles and video effects used and seeing if we could use them in our video. As I stated earlier, we didn’t  really have a set plan for the video; we planned to go up to our locations(Grinshill) after school and at weekends and film us riding down some of the trails. We originally planned to do all of the filming before the summer holidays, but I managed to crash on our first day of filming and couldn’t ride for the weeks up to the summer holidays, over which we did not have access to a camera for filming. After the holidays, we continued with filming, which took around 4 weeks, which went relatively smoothly, despite some interruptions from a friend getting stuck in a pine tree.
Editing took longer than it should due to disagreements, again due to a lack of a plan, and again easily resolved. After we had finished editing the video, we were told it needed more interesting video effects, as the video was very ‘clean’. because we had finished editing pretty much on the deadline, I feel we rushed this  and we had a chance to this again, I feel we could have done something better.

The establishing shot of the video is a panning shot of the view from the top of Grinshill to ollie and I, with text introducing us, and a logo that james designed for the group. Later on in the video, the action freezes, and tells the viewer the name of the trail that Ollie is riding. This gives the viewer basic information about the trails, as this video is supposed to promote the trails at grinshill. We left the diegetic sound of the bikes in the video, as we felt it added a sense of speed, as well as putting a song in to make the video more interesting, and again, add a sense of speed to the video.

From a legal and ethical point of view, our video had a few issues that didn’t really affect our filming. We are actually unsure if we are allowed to mountain bike on grinshill, however after riding there for 5 years, and having received no complaints (apart from narrowly avoided dog walkers), we’ve assumed that no one really minds. We also see a lot of other mountain bikers around the hill who say they have been riding here for years, also without any complaints. The typeface and logo we used were not made by us, so we would have to get permission in order to get to use them.