A/V Video Commentary

When I made this video, one of the hardest parts was making it seem as life-like as possible. The lighting had to be just right and the transitions from scene to scene had to flow naturally. Basically, it had to be as close to the real thing as possible, as if a person was actually being instructed at the gym. With this in mind, the most conscious part I had to become aware of was the transition from scene to scene. In writing we seem to take it for granted that there is a natural progression of time, inside a specific scene, and the reader seems to recreate that continuous sense of time as if their eye and senses were jumping from person to person, or roving over a New York bar. But with video, there is a pressing demand to make the events flow in order and seam together to make a piece work. The blockier the piece is the less believable and life-like it seems, and you can't cut right from a scene to a person talking, they have to flow together and intermingle much more directly, that leap from scene to dialogue flowing much smoother. The seamless transition from one frame to another is what seemed to work for me, but there were other cases where my classmates used set scenes with an overlay of writing to convey a particular mood or setting, and these were individual blocks of time. I still have this idea that pictures/video should be as life-like as possible, recreating vision, but there are always people who distort this conception, and by so doing, make us rely on our other senses to interpret the work.

In other ways, my video was very similar to writing a short story. There has to be tension, breaks in the story, a mood imparted, characters, transition from scene to scene, description, and a choice to highlight on specific points rather than others.