Animoto Video

I was very excited about this assignment, but had no idea what my topic would be. I looked at each of the themes available in Animoto hoping one of them would inspire me. As soon as I saw the Halloween theme I knew that was the one I wanted. I love scary stories and horror movies. I thought about making up a horror story to tell through pictures, a sort of silent movie, but I was skeptical that I would be satisfied with what I could accomplish in the allotted time frame. Still, I wanted to do something more than assemble a collage of creepy pictures, so I came up with the idea of making a public service announcement to draw people’s attention to something we should be afraid of. Again, I didn’t have something particular in mind, so I googled “what should you be afraid of” and came across a New York Times article that argued we should be afraid of sitting for more than a few hours a day.

The latest research shows that standing is probably not a significant improvement over sitting, so I looked up the CDC’s actual recommendations, which specify that we need physical activity. Based on this I tweaked the message from the New York Times’ article’s “don’t sit” to the more proactive idea of “move”. I looked for free stock images of scary things, but frankly wasn’t happy with what I found. I decided it would be more fun for me if I used pictures I already had. This was challenging, because what I have are family photos, which aren’t taken with the intention of being frightening. I did scrounge together several photos that I thought would fit my theme, including the photos of sofas and televisions. I supplemented this with a picture of one of my cats, some headstones by my apartment, and a short video of my rocking chair. I was hoping the spider who lives in my apartment would come out so I could get some video of that, but no such luck. If I had more time and/or money I would have set up some photo shoots to get more images.

I would definitely use Animoto again. I think it quite obviously lends itself to organizing family photos, but I am very interested in the idea of using it to tell a story through pictures and would like to try that. Although I didn’t use storyboarding for my PSA, I would definitely storyboard before shooting photos to tell a story. There is so much more to think about in a picture than I had realized. For instance, I knew I wanted to wait until the sun was setting to get the ambiance I wanted for my photo of the headstones. This would have been more important to plan out if I had to travel somewhere to get that photo. Even shooting a 3-4 second video of my rocking chair involved a lot more than I had anticipated. I ended up shooting that from several different angles and with the blinds at various degrees of openness to get a clip I was satisfied with. I definitely see how storyboarding would save time and money on just about any project.