CREATIVE MEDIA PRACTICE: FINAL THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS

Some weeks after finishing 'The Beer' here are a summaration and collection of thoughts I had about the final project.

• The feedback I have recieved from it by sharing the video on social media has been positive - many seem to have gotten the experience and enjoyed it in a way I imagined and hoped they would. The views on the first video (the true indication of how people watched it) have also reached 100 - which for me of my reputation on YouTube is very good.
• I'm particularly proud of what I achieved by myself. Compared to what I achieved with my last YouTube annotation video I felt I fully explored the uses of annotations and feel like I created an expereince that uses them in an engaging and unique way.
• On watching back I would like to make the experience larger - I would achieve this by adding more clues and more 'rooms' for the audience to explore. The idea of also including more potential suspects is something else I would look to add.
• I would have liked to improve the production quality of the project. Issues with booking meant that the professional lighting rig we had booked was not avaliable for us when we came to film the project meaning we had to make do with room lighting. Whilst it isn't too much of a distraction there were better options avaliable that I wished I had explored.
• On some of the shots I had to get in a second camera man to help out whilst I either sorted out the lighting or to focus on directing. Whilst I was a fan of some of his camera work, there were some inconsistancies between his style of camera work and my own. One of these was his use of pull focus which led to some of the shots being out of focus. If I was to do this again I would keep one consistent camera man - whether it be myself or someone else - to have a distinguished look to the film.
• Actors were also hard to come by and I used a lot of friends to be in this project. Whilst their attempts were valiant and I was appreciative of what they did for me - if I could have got in contact with actors and actresses who were comfortable to perform this could have improved the final product.
• One of the most interesting thing to note is the amount each views the videos get. As noted before, we recieved a 100 clicks on the first but interestingly the definitive end video has only reached 30 views. I would like to look into whether this was due to people losing interest in the story and if so how could I improve it.

In conclusion, whilst I accept on a production level there were obvious flaws with 'The Beer' in terms of exploration and reflecting on what I created I was satisfied. I felt I made exactly what I set out to do and this is something I would definitely be interested in looking into again - I have already made plans for a possible sequel or entirally different YouTube annotation video with hope to explore new different and unique possibilities!