Video Critiques

I watched two different video packages. The first one was from the St. Petersburg Times. It was titled "Shark Attacks" and covered the pattern of sharks attacking the Florida coast. The reporter talked incredibly slow and would space his words out weird--almost as if he was trying make the piece longer, but I tried to pay more attention to the filming and editing. What I noticed were the great cut-away shots. St. P used scenes from the beach, beach birds, the tide coming in, "hazard" signs, the colored beach flags, and people waking into the ocean. The difficult part about this story is that it is not the most visual story. There is no footage of shark attacks or aftermath of an attack, so the shots are mostly of people just on the beach and the warnings that surround these beaches. When interviewing, the camera man did not exactly use the rule of thirds. One of the interviewees, a man who takes his family to the beach, only had his head show in the bottom left corner. Though the shore behind him was pretty, he barely took up 1/4 of the shot! There were some neat in and out of frame shots with people walking into the water and one guy skim boarding into and then out of the frame. I think a tripod was definitely used and there was no zooming.
The second one was from news.com and it was titled "One Lego at A Time." It was about Legoland looking for new people to become the company's new design mastermind. The video overall was okay, and I definitely noticed a lot of the things we talked about in class. There were many cut-away shots that showed close-ups of people building legos. I noticed it was sometimes hard to get a medium shot because they were trying to focus on what the person was building and the person him/herself but the person's head kept coming in and out of the frame or the person's head would be cut off. There was not really a variety of cut-away shots but there were definitely a lot-- I kind of felt like I was seeing the same shot over and over again. There were a few wide-angle shots that did not really show anything necessary just because the legos are so small. Also, they interviewed a woman for much longer than 15 seconds and ended with her talking. So it kind of ended without a solid conclusion. It was an interesting story idea and there were some cool lego creations and this was a great visual story.