Video Production as Creative Expression

One thing I have completely fallen in love with at the Institute is video production. Through MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program I have taken several film classes, including Short Attention Span Documentary, Interactive Documentary, and Production of Educational Videos. I have also made lots of videos documenting my life and the lives of those around me. I believe film is one of the best mediums for conveying ideas and expressions.

Documentaries

A short attention span documentary is a short film designed for an online audience. The genre has gained widespread popularity on Youtube and Facebook, where the films normally present a profile of a person or event. In this genre I have made a film profiling a dining hall worker with a photographic memory, a group of lightweight rowers cutting up to ten pounds per week, and a community of competitive video game players who compete in national-level tournaments.

On the other hand, an interactive documentary is a relatively new phenomenon that relies on the power of technology to make truly immersive documentary experiences. In this class we explored the genre in depth, examining the use of augmented reality, internet documentaries, live exhibits, and many more. One class I had the privilege of taking culminated with students designing and pitching their own interactive documentary. My project was also my submission for the Monarch Butterfly Fund’s Track the Butterflies competition, in which contestants were asked to find a cheap way of tracking the monarch butterfly migration with a high level of detail. My submission involved attaching small radio transmitters to select monarchs and releasing them. Human participants in the interactive documentary would then download a mobile app that passively searches for these radio transmissions and uses them to triangulate the location of the specific butterfly over time.

Educational Videos

This past spring I had the pleasure of taking the capstone video production class at MIT, “Production of Educational Videos.” This class focused on studying the theory behind both effective teaching and effective film production. This class culminates with the creation of a single, long educational video and write up. I produced my video on how to care for your living group, a topic my friends and I have been grappling with for the past two years.

Lifestyle

My favorite use of the video medium is to simply document life and events around me, typically in a brief or humorous fashion. In this way I believe everyone has the power to create amazing videos with minimal training, which is why on several occasions I have taught workshops to groups of over sixty students on basic film and editing principles.

Many of the videos I have produced revolve around the sport of rowing (which I have competed in for six years), my friends joking around, or seemingly-everyday events in my life.