Once the project topic was announced I was a little overwhelmed since I had a lot of content creators that I enjoyed watching and felt were a good fit for analyzing. After reflecting for a couple days I decided to choose “Vsauce” for my project. The reason I choose this channel is because all of the videos on this channel have a lot of effort put into them and they are all very interesting. I never analyzed his content so I hoped that using his channel as my topic would help to understand why his videos are so entertaining.
After that I started to watch his videos with an analytical perspective using ideas from the book to ask myself questions as I watched through them. I would constantly ask “what is the point of this video?”, “what does he want the audience to feel here?”, “what points of views is he representing?”, “Can people interpret his message differently?”. I also had started to notice patterns throughout his videos that I had not noticed on casual watches. One of the main things I noticed is that he connects topics that are very different even though they seem to be similar. He also uses many visuals to supplement his explanations of his topics making them much easier to understand. However, because his topics are usually very complex there may be a lot of information omitted in his videos. I realized that the main point of Michael’s videos is to promote an educational lifestyle where the viewer is excited to learn more by himself. Michael will always put links to many articles and tools that can help the viewer learn more about the specific topic that he is talking about.
Once I wrote down my analysis I started to organize my ideas so that they would make more sense in a video format. This is where most of my struggle came from during my creative process. Due to the video being a max of 450 words I had to cut a lot of the information that I wanted to talk about for the video. I seperated my ideas into groups that had similar ideas and started to cut ones that were too similar. I then thought about the main points that I wanted to talk about in the video and cut all of the information that did not relate to that hopefully removing filler. In the end my video ended up being shorter than the 3 minute maximum requirement. After reflecting on what exactly I wanted to show in my video I believe that the quality of my video is overall better than it would have been if I had made it any longer.
Then once I had a script written I started to record the video. I seperated my script into paragraphs and recorded each paragraph separately. I did this so that if I wanted to change the sequence of my video I could easily do that. Another struggle that I had for this project was picking the correct visuals to correspond to my script. In the end I used mainly screen shots from Michael’s videos that I believed showed off his personality the most.
Overall the creative process for this project was very enjoyable and I am glad that I got to learn a little more about Vsauce and what makes his video so great. The biggest creative breakthrough that I had during this process was the idea of quality over quantity that I had discovered while creating the script for my video.