Kismet Arts Tangent

The making of the video component for Sierra Club’s Best Internship on Earth (aka Outdoor Youth Ambassador)–Please vote here http://content.sierraclub.org/bestinternship/content/katarina-best-intern-earth— 2012:

My friends and I went adventuring last weekend and I documented it and used some of it in this video.

On Saturday, we went rollerblading at Magnuson park. It was a beautiful day, so to avoid the traffic at Greenlake, we went to Magnuson. It wasn’t crowded at all, but the sidewalks are a little more bumpy.

On Sunday, we drove out to Deception Pass. We mused why they called it Cranberry Island. There were parts in the trail that led to nowhere and the witty ones of us pointed out that’s why they call it “Deception Pass.” While we were hiking, some of us saw a big splash in the river and a voice yelling help. Minutes later, the water patrol came by and zoomed around the area. I hope there was a rescue involved. We found crabs, snails, algae that popped underneath our shoes. We climbed a log from the beach to the trail that was a ledge above us. We ate sandwiches and snacks that Carolyn had prepared in the morning (thank you!) along side the grassy summit. We looked down and saw the water glimmering with sunshine. The Summit Trail from the Perimeter Trail is only 0.8 miles… straight up—it was quite a work-out! Someone commented that there are more switchbacks on American trails than European ones and I wonder why that is? Something about our queue culture change the way we make paths in the wilderness?

A lot of footage I got was taken with a Kodak Share camera that my mother bought for me four years ago was not in the video because of some formatting issue. I was glad that I took a lot of footage with both cameras. My housemate Jon lent me his Contour Camera (thank you!) which has a wide angle lense, 720p, and is rather compact (has option to be mounted on a helmet).

Thank you to everyone in my group. Everyone during the trip pointed out interesting things along the way, such as a defensive Mama crab or weird looking mushrooms. Thank you for filming me and tolerating my pauses along the way. I’m really glad I have all this video-recorded. I’m realizing that picture taking is so ubiquitous, but the art of video taking is definitely underappreciated. With our budding technology market, YouTube memories are a thing as scrapbooking was once.

Update 3-28-12 (Post-critique):

No formal critique, but a lot of feedback. Shaky parts, makes people dizzy, the text is hard to read, flaky transitions but otherwise good. Never let YouTube fix your video. They actually have a dialog box that says “your video is shaky; want us to fix that for you?” What you really do is relinquish your precious over to an algorithm that will stretch and rotate your video in the attempt to compensate for the human gait. (All shaky cam is the fault that we have two feet. If I had ten or twenty, I would just roll like a caterpillar– I would still call this blog, Ment Cat!)

If I were to do this video again, I would plan my shots better. Have a lot of still moments. Definitely set the camera down somewhere and take video like that instead of holding it. I would make less opacity/blend mode choices (though, I think its beautiful, it’s a little too avantgarde for a video for this particular audience).

The marketing of this video is a whole other story. I like social media, but it always seems like a spammy thing to link to someone else’s corporate-y website where they have to vote on something. It’s probably that people don’t really know what Sierra Club does and the voting page doesn’t really describe anything. If I were to redesign the voting site, I would make it look less commercial and add information about the position and what exactly Sierra Club does. People don’t know they are environmental lobbyists (essentially, correct me if I’m wrong). And other contests like this involve more information about the candidate on their profile instead of the generic “Help me get the Best Internship on Earth this summer. Vote for my video!”

A vote for my video is a vote for good design.