Slug & Lede

Sin City Shooters is a video clip about a group of shooters who hold contests at the Desert Sportsman’s Rifle and Pistol Club. The piece does an excellent job of featuring individual shooters in interviews and then putting their voices over clips of the people in action on the range. This technique is used several times and mostly the people are talking about their excitement over the sport and their love for it. The first women interviewed shows good emotion and energy and that is captured on camera well, also a young man in a black shirt gives a thoughtful explanation of why he participates and what that means to him.

The action shots used are extremely valuable to the piece and really are the reason behind it being successful. Many of the clips show impressive scenes of the shooters in action and these also include some of the gear and targets are shooting at. Viewers catch a good look at many different types of wepons that might interest them and targets that look out of the ordinary. Also, the camera angle used is impressive including scanning of the scene following people as they go from station to station on a course and the camera angle which gives the perspective of being shot at by one of the contestants. Even during the interview sections the background is intriguing, but not overly exciting to take the attention off of the subject that is talking in the scene.

Although many things where done very well in this video, several things could have been improved. One interview in particular added very little to the piece as a whole. The man in the red shirt mostly just said he was from somewhere else and usually shot at other places but had come there today. I know this adds the aspect that people come from other areas to participate, I thought that it took to much time in such a short piece. I would have preferred to see a manager or someone who had some kind of authority interviewed and asked questions about the people who come to the site and the atmosphere of the community. Also, the women interviewed at the begging and end of the segment pretty much repeated herself. She had good energy and excitement but not nearly as much as seeing someone shoot and blow up targets, I would have preferred that segment to have been changed and have asked her another question or put it as a voice over with action shots of people shooting.

Overall, I think the piece was good and the camera work was the best part. I do feel however that when working with such a short segment that better quality material could have been shown during some of the video.