Archive for the ‘forum’ tag
Students Talk about the Issues
The video “Sun Youth Forum” from the Las Vegas Sun covers 1,000 senior high school students as they participate in a forum talking about various issues surrounding the country.
The technical use of video in this piece creatively shows the experiences of these students as they participate in the conference. To start the video, the camera picks up an oncoming bus of students to the facility where the day’s activities will be conducted. The use of a moving shot brings about anticipation not only for the kids on the bus but for the viewer as well. We see the start of their day, giving us a nice reference for the entire piece.
The video emphasizes a mixture of close-up shots and medium range shots. A few shots at ground level match perfectly with the visual effect of the massive amount of students as they walk to their different speaker sessions. The video does a sufficient job of capturing the many different sessions using wide enough shots to capture the students as they listen to their speakers.
There were only a few close-up shots that were used for interview purposes, but they were effectively interspersed between the wider angle shots, allowing us to draw upon the personal experiences of a few individuals. The angles used during the various interviews with participants captured their expressions and movements and allowed the individual to become a more central focus of this larger story. However, one interview with a congresswoman from Nevada seemed too close and encroaching on the viewer. It would have been best if the cameraman would have stood a few feet further away and shot from a better angle.
One of the final shots in the piece involving the awarding of scholarships through a raffle was by far the most well thought-out arrangement of the entire package. The camera starts out on a close-up of the tickets being mixed together and then pans out toward the large crowd to find the winner of the prize. The close-up and wide shot mix together nicely and provide a simple but highly effective picture for the viewer.
The faults of the video in my view are minimal. The pace of the shots can be bothersome at certain points. The camera shifts angles and levels of visual space rather quickly and can be distracting to the viewer. To solve this problem, the producer could have slowed down the pace of the footage and given each individual shot more clarity. Furthermore, a more sensitive use of zoom and panning shots could have cleared it up.
Overall, the use of video for this particular piece was extremely necessary. It allowed the viewer to get a visual picture of the day spent by these students. Print could have also been a possibility and still told an effective story, but video was still the best and most suitable option.
http://www.lasvegassun.com/videos/2008/nov/25/1199/#