Video Project Analysis

 I think the consensus on the previous final assignment was both straightforward and accurate: it lacked any creative expression. While I will say there's a benefit to an assignment that's straightforward and clear on how to be executed, I don't think anyone would really learn anything from doing it due to its cookie cutter nature.

Essentially, everything would've been spoon-fed to us -- the messages for the video, the intro and outro, the structure and content of the video. There's very little opportunity to do anything fun or creative with such a constrained assignment, and yet creativity is basically the cornerstone of creating media. Beyond that, it's a rather dull assignment to begin with. There's no real visual flair to it, just a bunch of reading about random statistics. Maybe when the original came out, it was more 'cutting edge' of a topic, but these days my response is more of "yeah, I get it already".

I think giving more agency on this assignment is therefore important, as it allows students to try different things with shooting, scripting, and editing and actually improve their skillsets. That being said, I do think giving too much agency also makes this a difficult assignment, as it's harder to gauge expectations and the amount of options becomes dizzying. Having clear criteria is really helpful to accomplish a project, and  having some restrictions actually helps with creativity (as long as they aren't too restrictive, of course). Things like a specific topic or prompt for a project like this makes sense to me, so long as it's not telling me precisely how to shoot the entire video.

In a similar vein, I'm not really sure how much to write here. I feel like I should probably write more than my weekly reflections (since this is supposed to be equivalent to a large project), but I'm not too sure what else to say either. The discussion in class felt like it went pretty straightforward along these lines too -- everyone agreed they didn't like the assignment (and they were happy to try to come up with something else) but then it was very difficult for anyone to come up with specific details for a new assignment. Most of the pitches felt pretty abstract or vague; I didn't actually see the finished video because I've been scrambling to get my other 4 classes together, so anything about the results would be pure conjuncture.

Also, I think it's hard for students to come up with a new assignment in general, as they're often relatively inexperienced on the course material and don't have clear ideas of what might go into the process of creating the video. (For instance, I remember the topic of video length coming up in class, and most of us not really knowing what a reasonable guideline might be.) Beyond that, I don't think much really got carried over from the original project either, so that format and guideline got lost. All that really got kept was the basic point: utilizing shooting and editing skills to create a video.

Anyways, I hope it worked out for everyone in the class. It would've been nice to do something like this in a group, but things didn't really work out for me, so here I am whipping this together instead.