Penny Newspapers – Video Documentary

• 9 years ago
• Posted in:Video documentary (Assignment 2)
• 2
• Author: catherine steeves
• Tags: news, newspaper, penny newspaper, video documentary

Here is my Video documentary. The introduction is first and then the link and script are at the bottom of the post.

I hope you enjoy it.
Catherine

Production Choices

I chose to produce my video in Adobe Flash because I have taken two courses in it and wanted to use some of the skills I have learnt.

The video is audio over animated images. I chose this because an audio recording is the best way to communicate the volume of information that I had gathered. I chose images to reflect one of the main aspects of each section. I did this because to have an image with each idea would mean that the images would be moving too quickly across the screen to keep up with the audio that the viewer would not have time to look at each image. Using one idea allowed me to find several images for the idea to show it more fully.

There is no audio over the titles to remind the viewer that although penny newspapers provided discussion topics, they were a form of literate communication that would have been silent and individual during the reading process.

I also included a section on modern news choices, because penny newspapers started us on the path we are on today. I found it to be an interesting link so I decided to include this relationship as a conclusion to the piece.

Style

There is a lot of image movement and overlap, one image coming in while another is exiting. I chose to do this because of the sense of urgency that penny newspapers brought to the world of news. Penny newspapers worked to develop the time sensitive nature of news we all know today, and I was hoping to capture this with the overlapping movement of the images.

I chose a variety of changing colours for the background to represent the attention seeking nature of penny newspapers. Often accused of being scandalous, they attracted a lot of readers and I used different colours to keep the viewer interested.

I tried to make the titles interesting and to show a little bit about the section they were introducing. For example, title with the word “change” changed colour to show difference. The “Social Changes” section is meant to replicate a printing press, to indicate how developments with that technology helped the penny newspapers become successful. Additionally, I used more cursive looking font in the “Introduction” section to represent the lack of print technology.

Challenges

One challenge I found was that it was quite difficult to find pictures of the 1830s. As a consequence I opened up the time frame to the entire of the 19th century, with only a few images from c. 1900. I decided to choose images from later rather than earlier because penny newspapers existed in the 20th century and did not in the 17th so the social effects would be reflected in images of a later time.

Another challenge was that the video production stage took me a lot longer than I was anticipating. This made me feel rushed and I think I was not as creative as I could have been. This is the longest project that I have completed using Flash and I am much better acquainted with the timelines and editing procedures, so I will know to budget more time into this type of project.

Success

I was really pleased to be able to try out some of the techniques I had used in my Flash course. I remembered many of them and was able to execute them mostly from memory. I had a lot of fun working on the lettering animation. I think that the production quality is higher than I would have been able to achieve prior to the courses.

I am also pleased with the effects I was able to create to capture the themes and ideas that I was trying to communicate with the audio portion. Additionally, I worked hard to ensure that my script did not sound like an essay even though it is written in a similar format. I think I created a more accessible tone while retaining the quality of information.

My Video is here

Script Document