Documentary!

When I started this project, I didn’t really know where I was going with my idea. All I knew was that I wanted to do my documentary on what happened to Myspace. The project turned into a sort of memoir of the old Myspace mixed with an introduction to the new Myspace. I had not planned about putting anything about the new Myspace in my documentary because I had no idea they were even relaunching, but I thought that it added to my project. It sort of gave it a direction.

There are some things that I wish I could have done with the video if I had had more time to work on it. I had initially planned on putting in some screen shots of Myspace and Facebook but I decided it would be too complicated. I could not even imagine the time it would have taken me if I had to take the audio from the video, add the background music all on Audacity, find a way to convert it to an mp3 file, and then try to get the video to sync up with audio. And to do that with multiple videos would have been too much of a hassle. I think Windows Movie Maker is very flawed in that you can only have one audio track playing at a time. If Movie Maker had the option to put multiple audio tracks then it would have been way easier to add the screen shots and I definitely would have done them.

One other thing I wish I could have done is to film in quieter areas. Filming my interviews in my dorm lobby may not have been my best idea but it honestly did not occur to me that people would be walking in and out and making a lot of noise. Usually our lobby is totally dead but it just happened that that night it was bumpin’. One thing I thought about doing was putting the louder videos into Audacity and trying to make the background noise quieter. I did fool around with it for one video but the effects in Audacity are really confusing for someone who has never used them before. It ended up that the audio I created in Audacity didn’t match up with the video well enough. Instead I tried to hide some of the background noise by putting a quiet instrumental song behind all the videos.

I thought my interviews went really well. I did very few interviews because I really liked what they had to say and most of their footage was usable. It made it really easy to transition from question to question. I also thought that the facts that I added in about Myspace in its prime helped my argument. One thing I did not like too much was the long text at the end describing the new Myspace. Unfortunately I ran out of time to think of a different ending and I didn’t know another way to show all the cool new features that the new Myspace has. In the end I was pretty happy with how my documentary turned out.