For our coursework activity this week we were asked to create a short teaser trailer for our Research Project – mine being The Road to Elgol. We were given the opportunity to collaborate if we wished. I decided to go it alone as this task did not play to my strengths – my technical skills are limited. So it was with some trepidation that I decided to “go for it” rather than ducking a task I found challenging.

My teaser can be found here and the password is Falmouth:

It was suggested (given the theme this week of remediation) that we might wish to appropriate/remix image content by others or to repurpose our own images.

In order to give my viewers a real sense of The Road to Elgol I thought it was important that they saw it for themselves not just through my imagery, as my project is very much about my experience of the Road. So, I decided to try to find a video that had already been made as I had not yet captured the Road on video. There were a few examples of others taking the fifteen-mile drive from Broadford to Elgol on the Isle of Skye. I chose the video made by Grant Mackinnon on 29 August 2014 and set about picking out some stretches of the Road relevant to where my images had been taken.

My plan was then to put in some of my still photography at the stopping off points. We only had two minutes to play with so I decided to end the teaser with a clip from the final part of the journey taking the steep and winding road down to the small port of Elgol. At this stage my intention is to submit my photographs for my Research Project in monochrome however the teaser is that there are a couple of colour images in the final parts of the film.

For me, this was the easy bit – working through the concept. I decided to use the same workflow process as I had done with my Oral Presentation which was to set my work up in Powerpoint (which I know quite well) convert it into Keynote and then load to Vimeo. Setting up and trimming the video clips was relatively simple and my photographs were easy to load however, I encountered a number of difficulties around actually playing the videos effectively.

My particular problem, which I have yet to resolve, and is well documented on many support websites, is that when I play the video clips and then transition into my photographs there is an awkward flashback to the start of the preceding video journey. Having resolved the problem in Keynote it then returned when I converted to Quicktime to load up to Vimeo. The feedback is that this problem does not detract from the overall impact of the teaser but I would like to resolve it.

This activity has taken me a lot of time and way out of my comfort zone but I am happy that I didn’t shy away from the challenge and for a first attempt I think it is passable. I am certainly pleased I have gained some new skills and feel more confident in undertaking this type of task. For the future, I am intending to get to grips with Adobe Premiere Pro which I understand can be loaded directly into Vimeo. I am also planning to take my own video of my journey down the Road to Elgol for future projects of this type.

References

Mackinnon, G, (2014) Video of the Road to Elgol

Alison Price

Alison Price

My name is Alison Price and for the past ten years I have travelled the world photographing wildlife, including Alaska, Antarctica, Borneo, Botswana, the Canadian Arctic, Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
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