OUAN501 - Practical, Sourcing Footage

One of the longer processes throughout the projection was the sourcing of footage. Despite doing the bulk of it at the beginning I found myself continuously searching for additional footage to compliment smaller sections of the script and overall add extra visuals for the bettering of communication to the audience. The vast majority of the videos I needed and ended up using were available on Youtube, and to obtain them I used the free tool, 'Youtube Downloader', which simply downloads the videos from the site in a desired resolution. Luckily a lot of the footage I wanted was available at either 720p or 1080p. Although, footage of news broadcasts from the 90's and early 2000's was only available in a very low resolution and had to be scaled up. This footage also wasn't availabe in widescreen so the aspect ratio of footage changes slightly throughout the video, this isn't too much of a problem though, and in some ways I thik it adds to the distinction between certain time periods and between individual clips. As previously mentioned, the gathering of footage was made immensly easier because I'm a student making a film for the purposes of education and not for profit. Otherwise permission would have to have been given by the authors of the original material. In total I believe I gathered around 40 to 50 seperate clips of footage all ranging from between a minute for something like a game trailer to 30 minutes for a news broadcast or even longer in the case of the clips from the 1993 video game conference. In total this amounts to between 4 and 5 hours of footage. I did spend a large amount of time looking through certain footage for specific sections that worked best, but in most cases I already knew what I was looking for within certain footage and it was simply a case of finding it and adding it to the sequence. I had a lot of choice and was quite constantly throughout the process making decision on how certain footage would look when sequenced with elements. I had a concern at the beginning that the change of quality in footage between something from the 90's to someting in full HD from recently would be too much of a contrast and would look poorly sequenced but it actually worked quite well in practice and didn't pose and issues for me. The different types of footage I wanted to aquire was a mixture of news broadcasts, video game footage and trailers, interviews with the people I was discussing in the narration and images of essays or studies that I was discussing. This gave me everything I needed to visually represent what I was talking about and I probably have created something that was around 30-45 minutes in length if I'd wanted to, given the amount of video that I had to work with.