Research

As I move into the last stages of the project, I am beginning to have very clear ideas of what I want and where to take the video, however it is always good to continue researching others and see if there is anything I am missing or that could work better. I find it helpful to see what sort of stuff is out there.

I stumbled across this article (http://uk.cars.yahoo.com/drive-smart/road-trip/article/265/) with a simple google search for 'roadtrip videos' having got a little stuck doing research. The person was doing the trip for Yahoo! Cars and did a 500 mile trip from Cape Town to Port Elizabeth, filming it and also taking still photographs at places of interest or things that caught his eye. The idea was the only thing available to guide him of where to go and what to do, would be the internet.

Something that stood out in the article was the sentence 'Take a ride with travel presenter Mark Durden-Smith, and his companion Jeff the Jeep'. It goes back to previous research and ideas I looked at where the car becomes more than just a metal shell used for getting from A to B. Here, the car almost takes on the role of a person. It has a name and is referred to as a companion before the word 'Jeep' is mentioned. It suggests a relationship with the car, that it is more personal and something treasured.

I'm unable to embed the video, but have taken a few screen shots of it instead. The video itself was interesting, the presenter was very annoying and it generally swung me away from wanting to use people and voices as much in my video, but I'll get to that later. The video uses a lot of quickly cut panning shots where you see a variety of landscapes and locations which keeps it visually more interesting as it's forcing you to take notice and look at it all.

While the purpose of the video is obviously to show you the various locations as well as the experiences he undergoes I did find it helpful just to see a different approach to the concept of road trips, it was quite spontaneous and he let google control a lot of the places he went by seeing where it told him to go when looking for things.

The main shots the video consists of are ones that show the presenter driving to add the dialogue, ones that set the places and the weathers (panning shots, from the window, through the windscreen, of the sky) and also of the experiences he undergoes. There are also a fair few shots of the car itself which is something I have generally avoided in a bid not to be too obvious.

However, I did like this one particular shot which would have been achieved by hanging the camera out of the back window. Not the safest thing, but it gives a different and interesting angle and view of the road as the yellow lines ticks by.