The idea for this project came out of a conversation with my husband, Trevor. I had been thinking about creating a vlog or interview-style video about digital literacy, but kept getting stuck on tone and audience. As I talked through my ideas with Trevor, we continued to brainstorm different YouTube genres to explore. When he brought up the idea of a reaction video I first thought, “oh, I can’t do that...” But then I had a second thought: “what if I reacted to Google search results?” and immediately started laughing as I imagined it. Trevor agreed to be my wingman and we were off! This project has continued to feel like a risk, but a very playful one.
Identifying and analyzing mentor texts was a confidence-building first step. Corridor Crew, LeagleEagle, and Tristan Paredes were just a few of the accounts I reviewed (thanks to Trevor’s taste in YouTube videos, I had some great starting points). I was comforted to see the wide range of approaches that creators take to these kinds of videos and I have highlighted some of what I learned in my Ignite video above.
Analyzing these mentor texts gave me a lot of ideas about how I wanted my video to look. However, when it came to creating my own setting, I was brought back to the reality of filming a video at home during a pandemic. I let go of my wishes for background blur and intricate lighting and squeezed my filming setup into the corner of my bedroom because that side of the house gets the most natural light. I used a TV stand as a makeshift desk and piled books on top of a nightstand to hold the camera. I recorded video with a DSLR camera, audio with a Yeti microphone, screencast through Quicktime, and backup video with my phone.
I was nervous about recording this video because I couldn’t completely prepare. As much as I wanted to have a script or outline in mind, I resisted pre-Googling Trevor’s name so that my reactions would be genuine. I comforted myself with the reminder that I’ve taught workshops on this topic many times and that I could cut anything that didn’t work well in post-production. Once we got going, I actually had a lot of fun recording and ended up with a little over an hour of footage.
The editing process was the largest portion of this project by far. I challenged myself by deciding to use Adobe Premiere. It took me a while to get used to navigating the basics, but I was able to find quick tutorials online for most of the things I wanted to do. The biggest challenges actually weren’t about the tool itself. Early on I discovered that either the microphone or Quicktime had timed out or frozen periodically so I lost some small pieces of audio. Very few of those were at key moments, but it made lining up the video and audio correctly really tedious. The camera also ran out of memory and then battery, which meant that I lost some video moments as well. Thank goodness for cell phone backup footage! Besides some of those larger frustrations, I really enjoyed the problem solving process of editing. Some of my favorite moments involved cutting out extra footage to find the most effective transitions, humor, and lesson moments. I also used Otter.ai to create a transcript of my footage, which sped up the process of identifying key moments. I loved seeing the narrative emerge, especially as I started to integrate the screencast footage with the video of our reactions.
There are certainly things I would change if I were to do this again (mic placement, the direction we faced, addressing the audience more often, to name a few). But I do, indeed, think that I could do this again. Treating this as an experiment freed me up to try some new things and I’m happy with where I ended up.