Kate McGonigle Sequence ID

I had planned to use a Washington Post video about young people choosing to farm instead of making $80-$100k a year for this assignment, but it would not let me continually go back and forth to look at time stamps; it kept freezing. Although I was going to criticize the sequencing in that video seen here, because there wasn't really a great distinction between tight, medium and wide shots in it, the other video I'm going to critique for the assignment was much worse.

The video I chose, found on The Baltimore Sun Web site, is about the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania. I would say the sequences in this video are unsuccessful, as is the way that the interview portion of the video is incorporated with the sequences. I tried to embed the video, but the code did not work.

The video begins (at 0:00) with a tight shot of a sign on what I assume is a Hawk Mountain trail. The sign is not completely straight in the frame and the bottom kind of gets cut off when there is a little bit of space at the top to possibly fit the whole sign into the frame. Plus, the sign isn't really that interesting or that strong of a shot.

At -1:35 (the video counts backwards instead of forwards), there is another sort of tight shot of a hawk and the camera kind of pans around the room to look at other hawks in this room. The camera is pretty shaky and the movement around the room is kind of like a bad home movie, not to mention the fact that it is unclear whether this is a tight or medium shot.

At -1:21, there is what would probably be a wide shot of the camera traveling up a rocky path to an area of rocks where people are seated. I'm sure the journalist was trying to show the viewer what Hawk Mountain looked like, but again, the shakiness of the camera (and no definite shot, since there is so much movement) just isn't compelling.

At -1:03, there is an even wider shot taken off of the top of one of the mountains, of one of the hawks flying in the sky. This shot is OK, because it is obviously a wide shot and it's a pretty view.

One other major thing that was unsuccessful about this video, though, is the fact that the video is narrated by Lee Schisler, the president of the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, except his voice sounds odd, like the audio isn't clean, almost as if the interview was done over the phone. But then, at -0:32, you finally see Schisler. Schisler should be shown at the very beginning of the video, introduced via a text screen, and then the rest of the video sequences should be incorporated. This would be much more successful because then we know that even though Schisler's voice sounds odd, the journalist did indeed speak to him in person, and he is the one speaking as we view these other images. It was also confusing that the majority of the video did not relate to what Schisler was talking about.