Happy October everyone!
With the new month, I’m venturing on a challenging but exciting endeavor to create consistent content while honing my video production skills in the process, and I’m inviting anyone to join me in this project.
I’m committing myself to creating a 5x5 video for every single day in this fantastic, spooky month. What is a 5x5 video? It’s pretty straightforward: A 25 second video with 5 shots, and each shot being five seconds each.
This is a common assignment for filmmakers just starting out and I personally oversaw several groups of younger students creates 5x5’s of their own and the results were really fascinating.
When it comes to style, anything and everything goes. I personally want to use this effort to experiment with all types of shooting and editing techniques and the content will show that process. I’m offering a fair warning that the quality may be a bit… varied. I will be experimenting, sometimes, if not often, unsuccessfully. But that’s the point! I wanted to challenge as well as free myself as a creator, and I think this is an intriguing way to knock down my insecurities and facilitate that growth.
I’m hoping these don’t end up as a ‘slice of life’ contribution, where I film the most random and mundane things in the name of intention (ugh), when the reality is that I didn’t have it in me to come up with anything premeditated. I plan on giving a lot of effort to these, but who knows how my attention span will hold up as the days go on. I very well may be posting the exact type of content I’m now chiding.
I will also be posting a short complimentary blog for every entry, reflecting on what I learned in the process of creating it. I won’t be sharing these too often in my satellite social media accounts with the videos themselves. Instead, they’ll just be chilling here for anyone to sift through. I love writing and it’s simply a pleasure to reflect on things in that manner.
To be completely transparent in terms of intellectual property, I plan on including lots of local music and other forms of art in these vignettes and I will loudly credit any artist whose work I use. I’m not monetizing from this in anyway, and if anything, I see it as tributes to any material I find, a sort of fan-art, if you will. If you feel uncomfortable about me including any of your work, you can talk to me and I will immediately take it down. I am also reserving planning on recycling old footage of mine to put together some cuts. Anything I use will be footage I at least directed myself. If I didn’t shoot any used material, I will credit the person who did.
Any collaboration on these would be welcome, as it wouldn’t be enjoyable to anyone if this was completely up to my conception and creativity. So if you wanna mess around and create shit in an extremely low stakes environment, hit me up! I mean it. I’m already in the process of gathering a good bit of outside input and dear god I need all the help I can get.
I’m starting this whole thing off today with my first 5X5 entitled “Pack it Up.” Check it out on my Insta @zackwilliamspgh
Here we go!