This Capstone showcases an independently written, filmed, edited, and published crash course comprising three lessons about digital video relevant subjects. The process of deciding what I wanted to do for my senior year capstone involved me having to look back on my first days and experiences in the Digital Video program, and asking, what would have made my time in DigVid a little easier?

While thinking back to those days about two years from when I began working on my capstone, it occurred to me that a lot of the curriculum of the program had to be shown through youtube videos, or screenshots from films, or examples of professional photography. And obviously, this is only because that is the best way to teach a visual medium: show examples of things that already exist on the internet. It’s difficult, (next to impossible, actually), to teach a subject like film and video production without presenting a visual to back you up. Because of this, DigVid was often taught through things like Youtube videos to help explain these visual subjects. Then I thought, now that I know these things that we’ve been learning and applying for three years, I would be equipped to be the one explaining them now, and I could be the one making the Youtube videos. And that’s how I ended up deciding on what I’d accomplish for my capstone.

Annotated Bibliography

Studio VYV. “APERTURE, SHUTTER SPEED and ISO/ the EXPOSURE TRIANGLE MADE EASY!” YouTube, 31 Jan. 2023, www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2HSoOq-rfo. Accessed 30 Jan. 2025. In order to create videos that are successful in ensuring that the skills and information that I will be passing along and explaining in my videos are honed and prepared properly to be shared, it is important that I study the videos that already exist in the topic areas that I intend to center my capstone project on. This is a video about the exposure triangle, one of the six video topics that I plan on reproducing for my project. I have taken notes on this video as well, highlighting specific things that I think makes the video a successful explanation to viewers who may be inexperienced in this particular area.

Aputure. “Lighting 101: Intro to Light Placement.” YouTube, 27 Jan. 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqMQZG68Wkc. This is another example of the kind of information that I intend to share in my capstone. Another aspect of my note-taking and research process has been writing down the things in these example videos that I think are not exactly helpful or something that I believe I can improve upon in my own videos. However, for this video, I have very little to criticize because I believe that it exceeds all of my own personal standards and expectations for what I’m trying to accomplish with the resources that I have available to me. This video is quick paced, simple, and heavily visual-reliant which works great to convey its message extremely effectively to its beginner audience.

RocketJump Film School. “Intro to Storyboarding.” YouTube, 24 Mar. 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQsvhq28sOI. This is a video that I have watched and known about for many years at this point. I believe that this is the most effective explanation of what storyboarding is, and the things that you are able to accomplish with it. There are two elements to this video; pictures of the storyboards, and the final product of the shot that was created from it. And on top of these visuals is just a casual narration that provides context, explains the process, and goes over the technical aspects. But for the most part, this is a visual explanation. I will take lots of inspiration from this video, mainly the intent to be as simple with the explanation as possible.

Interview with mentor My mentor works professionally as a pastor. He is very familiar with the process of creating a draft of his message, his sermon, and then delivering that message in a way that engages the audience and allows others to connect with his words. I thought that he’d be a great help in aiding me with the script-writing process of my videos, as well as the actual recording and public speaking aspect of talking to a camera. This will be a very major part of my videos that I don’t intend to ignore, the person that is explaining something to you has to be interesting to listen to, which my mentor is very good at in my opinion.

Interview with professional I’ve talked to a professional in the writing/producing industry about my capstone project and what I intend to accomplish with my videos. What I gained from this conversation was that explaining the topics in my videos, since the target audience is intended to be towards beginners, will force me to put myself into the shoes of the people who will be watching my videos, ie; the tenth grade class of DigVid students. Oftentimes people who are more experienced in an area might gloss over seemingly obvious things to them that are not inherently obvious to newcomers, or they might let slip some jargon that only a select few people will catch and recognize its meaning. So I’ve become more aware that I should focus on making my videos friendly to beginners.

Tarantino, Quentin, and Roger Avary. PULP FICTION. https://assets.scriptslug.com/live/pdf/scripts/pulp-fiction-1994.pdf?v=1729114975 One of my videos will be about how to write a screenplay. One of the most genius screenplays of all time in my opinion is of course Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary. I enjoy the movie just fine, but oftentimes I come to the screenplay for my favorite scenes and just read the words on this script and I’m able to experience the movie in a whole different way that somehow enhances the experience of digesting this story. I think this is a great example of a screenplay because it’s not so by the books, or straight like it was written by a robot. The words are free and loose, there is slang in the scene directions; it is a very creative piece of writing that I will cite heavily when making this particular video.

Aaron Sorkin. THE SOCIAL NETWORK. https://assets.scriptslug.com/live/pdf/scripts/the-social-network-2010.pdf?v=1729115039 As opposed to the screenplay for Pulp Fiction, I find this screenplay to be a little more clean to look at in terms of its formatting. But that just goes to show the contrast between how writers choose to create their screenplays, and how much liberty they have in the way the screenplay turns out and eventually serves the production of turning these words into something visual that then becomes a feature film. There is no one way to write a screenplay, and I intend to show a wide variety of screenplays when I’m explaining in my video the process of creating one.

BrainBuffet – Self Serve Education. brainbuffet.com/. In the DigVid curriculum, we are given an account to Brain Buffet dot com, which has a bunch of different courses in basically all the types of Adobe sites. I’ve used it so far for Adobe Photoshop as well as Adobe Premiere. This is an incredibly rich and useful source for me as well because I intend to learn how to use another application called Adobe After Effects in order to edit my videos and provide helpful visuals to pair along my explanations. And I will also use these courses as secondary examples to study how professionals in this field might explain these concepts and topics to someone who is unfamiliar, like how I took notes on the three videos in my first sources.

“The Closer Look - YouTube.” Www.youtube.com, www.youtube.com/channel/UCI9DUIgtRGHNH_HmSTcfUbA. Instead of just one video to look at, this is an entire youtube channel that I have been following and been subscribed to for a while now. This source is intended to be used for the video that I will make about writing tips and coming up with ideas for stories that you will tell in your films. I believe that behind every great film, is a strong script, so in my opinion being able to think like a creative is super important for creating engaging and meaningful pieces of art/content. The Closer Look youtube channel is perfect for those who struggle with the writing process, and I have learned a lot from this channel and grown much as a writer from it.

Detisch, AJ. “5 Cinematic Lighting Techniques Every Filmmaker Should Know.” StudioBinder, 28 Feb. 2019, www.studiobinder.com/blog/film-lighting-techniques/. And finally, through the process of my research for the sources that I’ve included in my capstone production, I felt as though my knowledge was lacking a bit in areas, or was being stretched a little thin as far as how much I actually knew and would be able to explain simply. This led to me finding StudioBinder, a website for pretty much everything about filmmaking. This is a specific article about lighting, something that I believe I should sharpen up my knowledge on; this way, I’ll be more confident in sharing this info with others. And you know what they say, if you can’t explain it simply, then you aren’t an expert on it.

Take Me to Church - Hozier Obviously, the topic of religion is a substantial motif in The Handmaid’s Tale, i.e., the passage from the book of Genesis, the common phrases spoken by the handmaids, the Bible reading during the ceremony, etc. This track highlights the irony of twisted Christian faith, how oftentimes instead of forgiving others, we are prone to resort to hate and violence even though we know better. I think the scene that best captures this is in chapter eight, when the priest is hanged for breaking the rules.

Nude - Radiohead There are countless things that are out of our control–how should we respond to such a terrifying thought? Is it even worth the attempt to take matters into our own hands? Although many events throughout Offred’s life are permeated by the themes of this song, none quite evoke equivalent raw emotion as the recurring dream where her daughter is taken from her. I think the most haunting aspect of this scene is the sheer helplessness of the situation, and the fact that there is not a moment of hope where you might think that the two of them will succeed in their escape. Margaret Atwood presents obstacle after obstacle in this dream: Offred’s daughter slowing the two of them down, the cold water that they’ll have to eventually cross, the bullets whizzing past them, but never are we given a reason to believe that this story might end well. It’s a downhill slope from where it began. It’s also worth mentioning how gorgeous this track is. Not to suggest that this part of the book is particularly pleasing, but the sequence is dreamlike and separate from reality, “I feel calm and floating, as if I’m no longer in my body; close to my eyes there’s a leaf, red, turned early, I can see every bright vein. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”(75) So it pairs well with a listening experience that has such a heavy emphasis on abstraction.

Paranoid Android - Radiohead “The woman sitting in front of me was Serena Joy. Or had been, once. So it was worse than I thought.” (16) I’m not sure why, but I associate this song with big revelations, like a shocking discovery of information that you wish you’d never known. I find it to be very haunting and foreboding. Years ago, a very close friend of my parents was arrested and sent to prison for a serious crime. I’m not sad that he’s no longer close with my family, it was just an eye-opening period for me, but what bothered me most at the time was coming to the realization of how oblivious I’d been to who he actually was. That’s how this song makes me feel, and I imagine Offred was experiencing the same when she met Serena Joy.

How to Disappear Completely - Radiohead The requirements of the handmaids involve stripping themselves of all things that make them human, because they are not counted as human beings anymore, there’s no practical reason that they should be treated as such. They have no friends or family, no one to be authentic with, and nothing to do when they have nothing to do. And the pure fact that the handmaids are crucial to their society is not sufficient to give them a feeling of purpose, “Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?”(7) The title ‘How To Disappear Completely’, admittedly, is a bit on the nose, but the contents of the song provide a great deal of depth to what the name might imply. Like Nude, it’s a track with few lyrics, however I find it to be more tragic than Nude and even more beautiful. How to Disappear Completely deals with shame, it’s about the desire to possess the ability to vanish from places where you can’t find comfort. This shame is reflected in the way the sound is designed, it’s almost as if the music is trying to leave but it hasn’t quite found a way out yet. And this is what I believe the handmaids like Offred are dealing with all the time, not solely the fact that society has essentially made them invisible, but a feeling that their lives would be easier if they were not seen or acknowledged by anyone at all.

All Falls Down - Kanye West “But we can do it, a little at a time, a quick move of the head, up and down, to the side and back. We have learned to see the world in gasps.” (30) It’s easy to forget how good we have it, that is, until we no longer have it. In chapter ten, Offred tangentially mentions what music is like in her life, but the ways she experiences it is rather pathetic; “Sometimes Rita will hum, while kneading or peeling: a wordless humming, tuneless, unfathomable. And sometimes from the front sitting room there will be the thin sound of Serena’s voice, from a disc made long ago and played now with the volume low, so she won’t be caught listening as she sits there knitting.” (55) Desperation for something means that its value is increased no matter how abundant. But some people have the ability to do the best with what they’ve got, and that’s enough for them.