As you will have gathered, the last few days have been a bit hectic, what with the launch of the new FreeFrom Food Awards website and the opening of the 2021 awards. (I am delighted to say that we had had eight entries by the end of day one!) So I fear that I have not even got to the heath for a walk – a terrible admission.
However, following on from my slow walk round the boating pond last week, here is a contemplation of the Bird Sanctuary Pond late one evening. The crows (rooks?) were definitely having their evening chinwag – they were positively deafening. You will notice some ducks early on but in the latter half of the video notice the oak tree under which I was standing dive bombing both me and the pond with acorns. You can hear them hitting the ground and splashing into the pond and you can see the spreading circles of ripples from where they hit.
Slow walk around the boating pond
I really enjoy watching your “slow watching” videos.
I use my laptop computer, viewing the videos on full screen display.
What I particularly like about these videos is that the viewpoint never jumps from place to place and that the display is continuous. The viewer gets to see what you saw, as it happened.
A widespread way that many people who produce videos practice is to edit what they recorded and end up with what I regard as a load of bits of image rubble with the viewpoint jumping from place to place – perhaps fine if one has been there and remembers the layout but a muddle if one has not. I am delighted that you do not do that, you give us hot-rolled video.
Your videos give an as close as possible an experience of having been there as is possible in a recording.
I particularly like the videos where you are slowly in motion and looking around as you proceed.
There is a concept in virtual world technology called ‘clicking-in’ where after a while it is as if one is there.
So your longer videos are very good for this. I watch with full screen display and yes, it is a flat picture and there is a black plastic frame around it, but after a few minutes with gentle movement and no viewpoint jumps I find that I am ‘there’ in a virtual sense. The gentle moving helping to produce the illusion of actually being there.
So seven or more minutes of gentle video is great, time to relax and become involved in it, whether wandering through a wood or quietly watching a pond or perhaps visiting a country house and including everything, not just the rooms but going up the stairs, looking around the gift shop, all the bits that other video makers often miss out.
William Overington
Thursday 24 September 2020
Thank you, William, for all of that – I am interested in the ‘clicking in’ theory that I was not aware of. that was certainly my aim when doing the videos – actually when doing al of them really as the original idea was to allow those locked down by the pandemic to imagine, if only for a few minutes, that they were walking on the heath. More to come then….