Video Project

College Life: County Market


For this project, Sara and I were stumped on what to do. We kept going back and forth on what we wanted to film that would be interesting to the whole class. First we were going to do the dollar store, then we were going to compare the dollar store to Wal-Mart, then we were going to ride a random bus and see where it took us. If this were a paper that we had to write, there sure would have been a lot of prewriting and planning because we had no idea. Finally, we decided to do it on County Market, the newest addition to our campus. Sara and I often spend every Saturday and Sunday there, mainly because they give out a lot of free samples! However, we wanted to see why the grocery store chose this location, why other students shopped there, and why people worked there. When we got to the location, we wanted to capture all of the features that the store had to offer including the deli, the produce, the study area, the Caribou Coffee, etc. We went around filming and along the way stopped some customers to ask why they liked shopping at County Market. The main response that we got was because it was conveniently located right on campus and was open 24/7 so it was a great place to study. We did have some people who did not want to be filmed so that was kind of frustrating. The whole process of filming this documentary on County Market was very similar to writing a paper. We had to come up with a general script for what we wanted to say in the introduction to draw people in and establish what the purpose of our project was. After that, we had to think of questions that we could use to interview the customers and the workers which would act as the main points in a paper. They were the “body” of the paper. While using the video camera, we were able to continuously rewind and examine what we had just filmed which was similar to the editing of a paper. If we didn’t like something, we redid it. If we missed a specific shot, we were able to go back and capture it. If we wanted to cut a piece out, we were able to. The whole process of creating this documentary was essentially just like writing a paper on the topic, only in visual form. The film documentary was a remediation of the standard research paper. I think that by being able to actually see the inside of the store and the customers that shop in it, the film documentary is “that which would evoke and immediate, and therefore authentic, emotional response,” as stated by Bolter. If all of the information that we gathered and the pictures that we gathered were just put in to words, I do not think that it would have the same effect on the viewer. By being able to actually see the in’s and out’s of the store, the viewer is able to make a better decision on whether this is some place they would like to visit or learn more about. Gathering all of the information was the easy part. It got a little difficult (and frustrating) when using iMovie because neither of us had ever used it before. We had to mess around with it a lot but eventually we were able to get all of the clips exactly where we wanted them to be. While these projects always seem time consuming and troublesome when in the process of creating them, I think that being able to see the end result is really cool and well worth it.