6 Second Entertainment

Without a doubt, we are advancing into a more digital world where the majority of what we use to function or view are done predominantly on these flat rectangle surfaces called screens. Ranging from massive projected images on a wall in movie theaters, to a tiny 5 x 2 computer that fit in the palm of our hands, we as a human race have found a tremendous amount of ways to entertain ourselves. Media as a whole is becoming more and more brief as technology progresses to feed us information quicker than ever, just with a few clicks of your mouse (or finger).

Thanks to our advancing technology, people are now able to access any possible resource, whether that be books, movies, ways to contact people, and even find out how to get from right where you are standing to a certain spot in the country. In many aspects, this exposure to data at such an immediate rate has affected not only how we obtain information, but the length of our attention span as well.

Take motion picture for example, early movies and shows have been a form of entertainment ever since the invention and advancement of the camera. The length of motion pictures can play such a large role in how well people will be willing to continue watching. The success in amusing a person all depends on how well a story is told, time being a big factor. 
Nowadays, it is so easy to not only capture someone's attention, but to also lose it. Digital media has evidently caused our attention spans to shorten. This can be shown through sites like YouTube, where if the length of a video is too long, many people tend to click away. Videos being produced have become shorter and shorter to an average of 3-4 minutes on YouTube. And somehow, people have found ways to fully tell a story in just 6 seconds!




I am specifically referring to Vine, one of the most popular social media apps accessible on any smartphone. Vine is the prime example and proof that our attention span has become smaller. It takes creative minds (and probably people who have nothing better to do) to come up with a way to entertain in using only 6 seconds, and sometimes even less.


Personally, I think it's amazing that we can even comprehend what happens in that short amount of time. A variety of videos are posted each day on Vine, then shared on other social media such as Twitter. Whether they're humorous, informational, promotional, or even just used to express thoughts and opinions, these short clips can easily capture anyone's attention and even with a few seconds, can have great quality.

College Bio Project

During ONW's annual Blood Drive, a group in my college biology class had taken advantage of the event to film a quick and fun video for our project. Since I'm in E-Communication, I had the idea to take responsibility of the actual video production and film part of the project, which means storyboarding the preproduction, coming up with ideas and organizing how and when to shoot, and also I had the responsibility of editing.

The scope of our project was to explain the concept of blood cells along with how it ties to cell diffusion and osmosis.  My group had come up with the idea to interview random students who were at the blood drive and we all wanted the responses to be unexpected and funny. We had less than two days to shoot during school, however only one day to be at the Blood Drive and get footage from that event. My teacher had also only given me one day to edit, so we were pretty limited on time to complete this entire project. 

As I came up with the general storyboard and organized how were going to shoot, the rest of my group created the content that would be in the video and how to include all of the biology that we had learned. Then, on the day of the Blood Drive, we checked equipment out and went to the flex theater to shoot.

Filming the interviews didn't go too bad, the only downside was that we were very limited on time and had a lot of footage to shoot, at least for the biology side of the video. We had prioritized the biology content first, then worried about the interviews and having fun after, which resulted in a short amount of time to find many students who would be willing to be in our video.

After getting all of our footage, I edited (mostly by myself) and clipped together all of the interviews along with the information about diffusion. I tried to edit in the way that ONW's segment "Word from the Halls" does, with quick cuts and random sound effects. After watching the finished video, I feel like I could have done much better on the editing and it could have been longer with better content if I had more time to edit. During the editing process, I relearned shortcuts on Final Cut that I've forgotten and overall gotten more familiar with the editing software. All in all, I feel pretty satisfied with our video and my group ended up winning a prize out of other groups in our class.