Lessons from a day behind the wheel of BuzzFeed’s Snapchat account.
Alex Kantrowitz / Via BuzzFeed
About an hour before Apple's Fall event got underway on Wednesday, I signed into BuzzFeed's Snapchat account, took a deep breath and began filming. My opening scene, a quick video of my hand grabbing an apple at a local grocery, took about five takes to get right. I picked up an ugly apple on the first try. On the second, I missed the apple completely while trying to film and grab it simultaneously. On the third, my hand appeared monstrously large after a close encounter with the camera. Delete. Delete. Delete. By the time I published a "good take" to officially kick off my Snapchat Story, I was running late.
Such early stumbles were to be expected. This was my first time reporting on a newsworthy event via Snapchat (unless you count my friend Jasmine's wedding), and, as an Apple event first-timer, I wasn't really sure what to expect after publishing that first video. Still, the experience and the response turned out pretty positive in the end, and I learned a lot in the process, including:
One of the advantages of reporting with Snapchat is that the platform lets you stitch together a series of video clips and photos into a single, cohesive video called a "Story." These videos are published clip by clip on Snapchat's "Stories" tab in increments of 10 seconds or less. Publishing on Snapchat therefore gave me an opportunity to immediately churn out "live" video coverage of Apple's event without making viewers sit through a two-hourlong live stream. The completed story lasted a little over seven minutes — a "longform" piece of video content, as one viewer put it — but it was something that showed viewers the essence of the event, as it was happening, without making them sit through the boring parts. People watching my Snapchat Story could bite off chunks of it as it was posted, getting the updates nearly in real time, or watch the whole thing in one sitting once the event was over. Snapchat's new format seems especially suited for fast-unfolding live events, such as Apple's this week.
As a tool for editing video, Snapchat is very limited — and that's great. When you post on Snapchat, you're creating raw video, not the "Mona Lisa," so accept that it won't be perfect. In a few instances, my timing was a bit off, something I couldn't fix since there's no option within Snapchat to trim clips. But it didn't matter because the video I was posting was meant to be an authentic, raw, first-person look at an event that's important to a lot of people but one that few get to see in real life. People are willing to trade off production quality to get that type of video quickly on their phones. And that's what I was trying to deliver.
from BuzzFeed - Tech http://ift.tt/1Q7ga2L
via IFTTT
Hiç yorum yok:
Yorum Gönder