Highlighted in this video is artist Ryan Crawford. You may recognize the name from my Top 5 Climbing Areas post, as Ryan contributed a quote and a photo for the post. Aside from his pottery, Ryan boasts many talents, including his climbing.
I decided to highlight his incredible work and tell the story of his process, inspirations, and goals as an artist. Being a student, he studies ceramics at the University of Wyoming, and by surrounding himself with the vast amount of talent found at the art department, he is increasingly producing higher quality works. To see some of these excellent pieces on display, check out Ryan’s art Instagram account as he posts some of his more intricate pieces.
As far as my experience making this film, I tried to take a lot of my inspiration from VICE videos and their profiles on interesting people. Those films are really well done, and the stories are always great. So for my own video, I put the story first, I had a great subject, so it was relatively easy to put forward the story to the clips. Art is always an interesting thing to look at, so the shots in the film were easy to obtain as I filmed what I would’ve looked at had the cameras not been a factor.
With that being said, the part I did not enjoy was the editing and combing of these clips. It was tedious to make sure the progression of the process of him creating was in order so one shot was the beginning of the process and the next was the final piece. Also, I had a LOT of footage, and it was tough to condense it down into the required 4 minutes.
What I wish I would have done a little differently was create a better plan for the shots. I had what I thought was a thorough plan, however, Ryan’s process was very quick and I had to take what I could get. I didn’t get to utilize all of the tools in my arsenal that I brought that day, and I think I could’ve done a lot better if I had another shot, but the clay was gone, and the art had been created. It was a one and done type deal.
I’ve always had an affinity for the art of filming and videography, and I could really see myself utilizing it within a journalistic career as a supplemental to written stories, similar to my inspiration of VICE. However, I could also see myself creating stand alone video content with the skill I have learned and developed in and out of this course.
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