[Description]
The theme of the video is the ‘Disappearing Fragment of City’, whereas the subject is the diminishing of a local joss money store – Shing Fung Hong – due to its small amount of business, which is in drastic contrast with the surrounding busy market flow of Temple Street.
The video portrays the contrast of business between the Temple street stores and Shing Fung Hong.The business of the Temple street is first introduced, with loud audios of overlapping noise, crowded and constantly moving figures, as well as frequent interactions between business owners and potential customers all around the market area.
The video then transitions to the quietness and emptiness of the local Shing Fung Hong with the transition of a crowd walking away to empty up the space of the market, which transitions to the quiet and unoccupied floor entrance space of Shing Fung Hong.
The method of conducting research involves:
- on-site empirical observation: in which I realized the drastic contrast between the business of the joss money store compared to other sales in the market area, judging by their difference in population flow and the frequency gap of interaction between the business owners and the customers.
- interview: interviewing of the Shing Fung Hong store owners to understand the following information:
- the reason behind their diminishing business is due to the strict regulation issued by the local government of burning joss money
- they opened the store for business 20 years ago
- there has been an increasing trend of customers over the course of 20 years due to the increase in familiar/usual customers; however, the business is still not enough as they can barely pay rent
- the three store owners plan to spend their extra time running the store business even if it doesn’t have good prosperity until the moment they retire
- the store owners do not plan to transfer their skills of folding joss money and hand over the business of the joss money shop to their next generations since they strongly believe that new blood currently focuses on getting degrees for a long-term career.
(345 words)
As for the process of producing the video, the iPhone 13 was the device used for taking visual records, with a phone stand as an auxiliary tool. It took about 2-3 hours of duration for the video-taking process.
The video-taking location was the market of Temple Street outside of Shing Fung Hong, as well as the interior and exterior of the Shing Fung Hong joss money store. Such a location was chosen to record the comparison between the businesses of Shing Fung Hong and other businesses in the market – such close locational proximity enhances the drastic contrasting effect, where the fate and sustainability of business within the same space can be under such a difference based on underlying factors of local cultural regulations. The phone camera was used using the x1 enlargement setting.
Moments I waited to capture were smoothe crowd movement combined with loud mixed sounds that convey the busniness of a market, shots of individual actions between business owners and customers, as well as longer, quieter shots of the Shing Fung Hong.
The camera angles adopted during the filming process include:
- close-up shot, e.g. to highlight the busy working state of the clam business owner by the clanking sound made by her throw of clam shell
- medium shot, e.g. to highlight the busy working state of the crab business owner by displaying the bargaining interaction between a crab business owner and a potential customer
- long shot, e.g. to show the full length of Shing Fung Hong
- low angle shot, e.g. to depict the low level of customer attraction of Shing Fung Hong by showcasing the emptiness of the store up until the owner’s feet, as well as their low activity by capturing a long moment without them having to move away from their resting chair
- eye-level shot, e.g. to show the crowd among the streets of the Temple Street market from a person’s visual perspective
- high angle shot, e.g. to emphasize the emptiness of the store by bringing out the small size of the business owner’s figures in correlation to the large space of the store
- knee-level shot, e.g. to highlight the crowdedness of the street from the density of feet and carts sweeping across the floor area; to highlight the transition from a crowded space to a quiet space by filming the action of people leaving a space by a crowd of feet slowly walking away from the camera and clearing up the space
At the later stage of video editing, the iMovie app was used for the entire movie. The following video editing skills were adopted:
- Good transition of scenes by connecting focal point areas, or movement of focal subject
- Good transition from ‘busy’ to quiet by the ‘leaving’ action of the customer flow to empty up a large space
- Good transition from ‘many business/customers’ to ‘barely any business/customers’ by adjusting the audio loudness; the audio volume increases when there are customers
- Good ending of video by showcasing a customer purchasing at the entrance of Shing Fung Hong and leaving, with the follow-up action of the shop owner looking at the camera, and then turning around to walk away from the camera back into her resting space
(522 words)