Revised Intro

Having looked at helpful comments from a number of fellow students, I've slowed the early part down, just a little, by introducing a brief, still version of two of the images.  The voice is updated with a better French speaker!  And there is now just one 'cash' image at the end.  It feels like an improvement, to me.

I have also recorded some sounds in Leeds market and am ready to start working on the second half of the video.

The comments made me reflect a little on why I'm taking this approach and what I hope to achieve.  As intimated elsewhere, perhaps the most important reason is that I want to try something different and test myself out.  I also sense that the contemporary version of the 'Photo Essay' concept described in the course notes is, maybe, a short video on You Tube.  An online magazine, for example, could be more likely to include something along these lines, or a slideshow, rather than a carefully laid out picture essay.  The challenges are different.  A viewer of a magazine photo sequence can review the whole set in seconds, flicking backwards and forwards between pages.  Then they can follow the sequence, read the narrative that the creator has put together, and ultimately spend time reviewing any or all of the images in detail.  In the video, such as this one, everything happens much more quickly - like so many aspects of contemporary communications.  The viewers' attention needs to be won in the first few seconds.  They need something to be happening that keeps them gripped, since they can stop the video and forget all about it in an instance.  They're unlikely, certainly in the case of a video on the internet, to watch for longer than a few minutes, so getting the message cross quickly is important.  As I've been working on this and thinking about it, I sense that it has more in common with an advertisement or a music video than, say, a slideshow or physical presentation of still images.  One is trying to create a 'sensation' through a combination of visual and audio stimuli.  It still requires careful thought about sequencing, timing, juxtaposition, pace etc, which has similarities with the photo essay, but everything is happening so much more quickly.