The Changes To Cloudy (lessons in essay structure)

So as you may have noticed with the Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs video, it is VERY different to the WIP edit I had shared before.

This is because I felt the video lacked structure and appeal.

When conceiving the video idea, I felt it resonated so much with my own struggles of validation that I could turn this into a deeply personal video, specifically on validation. As a result the subject felt too heavy, especially against such a fun film. I thought it would be off-putting or even that people would think this would be a negative view of the film. I wondered if there was a version of this video that had broader appeal, not just my own specific struggle with validation, but something that everyone has experienced. I bring up social media in the video as a throw-away section, but I decided to bring it up to the forefront. This however meant a LOT of changes to the video, and less than a week to do it to meet the sponsor's deadline.

Let's do this.

So I have a new direction for the video, showing the parallels of Cloudy against the perils of social media. But I couldn't just add in a few new paragraphs - the script needed a full restructure.

One problem the original version had was while I used a general retelling of the plot of the movie as the kinda-structure of the video - I would recount the plot beats of the film and then cross compare them to validation - this results in a video that basically kept looping back on itself. I'd be making broadly the same points over and over with no real progression.

To help with this, I used pee. That's right. Pee.

Oh sorry, I meant P.E.E. Point. Evidence. Explanation.

State my thesis at the start, then explore in sections, citing examples and ultimately what it means in relation to the thesis. Then an overall conclusion and what the whole thing means. I'd done this kind of structure lots of times, but I guess I did it by what felt right rather than a guide like this. This was a big help.

However, I couldn't throw out what had been done already, that would involve starting everything from the beginning and there had been too much invested into this video already. So the process began to adapt the previous script into this brand new structure. This is what we did:

It was a bit of a Frankenstein effort, but we chopped the original version into pieces, wrote and re-recorded bridging sections and then recorded new sections to tie it all back to the thesis. This still required a ton of work from the editor to assemble this new version all together, but it was the best way to preserve as much as possible. Ironically a video with a message about taking care of yourselves was exhausting to make!

It was a salvage job, and I know this is the best possible version of this video (aside from the text-to-speak because I forgot to record the full plot recap of the movie and ran out of time!!). But as a result I was still worried the video could struggle. Had I approached this video with the social media angle from the start, it probably would have been a very different video. And I was concerned people would feel this didn't dig deep enough into the social media elements, perhaps being able to see the seams of how this video was forcibly stitched together.

But I'm delighted people have enjoyed this video and how it resonated with them in unexpected ways. I'm pleased this extra level of scrutiny helped improve the video's quality - but perhaps next time I can do that BEFORE the video is fully edited! 

Huge thanks and love to Apothael for all their hard hard work on editing this video (and all it's various iterations!)