Week 2 Story Critique : Fiddle Leaf Fig Tree Rejuvenation Tips & Tricks

My focal theme is A Change from Black Thumb to Green Thumb. I like gardening, but sadly I have killed numbers of house plants in the past. This year, our family moved into our first house. When I am looking at the house pictures on Houzz.com to get ideas for home decoration, I can't help noticing that every gorgeous interior shot and all the legit designers have fiddle leaf figs. So I rushed into Home Depot to get a 3 foot one back. A couple months later I scored a 7 foot one at Pike nursery. I have sworn to keep them alive. When I am doing research on how to take care of fiddle leaf fig tree, I stumbled into Fiddle Leaf Fig Tree Rejuvenation Tips & Tricks on Youtube.

This video is not really " story" type. It is more like an instruction. But I have a hard time to find story typed videos about gardening. If you happened to know any resources, please let me know. I have chosen three traits from Jason Ohler’s Assessing Digitial Stories to focus on for this particular video.

Project planning

There are a few elements in the video indicating the planning was in place while making this video, for example, the instructor wore a shirt that has the nursery logo on it, obviously, the nursery wants to promote their products online and want to more people to know their name. The instructor also had everything ready while shooting for this video, including a sad and droopy fig tree( with the pot removed) just like the video title implied, flowering can( with pre-mixed water with plant food), a package of plant food( the products they carry in their store?), scissors. The instructor seemed to know where her tools were and she reached to her tools with ease.

In the middle of the video, we can hear there were sounds like thunders. It was a little disrupting of the video flow. Because the thunder was loud hence part of her speech was not very clear. If I were the video maker, I would probably shoot the video in a different time of the day with quieter background.

Media grammar

The first thing I noticed is the video was shot vertically so there were big gaps in the both sides of the video. The video looks a bit narrow and sometimes couldn't cover the whole scene. For example, the instructor's half body and face sometimes were cut off. I think it would look better if the video was shot horizontally.

Another thing is the moving of the camera, most of the time the shot was steady, but time to time, there were short and jerky movement makes it not so professional.

Sense of audience

I would say this video did a good job presenting its main idea which is how to take care of a sick plant. The instructor's voice is steady and clear most of the time. She looks at the camera time to time to create a sense that she is actually communicating with the audience. After watching the video, I, as audience, learned a good deal of information that I am looking for. However, I believe there could be a few improvement in terms of sense of audience. For example, there could be a close up shot for her shirt logo and the brand of the food plants that she is using. The purpose of this particular nursery made this video is to attract more customers and promote their sales. But both information are not clear so the potential customer would have a difficult time reaching to them.