Reflecting on my Blog... Spring Final

Early in the year, I learned how important it is to have titles that flow with the video you are creating. You can see in my “titles” workshop film that I didn’t quite have the hang of creating attractive enough titles yet, considering it was only the first month or so of school and we were just starting out. When we did our cyberbullying projects, Cassie and I learned how to use After Effects to create moving titles and titles that stood out a lot better than just the Plain Jane titles that could be created in Premiere Pro. I think the titles are what made the cyberbullying video as good as it was.
My first and second videos of the year, the “Introduction” and “So You want to be a Baler?”, really showed how rough and uneducated I was about the program at the beginning of the year. We were just learning how to cut clips properly so that the speaker would not be cut short during mid-sentence or during an awkward face, as well as how to make the clips flow together without showing too much of a “jump cut”. As the year progressed, my editing skills strengthened a great deal, as you can see in my last three videos: “Cyberbullying”, “The Result”, and the “Animal Rights” videos. I was able to figure out how to properly cut and make a video flow with itself.
I learned a lot in the class that were not demonstrated in any of my videos, especially all the things that filmmakers do to make a movie as eye-catching as it is. Every time I watch a movie, now, I notice all these minor details that were talked about during class that I would have never noticed had I not been told about their meaning. Even though films have always appealed to me, and I have always been a fan of unique editing and camera working skills, there are so many things I never knew about that I can take with me from this class. Be it the different angles that add to a certain “mood” the director was trying to portray, or the colors in a scene that can really change how the entire movie would be had it been a different color.
I really enjoyed being in this class, and I am happy that I did end up taking it. Even though during some of the projects I felt like I was about to go crazy from either someone not participating or from a scene I was working on not turning out the way I planned for it to. I met some people that I hope I can maintain friendships with even though we are “going our separate ways”, and I will be taking a lot of skills with me that, had I not taken this class, I would have had to wait until college to learn.

Spring Semester Final Video

"The Water is Wide"

Jabberwocky Stanza

*Due to a family emergency, I was out of class and unable to actually create this video, leaving Damon to do the majority of the editing and creating. I did, however, help find the images we used as well as type up the credits.

Effects Sandbox

This is the Threshold effect.
This is the Wave Warp effect.
Directions on how these were achieved are below..




For the effects above:

001. From the Distort folder in the Effects window, select Wave Warp.

002. In the Effects Control window, select Wave Warp & change wave type to triangle. Adjust wave height to 41 & wave length to 102. Change direction degree to 66 degrees. Lower wave speed to -15.5. Do not do anything to panning and phase. Set antialiasing to low.

003. From the Stylize folder in the Effects window, select Threshold.

004. Change level to 98.

005. From the Generate folder in the Effects window, select Lens Flare.

006. Change the center to 688.2 & 30.5. Set flare brightness to 145%. Select 50-300mm Zoom for the lens type. Set blend with to 0.0

You might see these sorts of effects in a nightmare scene.

PLEASE NOTE: We were uncertain as to whether or not we needed to create two seperate videos with differenct effects, however we did do the assignment in its entirety.

Final Video: "the result."

Thinking About our Final Values Film

This post is from everyone that commented on our blog and the video. Liz, Jorge and Alicia, Elissa, Luis and Lizzy, Ryan, Julissa, Cynthia.
The positive comments that were most meaningful to us were from Everyone. They all pretty much said the same thing in one way or another. They told us that the little sections of the flashback were really good and it worked well with the storylineThat was helpful because It let us know that the choice to do the flashback was correct. In addition, they told us that the shots of Alexis’ character where you can truly see her reaction were done well, and that helped us see that we did stuff right even though we were stressing the film wasn’t that great.
The two best suggestions we got were from pretty much everyone who posted a comment. They all told us the same thing we were already thinking about the editing and the music and that was helpful because we were able to tell that we were on the right check and we all thought the same thing. We already addressed the situations that were all mentioned.

1) What value are you trying to represent? Honesty
2) What do you think your group has done well? I think we have worked very well as a group together. We have a lot of the same ideas and if there was any sort of issue, we would talk about it before it got out of hand.
3) What do you still need to complete? We still need to finish editing our rough draft of our film.
4) What are you most in need of feedback about? We want to know if our cuts were clean and if the clips we used worked well together and made our video look koala tea.
5) Identify a challenge your group discovered and faced in creating the film. Focus on a challenge about how to best tell your story. Describe how you dealt with that challenge, including discussions you had, things you tried and decided to leave out, and what you ultimately did to address it. I think the biggest challenge we faced was having to rewrite our script to fit the changed requirements of the video. Originally, we planned to have our main character be a male, but we had to change it because we needed our group to be in the cast.

Over The Shoulder

Reflection
Describe how your group planned your shots. What realizations did you make about the kind of planning that needs to happen BEFORE you shoot?
We didn't really plan out our shots, and all we knew was that we were going to need to learn the concept of over the shoulder shots.

Look at the composition of your over the shoulder shots. Did you follow the rule of thirds? Why or why not?
Yes and no, on my shots we had the rule of the thirds but on Cassie's shots we didn't.

What IMPRESSIONS do the over the shoulder shots create about the characters? How does this work?
In an over the shoulder shot, it is like you are standing in front of the character that is talking and getting on a more "personal" level.

How realistic does the dialogue seem in the final edit? What challenges did you have in editing?
To me, the dialogue seems somewhat realistic. We didn't really have any challenges during editing.

Is there a dominant mood or tone to your video? What is that mood or tone? How did you accomplish this?
I'd like to think the mood in this video is positive. We decided that Cassie would be a little bit more into the script than I, to make it a little more realistic to us.

What other observations do you have about using over the shoulder shots?
I don't really have any other observations.

What other ideas got emphasized or reinforced about how to make effective videos from doing this exercise?
One idea that was emphasized was that it added more of a relatable atmosphere with the characters in a film in an over the shoulder shot, it's like you are actually there in a conversation.