Category Archives: P3 Roadtrip Nation

Final Project: Insomniac’s Reverie

By Jacob Bates

I started out this project by thinking about what I could do with my Video8 camera in conjunction with my DSLR, and how that could work thematically. The thing that immediately came to mind was making the VHS style footage a dream. From there, I took inspiration from my girlfriend telling me about how she started seeing things because she was losing so much sleep, staying up late to study for midterms. It sounded really frightening to me and I wanted to try and make a video that exemplified that. I believe in the end I really accomplished that.

Planning went smoothly and it was the first time where I actually made a whole storyboard from start to finish and it was extremely helpful. Every video I made before this was me just winging it shot by shot and it made filming such an insanely easier process. My girlfriend was the actress in this and I think she did great, but it was pretty difficult to convey what I wanted to her. I did make the storyboard, but seeing as there wasn’t much dialogue I didn’t think to write any kind of script. Setting up shots was easy but getting what I wanted out of my actress took quite awhile.

After filming wrapped, I realized editing was the true challenge. A lot of what I wanted to do required skills I didn’t have in Premiere Pro yet and I had to learn a bit. I also did a lot of outside the box editing to try new things, making everything more dynamic and streamlined. I believe I accomplished this very successfully, after many, many, many iterations and a lot of people giving me constructive criticism.

This was a great experience overall. I didn’t have a lot of issues and having a relatively short film made it a lot easier for me to get it done and just try new things, get creative with it. I look forward to doing more projects with mixed media after I have done this.

Final Project, Mason Perkins

https://youtu.be/7SbS-O-UA1g

This project was a lot of fun but animating something on your own is hard, not to mention this is my first animation over 3 seconds long. I had to learn some things about animation in order to complete it, and my existing knowledge was put to the test. while I think I did well, especially for the timeframe, there were some things I know about animation that I either couldn’t do or forgot until it was too late to go back. I don’t think anyone but animators would notice those things though so I’m more shooting myself in the foot for saying anything.

I’m going to keep animating although its a hell of a pastime, literally the time passes faster than I can make meaningful progress. This experience has helped me feel out animation and how I want to steer my career accordingly to my likes and dislikes while working on an animation.

I’m continuing work on this animation including some reworking along with around 30 seconds of new animation. In the future unless I’m working with people and animation speaking characters I’ll stick to a single music track for the whole animation. I possibly will make it a part 1 and 2 and finish 1 first then move to part 2 which will be Jester finally getting that bag.

P6 Final

By George Hendrickson

My experience with this project was as usual, a rocky start that ended with aspects that I’m happy with and proud of. I wanted to do something silly and fun with a kind of “shit post” quality if anyone is familiar with that. I also wanted to advertise a modern product through the lens of post-World War 2 ‘40s-‘50s America, and the strawman that was made of the Communist ideology during the Cold War. With all I’ve learned after this class and this project specifically, I’m actually excited about going back to this and other ideas to do them even better. I’ve also learned that there are several aspects of the directing chair that I enjoy, but I have a long way to go as far as things like thinking about how the camera shot will actually look, and how long it will actually take. I also learned good lessons about having a solid script to start and go off of, and balancing that with improv. So, I can let my actors have fun and put their own twist on the role I have provided for them. I’ve decided that there are aspects of both production and post-production/editing that I can have fun with. However, there are plenty of aspects with both that I do not enjoy, and I’m sure time will tell where I fit best with creating video content.

5

At first I was really confused on what I wanted to make, but I knew it had to be something I liked otherwise I wouldn’t be motivated to make it. The first thing that popped up in my head was Ophelia, my cat. I adopted her a year ago and it is us against the world haha. I spend most of my time playing with her and just observing because she is so funny. She acts more like a dog sometimes and has a lot of attitude. It took a while for me to get all the footage because I had to wait until she was either in the mood to play or was just doing her thing. I knew if I had staged any of her actions it would not look authentic so I had to wait for her timing. This is one of the first videos I have made with Premiere Pro so it took me a second to get the hang of it but it was surprisingly easier to do than I thought. I definitely want to learn more about Premiere so I can add more effects like transitions and anything else the program offers. This was really fun to make and I’m excited to make more videos.

by Ana McCartney

The 5 Knocks Project

This project took DAYS to edit and film. I had major complications regarding my step-dad not wanting to participate, script re-writes, and set changes. I apologize for this being a tad-bit late, but I hope you enjoy, and get creeped out by it, either way.

This project required the help of 4 PEOPLE, not including myself. My little sister, her friends (Brenya, and Ellie), and my Mom all worked to produce the shots you see in the trailer. And yes, that is my hand in the thumbnail and at the end, had to make it more creepy somehow, right? I really enjoyed editing and directing this project, and I will 87.9% do this again. Of course there were rough patches along the way, like I previously stated, but that only help me learn what to do to overcome those challenges. Challenges last as long as you make them last. Experience 10/10.

By: Kyrsten Crittenden

P5 5

When I started thinking about this project, I was having issues thinking about what I could do that would be unique. I thought about games cause that is something I play a lot of and thought of funny ideas about doing quick reviews of something like skyrim or persona 5. And those could have been interesting but I believe mason brought up the idea I stuck with. He talked about an idea of doing a video at 5 frames per second. I thought this was really cool and wanted to do it. I then had to think about what I could do that would be interesting, and it was on the way back home on the bus that day that it connected with me how slow the bus feels but it was nice to take that time to just be there in that moment. And I decided that was a good idea to go off of. So on monday that next week I recorded the bus ride back and when I got home I edited it down to where it was only at 5 frames per second. This video hurts me as a video editor but also has its own unique feel to it that I really enjoy. Background ambience was a little specific cause of the idea but overall I like how it ended up.

P5 Image Editng

by Kahu Ekalani

I’m not sure why but I had a lot of conflict figuring out what to do for this project. I thought about taking videos of five people’s hands emphasizing the presence of five fingers. I considered creating a video listing 5 of my favorite photos I’ve taken but I knew it wouldn’t have been able to cover the one minute minimum duration requirement, so I decided to list a variety of photos I’ve taken of 5 different base subjects that I like to photograph. I used my prior knowledge of keyframing in Premiere to organize and shift the photos in a way I hoped was visually interesting enough.

I chose subjects I generally already had some previous photos of, realizing the things I unintentionally enjoy photographing. The majority of the photographs showcased were shot on 35mm film. I conveyed the point of the video with a numbered list to make it clear and chose a font I found tasteful for the context of the video. I used french orchestral music to put over the sequence because I wanted to give it a Wes Anderson feel. I also added some sound effects for comedic purposes. 

P5-Image Editing

During my brainstorming phase, I had the number at the fore front of my brain and started to notice how many 5s there are around. For this project, I went around town looking for the number five and it was actually very fun to see the different designs of the fonts, colors, and styles. I thought I found plenty, but when I got home I realized I definitely did not have enough to compose a minute long video. I found many different fives online, and filmed them. Luckily, I liked the pixelated look of the screen. I like that the number five can be represented with things that are not (5). For example, a dime, Benjamin Franklin’s headshot, etc..

My friend, Sammy Pecora, made the song for me. I told him about the assignment and he had an idea for a song that would represent the rule of fives in music composition. I wish I was more musically literate to translate his work and process to you guys, but fortunately I have a direct quote from him explaining. “Each note represents 5 diatonic steps creating harmonies which are separated by 5 scale tones, or ‘fifths.’ These intervals create an open landscape which to some may sound beautiful or somewhat nostalgic.” This was a fun element to combine our interpretations of the number 5 in our individual mediums.