Final Project Video

For this project I decided to do lego video. I used my own legos to tell a story about a couple and their dog on an adventure in the wilderness. I used my Canon Rebel T6 to photograph each scene. The shooting took place at a near by hidden trail which granted me freedom from those wondering on to my set. Would of taken my dog to assist me on my project but she is a impatient German Shepard/Husky mix. Took a day to take my photos and to edit them. I pulled the images over to adobe premier pro and used royalty free music and sounds to add to the video. It did not take too long to complete the project and i felt it turned out well. The hardest part was staying on task since the end of the term was nearing. I hope you like it.

I grew up playing a lot of video games. I remember going out to any restaurant or mall that had an arcade in it and dumping thousands of quarters into any machine I laid my eyes on. From classic games like Donkey Kong to modern games that were first released on consoles. But I’ve always been most fond of fighting games and “Beat’em Up” games. These would include titles such as Street Fighter, Double Dragon, Mortal Kombat, Final Fight, Fatal Fury, Streets of Rage, and many more.

I got into a lot of fights when I was growing up and I also was bullied constantly. And whenever I fought back I would always end up in some kind of trouble. It made me feel like an outcast and that everyone was out to get me. I always felt like I had a need to fight back but was never allowed to. A stigma that has stuck with me all through my adulthood. When I joined the military, I did it for the purpose of being a fighter. But my experience showed me that fighting was something I had to pursue on my own.

I got into fighting games as a means of escapism. Where I was allowed to go to a place where I can take out my aggression without getting in trouble. The whole point is to fight to survive, beat the bad guy, and save the day. But there’s also cool backstories to characters on why they choose to fight. In the Street Fighter series, every fighter fights for a different reason: Guile fights for revenge, Ken fights for glory, and Ryu fights to meet the next challenge.

Sprite animation is always something that I have been interested in. I get inspired by animations that I see on Youtube. There are many websites where you can download sprite sheets of videogame characters, backgrounds, and textures for your own use. Some people make their own games with them, while others make their own movies for people to watch.

This is something I’ve wanted to try and do for my Final Project. I started off using some sketches of my artwork for the Cobalt character. Cobalt is inspired by guys like Ryu from Street Fighter. A stoic protagonist that doesn’t take crap from anybody. I then started to use images of well known pop culture figures and using a the Pixelate/Mosaic filter to make them look like videogame characters. I mostly used Photoshop and Premier for this project and applied what I learned in Time-based Tools to make it look good. I also used Animate to make my own animated GIF to include in my video.

The challenge was figuring out what to draw so I just used references I got from other games. Using my own sketches was difficult and fun though. It’s something I intend to do more of.

I hope you all enjoy. And I will continue to make more stuff like this in the future.

For this project I wanted to create something fun, something light and something personal! I think this was my first real taste of filming and editing! and boy oh boy do I have so much to learn still.

In this video is my brother and our dogs. We go on a lot of adventures together and I thought thanksgiving would be the perfect way to capture a day in the life of. Our entire family lives in Florida so it’s just us. My brother agreed to be in the video if I took him to the skate park. I of course obliged but decided to benefit from him being at the skatepark and got some cool shots.

I added one of my favorite songs by Mac Demarco and added a film reel onto another layer in premier and lowered the opacity. For me this video was a blast to edit even though I spent more hours than I should have nitpicking every little detail! I love capturing authentic moments and beautiful scenery. This is what I want to do eventually. Travel the world and capture moments like this!

For the location we went to Newport one of my favorite areas on the coast. I love Newport because you have amazing seafood, beautiful beaches with virtually no people on them and a gorgeous lighthouse that has such unique scenery to shoot. It’s important for me to capture places like this so other people can appreciate this beauty as well. I believe this creates a ripple effect of people wanting to conserve natural areas!

All in all i’m fairly satisfied with the video but I definitely need to start investing in equipment like a gimbal and start incorporating audio into my videos because thats what intimidates me the most! Something that really bothered me about the film I had was that I really didn’t think to get many close ups which is definitely a big no no for a videographer! Ah well, it’s all apart of the learning experience, right? Oh and something I had a huge problem with is uploading this video. It took over 8 hours. Yeah, crazy right? I have no idea what the problem is or how to fix it. Maybe it’s how I export the video? Any help on this would be much appreciated! Thanks for tuning in guys and I hope you enjoyed my video!

My concept was to explore how nearby colors interact and have their appearance modified through light and shadow. I began exploring this concept for my digital photography final, but I felt a video would better capture some of the details and elements.

I acquired 16 colors of card-stock. I planned to cut and shape it into various simple geometric layers or 3d forms. Each would be repeated in every color so I wanted an easy to replicate pattern. Another goal of the pattern was to generate surfaces and structures for light to interact with. This was a part of the project I had to continually trim as I wanted to go in a lot of directions with it but would have ended up spending too much time making models and not enough time taking photos or video.

The other concept I wanted to explore in the video was how light in many ways resembles how we acquire and impart knowledge. Returning to school this term kept that “illuminating” concept a constant thought.

Illuminate – to explain and show more clearly something difficult to understand

Cambridge English Dictionary

I again ended up scaling back and trimming another thing from the project that may have led me further on a wild goose chase. Plus it was just a really difficult concept to try to get across in one small video.

As I worked with my imagery and compiled it into a sequence, I started exploring more shots, trying to figure out how they might fit in or be compatible with a final project. Steadily becoming more scatter-brained my output began to resemble my internal state. I took this chaotic energy of overlapping ideas and infused it into the project.

The resulting mishmash of imagery may result in a meditative state where the sensory portions of the brain are stimulated without any concrete concept or narrative solidifying in the conscious mind. 

Kind of like dozing off in a dull class! Which I’m happy to say was not the case for any of the studies my first term in the Multimedia Arts program. I’m excited for what Winter Term will bring!

For this assignment I learned a lot. At first I came up with an idea for the video. I wrote it down. One of the problems I had was the weather. The weather did not help at all. I wanted to have two actors in my video but unfortunately due to the weather it didn’t happen. I couldn’t shoot my video for several days. There were days when I wanted to shoot my video, but if it wasn’t cloudy, it was raining so I had to reschedule it for another day. The actors I wanted to work with did not want to go out due to the weather. Than I asked one of my friends to be in my video. I knew his schedule and I knew he was available the day I wanted to shoot my video. I had to make some changes in the script. This is the second video I’ve ever made and it’s the the first time that I directed. Since I had to make changes in the script I had to look for different locations. I took a lot of video to have a lot to choose from. For the video I used a Sony HDR-CX405. The quality is not the best, but it gets the work done. I shot my first video with the same video camera. In this assignment I learned how the weather plays a big role when shooting a video or taking photos outdoors. I learned I should be prepared to come up with a plan B if the plan A fails. To edit my video I used Premiere and it’s my first time using it. I learned to take out the original sound of the video and replace it with sound effects. I learned how to change the color of the background and more. I had fun shooting my video. I know I could have done a better job, but I’m happy with my work.

The Life Of Zoey is a short movie about my dog, Zoey, and the things she does on a daily basis. Zoey is a very happy dog so you will see many photos of her smiling. She enjoys playing games, eating peanut butter, and sleeping. Zoey is a very unique dog with a ton of personality so I thought it would be fun to make my final project about her.

 I had a lot of fun creating this project because it allowed me the time to go home to see my parents and spend quality time with my dog.I haven’t had the time to go see my parents and my dog since the beginning of fall term. This project was my favorite because I really enjoyed taking pictures of Zoey’s beautiful smile and I know that she loved spending time with me as well. We played fetch and hide and go seek together, while she did a really good job of listening to my directions.

 Originally my dad was going to allow me to use his Nikon camera to film my project, but it wasn’t allowing me to take photos on it. After getting a new battery and still not being able to figure out the camera’s issues, I decided to use my phone. I used my phone to film my P5 project and I had many issues uploading photos into Premiere Pro. I didn’t want to use my phone because I was trying to avoid the issues that I have previously dealt with. This time I had no issues uploading my photos into Premiere Pro. I had some issues with the format of my videos, but I quickly resolved them. Overall I had a lot of fun filming and editing this project. Zoey cooperated very well with everything I needed her to do.I kept a jar of dog treats with me the whole time I filmed, which definitely helped. Creating “The Life Of Zoey” was my favorite project of the term because I know my friends and family will be excited to see it as well.

The title of this post is simultaneously just keeping with my theme of using song lyrics every time, and also a very, very true statement. When I embarked on this project, I mapped out all the time I’d spend working on it and making sure it was as good as possible, and then promptly forgot a bunch of those times and ended up crunching to get this done over the past couple of days. Considering all that, I’m actually pretty happy with how this turned out! My actors were all amazing, and I’m super proud of the audio. The visuals themselves, uh… well, let’s just say I’ve never actually done an animatic before, and certainly nothing of this length! It was a fun challenge, and honestly I’d like to do this again and get more practice with it. I think having the deadline for class was ultimately a good motivator, even if the end product isn’t nearly as polished as I’d usually like for things I have to post online.

But, anyway, enough preamble! Please enjoy this scene from that audio drama I’m working on!!

…Okay, have you watched it? Wanna see some behind-the-scenes stuff now?

Here are some early sketches of Kim and the… something weird she runs into. In my head the alien’s always been more like a lemur, but whenever I tried to draw it like that, it never turned out quite right, so for this project I aimed more toward cats, ’cause I’m more well-versed in drawing those quickly.

I wish I had time to throw together a blooper reel from the audio recording session we had- I have a file that is four straight minutes of my girlfriend screeching into the mic, punctuated by muffled laughter from us in the other room, and it’s just golden. She also did an excellent job trying out different voices for the alien, even if I did ultimately just end up doing the regular speaking voice for clarity. And my other voice actors were amazing as well!! The voice of Kim’s friend at the end (their actual name is Garth, but Kim just calls them G) was a friend I’ve had for years now, and I’m pretty sure this was her first time voice acting, and I’m so so proud of her. Everyone was so patient with me, even when I had them retake things they’d already done perfectly “just in case!!!!”

Writing for this also really helped me get some new perspectives for the entirety of my project! I won’t include details (spoilers :3c) but this was just very, very fun, and I’m glad I was ultimately able to pull it together.

Thanks for all the fun times, y’all!!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go catch up on some sleep.

-Amanda

WTF? Manual Head Lymph Drainage! Just watch it! You won’t regret it!!

After my hiking video, my mother in law, Val Ford approached me with this idea. Val is a massage therapist and is studying some more holistic approaches to health. In the interest of building my skills and a career in this field, I decided to take on this project. Val wanted to allow her patients a way to give themselves needed lymph drainage in between visits. Val would actually like 2 videos. One explaining lymphs and lymph drainage, and a second one that the patients can rewatch doing the routine on their own. 

There were 2 major hurdles I had to overcome. 1. How to take 2 hours of dry medical related video and cut it down to 3 min. I had to do this without losing the context of the subject and still holding your attention too. 2. My audio was real ruff. I recorded audio separately, but ended up using the camera’s audio, because there wasn’t a huge quality difference between the two. I spent hours upon hours in audition, trying to reduce the extra noise. I wasn’t able to cut out the noise without affecting the dialogue in a bad way. I ended up doing all the noise reduction in Lightroom and the rest of the audio balancing in audition. 

 I probably have a couple hours of footage. I could have easily built a 20 min video. In the constraints of our timeline, I had to really chop up the video. I had to break it down to the heart of the content. I ended up with about 35 clips worked together. This was quite the challenge! With all the cuts, I had to do my best to make the video “flow”. I used a lot of different transitions that I felt worked well with the video. I also tried to cover up as much of the video as I could with graphics that I am pretty happy with. I got all of the static images from Adobe stock on their free trial offer. The white image, with the green lymph system, and the moving arrows was put together by me using After Effects. I think this animated graphic goes along way, helping people to understand the lymph system in the head. I’m new to animation.  I’m sure you will notice when you watch my video. If I can get anyone past the title. So instead of actual animated graphics, I did what I do know how to do. Animate text. Not my first choice, but it did the job.

I hope to keep making some similar videos like this for Val. I like that it pushed me into a subject that doesn’t really interest me. I had to do what I could to make it interesting, without having a subject that most people already think is interesting. Hope you watched and enjoyed. Thanks if you did!

Slowing Down to Appreciate the Little Things

So often we get caught up in the speed of life and forget to take time to enjoy the little things. I put this video together to try to capture that concept. The first half of it is about some of the many ways we rush. The second half is about some of the wonderful things we miss when we rush – the beautiful, slow, time-taking, rewarding activities we don’t always do.

I was thinking of putting together this video in a ‘this versus that’ format, but then I changed my mind. (For example: driving versus walking, laundry machines versus a clothesline, texting versus talking in person or sending a physical letter, heating up an instant microwave meal versus making a home-cooked dinner, etc.) Brainstorming for this project sure was fun!

Even in the middle of putting together this video, I caught myself trying to speed along. Instead of getting impatient when the computer was slow, I had to remind myself to sit back and relax!

Like usual, this project had its ups and downs, but overall, I enjoyed putting it together. It was very difficult to find the video footage I wanted because strangers don’t like being videoed in the background, so I ended up getting some other shots instead. One of my siblings was especially helpful in volunteering to be in my video footage, so I really appreciate her help! Also, I used her camera for all of the videos and pictures I’ve taken for my class projects.

Like I have with all of my other projects, I used a snowball mic from the Media Checkout Counter to record my voice. Unfortunately, the audio seemed a lot fuzzier this time! I hope it wasn’t because of the specific mic I was using!

So, the moral of the story is: I encourage you to slow down and pay attention to the little things! Give someone a smile, let a ladybug crawl on your finger, and drive the speed limit for once. The world is only getting faster, so don’t wear yourself out trying to keep up with it!

For this project, I wanted to make a mockumentary based on a show that I liked however that would’ve ended up being way longer than three minutes. So I decided to re-create a cute video I made for my boyfriend on Valentine’s Day. It’s a little music video with the song called the “Way I Am by Ingrid Michaelson.” The general idea of the song is that she will do all of this stuff for the person she loves because that person accepts her for who she is and that kind of resonated with my relationship. In the original video, it was just pictures of drawings that I had done. In the new video, I wanted to clean up the drawings on illustrator and animate them through Adobe aftereffects. The reason for this is because I wanted to add a bit more movement within the video and I think I was pretty successful at that with all the animations. One thing I almost forgot upon rendering my video was that I’m not allowed to be in it. This allowed me to be a little more creative and use stuffed animals, props, as well as Photos to represent our personalities together. One thing that I loved about making this video was putting so much time into the designs made from illustrator. They may not look it but it was pretty hard to make every single pose and movement for these characters. If I were to do things differently I would probably put more time into the animation of the actual video. I think the hardest thing for me about this project was rendering everything. It took a long time to render my videos and I also had to stack other videos on top of videos from after effects to Premiere Pro. Overall I think I definitely got my point across for our little love story along with the song.

By: Kaitlynn DuBois