Most of my favorite movies have plots that sound completely stupid on paper, but have a nearly perfect execution that makes them profound. I figured I would take a shot at something like this when I’m young and no one cares. So I decided to make a surreal (and thankfully exaggerated) video about my experience doing VFX in blender. I started with recording most of the live action stuff first, then doing some screen capture with shadowplay. About a third of the way through I had to re-format my hard drive to avoid a major computer catastrophe. Nearly giving me a heart attack and wasting almost a full day of my time. I spent more time than I expected to on editing because I wanted to emulate the heavily edited montage like style of directors like Guy Ritchie.
Category Archives: Fall 2020
Audio p4 Quinn
In typical Quinn Brown fashion I got in WAY too over my head for this project. At the beginning I knew I wanted to read a passage from an HP Lovecraft story so I chose to read from “The Festival” because of it’s descriptiveness and the fact that it’s one of his more underrated short stories. The story is about a young drifter who returns to the town of his ancient ancestors, but when curiosity gets the better of him he’s ensnared in a dark ritual known only as the festival. The first major problem that I encountered was the fact that the scene described in the paragraph I chose is meant to be almost completely silent. This meant that I had to try my best with simulating the ambiance of the scene by making it sound like a large group of people quietly walking past the listener. I’m not completely happy with the result but I should have known from the start that it would be hard for someone with as little experience as me to mix a scene like this.
The Man and The Gem
https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/1144715401%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-6BE9JljaG9l&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=true Logan Habib · P4 Audio Story
I very much enjoyed creating this project and learning the process’s behind audio editing. Getting the hang of Audacity took some time, but after I was able to get down the basic editing tricks, I had a blast. There are still some mistakes in this project that I wish I knew how to fix but, even though there are things I wish I could change, I still take victory in the small learning experiences. Trying to master editing my voice was the hardest challenge. The videos provided this week were a big help though and I was able to learn about noise reduction and noise profiles and apply that knowledge to my project.
I also really enjoyed freesounds.org. There were so many cool sounds that I could pick upload to my project. It took me hours to pick what sounds I wanted to use to set the scene. I tried to understand the characters emotions in each part of my story so I could try to pick the best fitting music for each part of the story. Its got more of a dark or eerie tone in terms of music.
Overall, I truly enjoyed the experience with audio editing and maybe I will try to practice it more on the side because I liked it a lot. Once again, I hope the audio comes through ok for everyone listening!! It was a challenge to eliminate all background noise.
Riddles!
By: Quinn Brown
THE JOY IS IN THE JOURNEY
For this final project, I thought it would be nice to do a simple, feel good short film. I wanted to be able to tell a story and teach a lesson all while avoiding dialogue. In its earliest form, the video was intended to be quite a bit longer, with a sort of running narrative of the main character seeming troubled, before deciding to go for a walk, and finding that his worries melt away as he experiences the world around him. The story would have climaxed with the character winding up at a house, and going to knock, before hesitating, and ultimately walking away. This version of the video never came to fruition, however, due to help constraints, time constraints, and a myriad of technological difficulties. On the last note in particular, I feel that the saying, “When it rains, it pours,” is especially accurate. The final product had to be edited in iMovie, as the Premier software would not properly export the files. Despite it all, however, I believe that I accomplished what I set out to do, alibet, on a far smaller scale. The video ends with the main character sneaking his way through the foliage of the dormant rose bushes to finish his walk, a shot that I feel sums up the video nicely, and helps make the viewer more receptive to the title shown at the end of the video: The Joy Is In The Journey.
In addition to this scene layout, I placed the main character in vintage clothing to evoke the feeling that this character has been traveling for a long time. The song that underlines the whole song, Grandpa’s Watch, By David Phillips, was also specifically chosen to evoke a sense of calm and nostalgia towards the production. Phillips use of gentle chimes and constant rhythm provide a driving force for the travel seen on screen, without being overly persistent or forceful.
Over all, though my original plans did not pan out, I am pleased that i could maintain the main core idea with mu limited resources and luck. I think that I actually prefer this shorter version, so perhaps this is simply a blessing in disguise.
F20-P5 Dolphins and a Surprise in Costa Rica
So, this is the story of my adventure swimming with the dolphins in Costa Rica when it was still legal to swim with them there in the wild. I decided to take an adventure by myself and it has been my favorite trip in my lifetime. Being a Travel Agent for many, many years I have been to many places and I still remember this trip like it was yesterday. The adventure began with an adventure. I hope you can follow along as if you were in my shoes. From Boston to Drake Bay was the first part of the adventure. I had to overnight in San Jose then off in a cessna for about 30 min, to a van through the banana fields down to the river. Then down the river for 1 1/2 hours to the ocean where we travel to Drake Bay, my home for the next 10 days. The next morning began the next adventure with a wonderful surprise at the end! There were many days we swam with the dolphins, but this was a once in a lifetime experience!
You should believe everything you hear about the dolphins they are the most magical, playful, inquisitive, and charming animals that you can ever interact with. I was so close to them while swimming, that I could reach out and touch them and they were not bothered in the least by my presence. This is only one story of my adventures swimming with the dolphins.I hope that everyone has the chance to go swim with them, you will not be disappointed! 
This whole process was harder than I thought. There are things that I like and other things that I was really annoyed with. I had my story in mind. I had previously taken the Visual Literary class where I had already had a storyboard all laid out. I enjoyed looking for footage to match my experience. When trying to put this together I got the sequence but it was very long. It took a while to cut out stuff to keep this under 3min. I pieced together pictures with videos from my personal archives as well as some videos from the lodge Delfina Amore, and some free stock footage.
For the technical. I had a few issues I’m not sure if it’s just my computer, but Adobe kept locking up and then crashing. It was very frustrating and time-consuming. This was especially difficult when trying to narrate it. At times the program would not record then it would, again frustrating. I just took it out. I was also confused on how to get everything all the same size. With practice… it will come. I wish that there were more in-person instructions on how to do these.
P5 Final
Landon Coleman MUL 101
The title of my movie is called, “The Technological Error”. I was going for a PSA style video that showcases the addiction to cellphones. I think that it has an intensity that is captured well and shown thoroughly. People these days use technology heavily and it is almost essential to have a phone at this point. I wanted to basically test my workflow and see if I could do the work that I imagined. I wanted to use all the software that I had learned this year including Audition, Premiere Pro, and After Effects. I also wanted to use my camera to take the video since I had only used an iPhone to record before. Trying all these things required me to learn many things like how to videotape using a real camera, how to do certain edits in Premiere Pro, and how to create text animations in After Effects. This project proved to be a challenge and there was a learning curve for sure. Everything took longer than I planned and nothing went as I expected. My girlfriend was a huge help in this project and I want to thank her for being a great actor. As for the things that I enjoy about this project, I really loved the outcome once the music was added. I think the music is at a perfect audio level to carry the viewer through and bring a higher understanding of the characters’ emotions. I think I demonstrated how much life can revolve around something as small as a phone. My main goal is for even one person to have some extra motivation to get up and go outside and take a break from technology.
Final Project: Seasons
by Jeff Pagano
As it turns out my final project is a bit different than I’d originally envisioned. I’d started with the idea of watching YouTube tutorials to learn some extra cool transition effects, but I ran into a detour. I swerved, but still learned a lot by putting this together.
I’ve changed the name from “Transitions” to “Seasons” because I feel that would be more understandable to the viewer. It turns out I had some interesting video on my iPhone that I could use. And I know traffic isn’t a season, but it thought I could squeeze it between Spring and Summer and the segment turned out so cool and was so much fun to put together I couldn’t leave it out.
One final note: I’m big on sound design (or so I’ve recently learned) and I found my ambient sound effects were a distraction, so I muted that channel before exporting.
Enjoy!
‘Gloves’- A Silent Film
This project ended up taking a very different turn than I had expected. Originally, I was planning on creating a serious chase scene, before providing a comedic break in the very last scene. I had to pivot a little bit after reviewing the shots from the shoot. The lack of a tripod or a good camera (other than my phone camera) made the shots much more difficult to create in the way that I had imagined. For one it was very difficult to keep a still frame without a tripod. No matter what, the angle of the camera will always shift enough to noticeable throw off the frame. For another, the rapidly encroaching darkness brought a lot of grain to several of the shots.
I had decided to plan the shoot right before the sun started to go down, so that I could have the growing darkness coincide with the escalation of events in the film. What I hadn’t anticipated, was how hard it was to correct the phone camera for low light. Even when I brought the lighting up in the darkest of shots, they appeared much more grainy. I had been expecting some grain to show up, though I didn’t think it would be quite so bad.
These difficulties resulted in a lower overall quality of the shots than I had hoped for and it led to a choppy narrative. To correct this, I decided to instead go for a comedic tone for the whole film. Editing was crucial in changing the narrative, and I was able to (hopefully) flip this project into a slightly more successful one.
Thanks for watching!
Gabriel Martinez
Alex Starke Final Project: Short Tales
For this project, I wanted to create a trailer/promo for my book of eight short Sci-Fi/Fantasy stories, Short Tales. Previously, I had done a few promos for my other book, Thor’s Travels: The Adventures of an American Jack Russell Terrier in Europe, but they were mainly slideshows of photos with a music background. For Short Tales I decided to incorporate some B-roll video, outlandish images, and some composite creations. A lot of time was spent choosing what I thought would work in respect to video and images–always fun doing though. Being as how this would be a short trailer/promo, without interviews or actors, I worked the project like a real-time story board as I progressed along. Putting it all together in Premiere Pro was a fun challenge, I had to remember a lot of what I had forgotten about the program, but once I got in a groove it all started to come back. Then there is always the music, for something like this it had to be motivating and upbeat. I spent hours listening to differing tracks, then trying them in the video until I felt I had found the right choice. Creating titles and adding a bit of animation to them took some time as well, but I enjoyed spending the time doing this aspect of the project
In the end, I feel the whole thing has come together pretty well, though I probably could have spent a lot more time on refinements. I am never totally satisfied with my creations, I feel there is always room to make them better, but one has to move on to the next thing at some point and let their baby go. The book itself is available on Amazon, in both paperback and Kindle form. Sometime in the future, I may also do an audible version as well. I also have another book in the works that I hope to have done in the next year, we’ll see, but in the meantime Denali online will be showcasing one of the stories from the work in progress, Welcome Home, Daniel, in December. I hope you’ll check it out.