So this will be one of my last posts for this class. We’ve finally reached the point of our final project for my media arts class! We were allowed to do anything we wanted to, and I originally had the idea of a music video with my friend. When my friend bailed on me (that’s showbiz, kid), I was offered to team up with my friends Brian and Derek. Brian told me that they were doing a music video as well, so naturally I was intrigued. He also told me that the girl they originally were planning to use was very flaky. He said that he originally imagined me as the lead in the music video. Needless to say, I was flattered.

Once they extended me the offer to act in what was now our project, I was ecstatic. I had never had much experience acting, and was always under the impression I couldn’t. I was definitely very nervous. I was really hoping that my facial expressions could convey what we were after.

The original story that he explained to me is it’s a first person video in black & white, and it’s a guy going through his daily routine. He wakes up, gets ready for the day, meets his friends, goes to a bar, etc. It’s like he’s basically going through the motions of his life. Then he goes to a park where he used to spend a lot of time with his girlfriend. It all fades to color and she appears. He starts to reminisce what it was like to be with her. You definitely feel the tone of the vide change. Then all of a sudden, she’s gone and it changes to black and white.

He starts to walk to the bridge and he’s looking out across the water. All of a sudden, she appears again. She walks forward and takes his hand. You see clips of what it was like for them to be together. You really feel the happiness and light she brought to his life. It then fades back to black & white, he looks to his left and she’s gone. The video ends with him walking down towards the lake to convey a feeling of loneliness, which is definitely apparent. The original ending was supposed to be that you would see him pull out an urn, and it was supposed to show that it was his late girlfriend. It’s more of a tragic ending, but unfortunately the video could only be 3 minutes maximum.

There’s also one other thing I’d like to touch on. The music! The song we used (and got permission for), was “For Someone” by the band called Why? Very interesting name I thought. The song is absolutely perfect. It starts out with a strong back beat, and the way the camera is showing clips from his life is timed very well. When the female lead comes in, the song slows down and is more relaxing. I couldn’t think of a better song.

When it comes to my experience, it was so fun! It was great to walk around with Brian and Derek and see their creative minds collaborate with mine. Brian was a great director, he gave good direction and Derek gave a lot of great ideas that we used. His storyboard was impeccable! We would all throw out ideas, our creativity  definitely fed off each other. I’ve admired both of their work that I’ve seen in this class, and was so fortunate to work with them. The weather was unusual for Eugene but I definitely couldn’t complain. It was so fun to show different parts of Eugene. It was great exposure, and something I definitely want to keep doing.

Hope you enjoy!

Sincerely,

Hannah

So this will be one of my last posts for this class. We’ve finally reached the point of our final project for my media arts class! We were allowed to do anything we wanted to, and I originally had the idea of a music video with my friend. When my friend bailed on me (that’s showbiz, kid), I was offered to team up with my friends Brian and Derek. Brian told me that they were doing a music video as well, so naturally I was intrigued. He also told me that the girl they originally were planning to use was very flaky. He said that he originally imagined me as the lead in the music video. Needless to say, I was flattered.

Once they extended me the offer to act in what was now our project, I was ecstatic. I had never had much experience acting, and was always under the impression I couldn’t. I was definitely very nervous. I was really hoping that my facial expressions could convey what we were after.

The original story that he explained to me is it’s a first person video in black & white, and it’s a guy going through his daily routine. He wakes up, gets ready for the day, meets his friends, goes to a bar, etc. It’s like he’s basically going through the motions of his life. Then he goes to a park where he used to spend a lot of time with his girlfriend. It all fades to color and she appears. He starts to reminisce what it was like to be with her. You definitely feel the tone of the vide change. Then all of a sudden, she’s gone and it changes to black and white.

He starts to walk to the bridge and he’s looking out across the water. All of a sudden, she appears again. She walks forward and takes his hand. You see clips of what it was like for them to be together. You really feel the happiness and light she brought to his life. It then fades back to black & white, he looks to his left and she’s gone. The video ends with him walking down towards the lake to convey a feeling of loneliness, which is definitely apparent. The original ending was supposed to be that you would see him pull out an urn, and it was supposed to show that it was his late girlfriend. It’s more of a tragic ending, but unfortunately the video could only be 3 minutes maximum.

There’s also one other thing I’d like to touch on. The music! The song we used (and got permission for), was “For Someone” by the band called Why? Very interesting name I thought. The song is absolutely perfect. It starts out with a strong back beat, and the way the camera is showing clips from his life is timed very well. When the female lead comes in, the song slows down and is more relaxing. I couldn’t think of a better song.

When it comes to my experience, it was so fun! It was great to walk around with Brian and Derek and see their creative minds collaborate with mine. Brian was a great director, he gave good direction and Derek gave a lot of great ideas that we used. His storyboard was impeccable! We would all throw out ideas, our creativity  definitely fed off each other. I’ve admired both of their work that I’ve seen in this class, and was so fortunate to work with them. The weather was unusual for Eugene but I definitely couldn’t complain. It was so fun to show different parts of Eugene. It was great exposure, and something I definitely want to keep doing.

Hope you enjoy!

Sincerely,

Hannah

This project was a lot of fun and mostly came from experimenting with different light painting techniques as well as learning my way around Adobe Premiere. Originally I had much different plans for this project but they were still in the realms of producing a video to accompany music made by friends. Due to a series of unfortunate events I turned my focus on creating hundreds of light painting stills using different techniques and then bringing them together in premiere to produce a continuous video from the stills. I used my Nikon D3200 with stock lens to take the photos. My partner and myself had a lot of fun with the light painting shots and once we got started the ideas were coming at an incredible rate and we needed to recruit more bodies to execute them. We were able to include the kids in this process which was great fun for them although I can’t help but wonder what passing people might have thought as it may have appeared we were having our own rave in the park with a bunch of kiddos hopped up on candy canes. Some of the shots didn’t make the cut this time around because they were still a bit experimental and needed perfecting so there will definitely be more trials and perfecting to this art form in the future. I was fortunate enough to have a friend that could put down a music track relatively quickly although originally my plan was to have the video accompanied by the full band, the guitarist and Garageband worked out well. The hardest part of this project was my computer crashing in final edit and having to start the whole editing process again, thank goodness I still had all the camera shots.  I have definitely learned so much from this process in so many aspects. It has triggered an urge and desire to expand and refine in the future.

I have been playing at the idea and practice of reading cemeteries for a very long time. I was struck by the realization that, inside the given of a cultural landscape, cemeteries had neighborhoods and enclaves that were as distinct and open to interpretation as any street or cityscape. Before moving to Oregon, most of my wandering have been within cemeteries that had been established well before 1850, and the majority of Civil War headstones marked the graves of men killed during the war. That is why I was struck my the number of grave markers for Civil War veterans, most of whom were from the upper Midwest and who had died as very old men after moving to Oregon. These men and their cemetery told a much different story about Eugene and the evolution of Oregon as a whole.

When I originally envisioned this project, I   anticipated using a mix of video and stills with voiceover and text. My still photos were much stronger than my video bits, and I was getting wigged out at the amount of voiceovers I would need to record. The final project, therefore, is all stills with a lot of text. [Note: The date on the final should read 2014, and I know through doesn’t have two ts.]

By Laura Hale

I really wanted to capture the aspect of storytelling with this project, which was actually much harder with the narration than I thought it would be. I had to cut out a lot of sentences and adjust timing  and cut even further down to make the three minutes. I also had to make sure I had to keep enough information inside the story to keep its beginning middle and end as clear as I could. If I had to redo this entire project I would use a different program to record my drawings and make them more detailed. Again, it comes down to the program and what it allows you to do and what you can figure out for its abilities. Audio levels were also very important, both in timing and how loud they were coming in for, they couldn’t overwhelm the narration for the most part nor each other. Image quality wasn’t too much of an issue with this project as all of the image were digital or at least digitized through filters. Lessons learned, know certain programs a bit better and keep up to date with them.

This is my final project video “The Meet”. I was going for a mob themed short video, probably from watching too much Sopranos. This was only my 2nd video I’ve shot, the first being the P5 video. I started with trying to think up ideas and just started drawing out a story board, slowly adding frame after frame of what I wanted to happen next. I drew the storyboard up to the meeting and thought, “what if it’s not really what you think?”

The planning process was a big part of the video’s success. I had to find a time when I could get enough of my friends to fill all of the parts. One of my friends in the video lives in Portland, and the other two U of O students, so the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend was the only time I could get us all together. I used my suits for the costumes and had to get cigars and liquor for props.

Another thing was finding a place to film, a place that would be okay to smoke a cigar indoors. I ended up using a friend of one of the actor’s place. Luckily he wasn’t working that day and I used his garage as the meet setting. He was playing video games in the same garage with somebody and we had to keep asking them to be quiet without being bossy.

Another difficulty encountered was the outside lighting. I wanted to film the outdoor scenes at a dusk-like setting. Only once it started to get dark, it started to get dark really fast. I had to hurry up doing outdoor scenes and it ended up getting too dark for me to film the piano transaction scene. I had to go back to the same place the next day during while the guy who lives there was home on a work break. I hadn’t filmed the scenes of putting the keyboard in the trunk and driving away and wanted the location to be the same. I finished the drive away scene and then the same problem from the day before happened. It got dark really fast.

We started the piano transaction scene and decided to film it in the house’s driveway. It was getting dark and only one light above the front of the garage worked. I had my friend back his car into the driveway for him to open the hatch in the video and had my other friend face his car toward the garage with its lights on for more light. It wasn’t as bright as I thought it would be, but it was enough to just see what was going on. I guess they were in a dark alley or something. As soon as I finished filming the last scene I needed, I was going to suggest maybe trying it one more time when the car whose lights we were using died. We had to jump the car while it was freezing cold and dark outside while trying to hurry to get the person who lived there back to work. We got the car running, loaded up all the props in the car and were on our separate ways.

Even with all the difficulties encountered and the overall stress experienced through the process of planning and production, I had a really good time making this video from beginning to end. Its really cool to see just an idea of mine actually manifest into something that I can enjoy watching. It also helped that I filmed with people I’ve known for a long time. I am looking forward to making future videos and hope I can just get better each time.

As I’m assuming you all know, I love snowboarding. I don’t just love snowboarding because I think it’s a fun thing to do with my free time. I love snowboarding because of its general atmosphere. No matter if you’re just starting out, a pro, or simply just taking your time, no one makes fun of you for it. Everyone comes together to hope for snow. We all are out there because of one simple reason: we love it. No one makes us be there, no one forces us to spend money on a season pass, we do it because it’s what makes us happy. When something makes a large group of people happy, there is not a day when countless smiles aren’t returned. Doing something you love, with the people you love? I don’t see what gets better than that.

For this project, I started out using my GoPro. After using it, my dad took the case off to clean it and put it back in his pocket without its case, where it later broke to an unfixable degree. I ended up losing most of the footage I wanted to use, however I did record some things on my phone. Using my iPhone was the reason for this long-shot footage. I clearly forgot to ask if it was okay to use swear words in the music I used so I’m sorry for that in advance! I didn’t realize it was so bad until I had already uploaded it to YouTube!

This class has been too much fun to put into words. Going into it, I was unsure what I wanted to get out of it. Now, I get to have skills that I never would’ve learned otherwise. Thank you guys and thank you Teresa! It has been a blast!

I was not granted appropriate weather for the shots I really wanted to to get with the exception of 2 days. During which I captured 2 images of the type I most wanted the get the trees with the streaked clouds and the ocean beach. I did enjoy creating all the images time of course always being a factor. I was not able to even do all the locations I wanted to do the light painting and the burning steel wool type shots. I also really really wanted to get a hyperlapse star trails shot but no clear skies for like two weeks so no go there..but I will still be paying attention after this project and class as my interest is not just for the purposes of an assignment or class. I feel that any kind of creative work has to be a personal pursuit if one really wants to excel in this field not just photography of course but anything artistic. I think experimenting and discovering problems and obstacles then finding solutions for the things that are pursued outside the bounds of assigned or contracted (paid) work can and will serve to make you more able to attain the confidence and experience necessary to be a successful Multi Media Designer and artist of whatever particular artistic focus one chooses to pursue.

No one should be ashamed to admit they are wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that they are wiser today than they were yesterday.
Alexander Pope

To sum up my experience, is difficult. I learned so much, and Teresa Hughes inspired us all so much, while the class moved so fast that sometime  I think I my brain couldn’t contain it all. My appreciation of media as art, and art as media grew and took on a different perspective as I challenged myself to come up with what I thought was interesting imagery in my creations.

This final project started as one thing and evolved into something else… a visual collage of images that touched my heart and told my own story of how much I love my pets/animals and how I think others who have pets know that same feeling.

I tried to show how close we get to our pets and how they are the only thing on this planet that give us unconditional love, no matter what we may do to them (you know some people should not have pets, but that’s another story).

Anyway… This is how we enjoy them and how they give back without words so many messages that we are their world. I thank them for being there, everyday… and if you’re a pet owner, you do too.