Category Archives: Fall 2015

“Moonlight Night” – Trailer Coming NEVER

 

“Based on the amazing hit of Derek’s story manga of Moonlight Night. Get those feels ready for a roller coaster ride of a feeling in your heart you won’t forget.”

Basically this video is supposed to be as “if” it were a promotional video trailer to a upcoming series show or movie to come out.

Never have I came close wanting to jokingly die when working on a final’s project. This process was so time consuming for me, because I’m filling in so many 8.5 x 11 papers constantly and working almost everyday on it, the process of how I did it was more difficult then it needed to be. Sometimes I wished just killing the main heroine off right away just to end the story short to save more time, but in a trailer it would totally spoil the upcoming movie.

The story itself if from an old original story I made in 9th grade that I found and changed some things up to fit it as a trailer for my final’s project class. The story is fixated to be a romance comedy, but with a little  bit of dramatic serious moments. Due to time constants, there were many scenes I couldn’t put in, but that would possibly go past the three minute mark. I also wished the drawings were made through line art, but didn’t have time so we did a cheap way of increasing contrast from the scanned drawing and some slight cleaning up with erasing. In addition even without color, putting in some good shading and toning would have been awesome, but again no time.

I asked a week before the due date to collaborate with Jenna and working with her saved a whole lot of time for me on my part. I’m very thankful for the motivation she kept giving me and through out the process we constantly kept pushing each other and wanting to jokingly die together. Anyway I’m somewhat happy with the final outcome in a way with this project. It was a love hate relationship to the project and my story characters.

The Box – By Forrest Emery

I’ll be honest, I thought the final was due next Tuesday, so I did this project in two days, rather than in a week. Unfortunately I turned it in a bit late, however, being in a time crunch really helped me to focus on what exactly I wanted to do with my film. I had an entirely different idea going into this project, but, because of my lack of time, I had to come up with something else. My whole idea was to have a box that the viewer doesn’t get to see inside of. I thought this would provide a natural story element and a bit of intrigue. I started to storyboard and see where I could go with the idea, but I hate doing storyboards more than just about anything so I scratched it and decided to wing it. My friend and I had a blast filming this because I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do with it so the whole time we were just throwing ideas out and trying different things. Because of that approach editing was a bit of a nightmare, however, I’m really happy with what I ended up with, especially given my lack of time. My goal was to entertain the viewer with humor, mystery, and good editing, so, hopefully I achieved those things.

Check it out below!


Final Project

Despite the idea of the video being that it is difficult for me to find people to help with me out with making my final project that ended up actually being the case. It wound up being very difficult to get people to be in it and if I was able to choose a different project idea I probably would. I decided to go with the first person view point because the “story” of the project involves me and since we were not supposed to be in front of the camera for the project at all, this allowed me to execute the idea while also obeying the parameters of the project. I like the look that it wound up giving the video, having everyone speak directly into the camera added to the overwhelming rejection tone of the video.

For editing I used Windows Movie Maker because I was already somewhat familiar with it and it was able to use it at home so I would have more time to work with it. All music was found from the Free Music Archive and it was shot with the Kodak PlaySport.

Overall the project did not quite turn out as I had initially pictured it. I was hoping to have some more scenes and maybe some other people but it didn’t work out. In the end I am pleased with how it turned out, I think the initial idea still came across just not as fully  fleshed out as I was initially wanting.

 

An Unfortunate Discovery

Unlike the last assignment, this one was fun again. I got to spend time with a friend I haven’t seen in months, and I got to bring another one of my ideas/creations to life. I wish I’d had more time to access the programs, but due to other finals I didn’t have much time for editing. If I had Premier on my computer, it would definitely be better. Aside from all that, I enjoy how it turned out! For something pieced together yesterday at 6 PM, anyway. I also had a few problems with the size of the video, and I had to mess around with a few different programs to make it a manageable size (Three gigabytes for two minutes!? Curse you, RAW Photos!!).

The story follows an unfortunate young man who finds a sword, and falls under the influence of a spirit (If you wanna know more about the guy, ask me. He’s nice once you get past the demonic influence. c;) bound to it. It’s got an overall mysterious/tense feel, and ends on a cliffhanger. Maybe I’ll make a part two soon, who knows! Overall, I really enjoyed making this project, as stressful as the time crunch made it. I hope you all enjoy! <3

Homeless, but not Voiceless: IMA Final- Joey Johnson

 

This project was very edifying for me, and only is the tip of the iceberg in terms of the footage we got and the ideas it opened up.  I hope to make this into an ongoing project and to dig deeper into this aspect of our city and how to constructively help homeless/street people.

The audio is hard to hear, I turned it up as high as possible, but a lot got lost because we did not have audio equipment to make it better, but we definitely did the best we could and got the message across.  There is a little language profanity, but I feel it is relevant to the subject we were filming and adds a raw depiction of life.

I’m very proud of my courage and creativity to use this project as a way to reach out, and give a voice to a community that has more opportunity to feel powerless than empowered.  What these people need more of is resources to take their life back, and more support to stay off drugs like meth and heroin, and to be given a chance as convicted felons to find a healthy place to live and change their lives for the better.  Not all homeless and street people are in extreme addictions or past legal issues, but to find a way to provide healing and resources including a place to store belongings or take a shower and go to the bathroom could dramatically change the homeless situation in Eugene.  I believe if given the support and care that is needed, most people want to get clean, rehabilitate their mental health, and participate in the world in a way they feel proud of.  But until then, what they are most grateful for is the help they do receive, and the community they have within each other to buffer the support they may have never gotten from family or society.

Thank you for the opportunity to reach out to my home town and listen to the ones who need it the most.  Stay tuned for an extended version!


So You’re an Adult Now…

For my final project I had a few different ideas, the first one being something along the lines of Drunk History (if you haven’t seen that, youtube it. So funny.) Mostly because I’ve been binge watching it before bed every night, and I thought that would be pretty entertaining. However, apparently having a drunk person in your school video project is “not a good idea”…which…okay fine haha. My next idea fell pretty flat and I couldn’t think of a single direction to go in and I was running out of time. So that was cool.
*panic setting in*
Which made me realize: I find myself struggling sometimes, to do the most rudimental of tasks that I’m expected to excel in just because I’m no longer a 12 year old. Like paying bills on time, getting my oil changed, and wearing something other than sweatpants because “looking nice” is a thing too…oops. Whatever.
My family is always like “You’re an adult now blah blah blah” and I’m like “how many marshmallows do you think I can fit in my mouth?”

Thus, my video idea was born: life as a twenty-something year old. I wanted to really get the point across that having everything together, although is expected of you after a certain age, isn’t always the case. In fact it’s almost never the case. I still think I deserve a gold star whenever I can successfully cook dinner without setting the fire alarm off…seriously, I have to take it off the wall and hide it under my comforter before I cook anything. I can French Press coffee like a boss though! *gold star*

So you’re an “adult” now…what does that even mean?

Washington-Jefferson Skatepark Video

For my Image Editing project, I returned to my roots of skateboard documentation. For about a ten year period during and after high school, about 1998-2008, I did a lot of skateboard photography, and was very serious about it. My ex-wife and I self-published a small skateboard magazine, and I still have a lot of equipment for shooting good skateboard photographs on 35mm: a long lens, a 15mm fisheye, and two flashes with radio slaves and tripods.

So, for this project, I decided to see what I could get at Washington-Jefferson skatepark. I worked at Tactics Boardshop 2007-2009, so the first things I did were shoot some of my friend Scott Garrettson and contact a couple people who helped me get into contact with Caleb Grant, who is sponsored by Tactics. Once I was shooting with Caleb, a few other people who were there asked me if I wanted to shoot with them too. I also ran into AJ Liu, who had worked at Tactics with me when I was there. I shot for 4-5 hours between two days, and had a lot of fun.

So, then I had to edit all the footage I shot, which took several hours, well over the 4-5 hours I took to shoot the footage. First I had to get to know the software a bit, which took a long time because of the computer problems we were having. Then, I really wanted to try to imitate some of the techniques I’ve seen in other skate videos, because I’ve really enjoyed a lot of the editing I’ve seen in skate videos over the years, like having all or most of the tricks land right on beat and having quick clips of B-roll edited well to the music between the tricks and in the spots where it says the skater’s names. I was able to accomplish some of what I wanted to do, but I definitely did not have the time to get it anywhere close to perfect.

Besides the editing, a lot of the shots are not framed exactly how I would want them, a few of them are shakier than I would like, and there were a few problems with the audio track. The song is “The Station” by Richie Cunning, from the album Night Train. I got permission from him to use his music for non-commercial purposes.

5 Ways to Get the Girl

So with this project I actually had several other ideas in mind, but I only had the camera for a limited amount of time, and my roommate was only available for one night so I had to do some improvising. So this “How to Find a Nice Girl” idea was a spur of the moment idea that we came up with while we were talking about one of our friend’s having some dating issues. All I really knew was that I wanted to incorporate some form of light-hearted humor. We needed a second actor for this, seeing as we needed a “girl” to be pursuing, but since I only had my one roommate, and it was made abundantly clear that I was not allowed to be in it, we used a random mask we had laying around. So hopefully the point was still able to get across even though one of the characters was literally just a piece of decorative plastic. So extra kudos to my lovely roommate, Stephanie, for being such a good sport! I’m not great at the whole “filming” thing and I was having some little difficulties with the camera going randomly in and our of focus even though it was on a tripod, and it was picking up the color kind of weird and I wasn’t quite sure how to adjust the white balance from premier. So there’s definitely lots of room for improvement but overall I had a lot of fun filming this project and we had a lot of good laughs trying to make this work. I almost wish I could have included a blooper real because there were some seriously funny things going on behind the scenes.

5 Things to do with Your Hands

 

For this project I decided to do something funny, as compared to my last assignment. I got a lot of inspiration from HowToBasic, a very odd and NSFW YouTube channel. I really find this type of absurdist humor to be hilarious, like Tim and Eric, or the Eric Andre Show. It did not take long to shoot this at all, and I left the camera in one spot to give it a ‘How-To’ feel. The most difficult part was probably adding and cutting the music, which I did in Audacity. It was really fun to create a little space in my room to shoot, and I am grateful that the Multimedia Department has awesome equipment for me to borrow! I hope you enjoy my short!

P5 Image Editing

Well, in this video I really wanted to talk about character creation. It’s what I want to do so I figured 5 tips for character creation was appropriate. I couldn’t really make a finished picture with how much time I had (plus research took a while- I’d never drawn armor before) but then again, concept art is supposed to be rough and quick until you get an idea to run with. I used a generic knight of the Order for my personal Jade Project series. The Order formed when five Paladins were exiled from their affiliation with the peacekeepers. Those five exiles formed the Hand, the leaders of the new Order who consist of Mundane non magic users. They enhance their abilities with technology to keep up with the Arcane people who dominate the land, and hunt them down. There’s some backstory, I promise it’s cooler than it sounds. I’m for sure going to change the design on this guy later…

Yes, I went 8 seconds over the limit. But I had so many things to say give me a break. I had to cut out an entire minute of other information already. These are just really basic tips that I hardly talk about, each point alone deserves much more elaboration. I tried Premier but I learn software very slowly, so I went back to After Effects for this video. My computer quit on me a few times while using the screen capture software, that was annoying but it worked in the end.

By far the most time consuming thing was syncing up the different screen capture clips and messing with making them sped up. Also opacity.

I can say that I’m pretty happy with how the video came out, dismal voice work and all. 5 was an interesting prompt and as usual, the first thing that came to mind was character creation.