Well I’m glad the turn in date finally got here because I have been working on this for weeks and it still felt like crunch time at the end. I sat and edited audio until 11 am which I told myself was my deadline and had to export. I had a lot of fun shooting this with my daughters. The staff at Mama Mayra’s Kitchen were so nice and friendly and helpful. There was a slight language gap but they worked with us and we got it done without disturbing the other customers. I filmed all of the girls shots in one afternoon. They were all starving when we finally got in because it took over an hour to get everything setup and the outside shots done before it was to dark or started to rain. I had to go back 2 other times in in order to get all the shots I wanted after I started editing and putting it together. I did another filming at home to get the interviews because I didn’t want to try and do it in the restaurant. I recorded the audio in the mic directly on to my computer and did the filming on my camera but when I started trying to match the 2 in all the different cuts I realized that the way I was doing couldn’t be the way. So, I ended up just using the audio from the camera and made it work. I can’t wait to learn how to put it all together.
This is the final project for my Introduction to Media Arts class, but hopefully with effort, not the last post I make for my blog. This project was a challenge, the kind that pushed me and I had some success with this project because of lessons I learned from my first project, and there were also some mishaps and new lessons to learn from this time around too. Overall I was able to convey a fun little story that I enjoyed making and I hope, makes sense.
I’m sitting down in class and the teacher, Teresa Hughes, puts a three page guideline for making a film on the desk. Add that to the list, I think. I had several projects in various stages going on for all of my classes, and since I’m in the Media Arts program, there’s no big test at the end of the semester or mid-terms but sizable creative projects. While juggling these projects I was dealing with a problem, What am I going to work on first? After a week or two of thinking about it and that not working, I set a timer to come up with as many ideas as possible for this project, then a timer to write on each idea to find the most workable story. With the best ideas I set a timer to flesh out each of the couple of good ideas I had. Out of that short process I had a story to work with.
Pre Production was demanding, I hadn’t written a story in several years because I didn’t think I’d know how to. I used one of the Production work days in class to come up with a storyboard, using ideas and feedback gained from another class to make my storyboarding process more fruitful. The class was called “Concepts of Visual Literacy”. What I did differently in storyboarding here versus my first film was give the characters more facetime and setup, action and reaction shots, where we see the character look at someone or something, look through their eyes to what they do or are looking at and then see their face again to see what we are supposed to feel. With the subject of my film containing a sense of urgency, it was very important to capture the feeling of each character and look into their emotional experience.
Since I put off writing the story so long, I also had to work very quickly to find talented actors and fortunately I was able to work with family friends young Emily and Andrew and a couple of adult classmates Melia and Malakhai, everyone did excellently beyond my expectations! Thank you.
Behind the scenes were lots of laughs and funny moments because most of us were new to either being in front or behind the camera. Other important pre production aspects to keep my mind on was keeping the people who helped me happy to work with me. I bought food, tried my best to keep them warm and give as clear directions as possible as well as have as clear of an idea of who their characters were supposed to be and the story as possible so my actors were not performing blindly. Nevertheless, some of the best moments were from unexpected improvisation in the way they decided to convey the emotion or reaction I was looking for.
There is so much more I want to say about finding the location and losing wallets and finding unexpected surprises we found on the set at the river, or how I forgot my SD card at home and had to borrow one from the young actors’ dad. Thank you. But here is a little bit on my post production process:
From feedback on my first film from a panel of film critics I learned that sound is very important, if not more important than what you see on the camera. Stitching the shots together was a fairly straightforward and quick process compared to finding royalty-free sound effects and music, and then cutting these sounds together to make sense with what was happening on the screen. I’m grateful to the artists and nameless faces out there that created these clips for people doing creative work to use in their product. I’m no pro but the audio in this film is a step up from what I’ve done before. I learned a lot about basic audio from Mel Stark, my “Time-based Tools” professor and audio engineer and Teresa.
I’m looking forward to experiment with another film project soon, it won’t be my first time.
For my final project in Intro to Media Arts, I decided to follow up on the last project I did. Using my light board and art supplies I created a stop motion short film. The film was made using transfer paper, pens, pencils, and erasers. I started my project with the idea of having a girl ironing a shirt. Her cat walks up and meows, but she ignores her. The cat jumps onto the ironing board, the girl tells her to get down, then bends down to the floor. The cat then jumps down and walks between her legs and boops her nose. I struggled so much with the proportions of an ironing table and when I was done with my thumbnails, I realized it was way too long. I got rid of most of the project, and just did the end scene. Though I love drawing, Repeating the process can be a bit tiring, and repetitive. I also am not used to drawing cartoon animals so my cat drawing was a bit funky.
One of my favorite parts about this project was finalizing it. After the meticulous drawings were finished, I shot images, credits, and the Title. Setting up the camera and quickly taking shots is very fun for me. When I imported them into premiere, I found myself extremely bored again editing the timing of the images. As soon as I was done I added some music and felt rather content with my project.
Ive always wanted to record my art and have it be shown in a fun way. Im excited so say I finally got to do it, and that I wasn’t unimpressed with my work. If I would have given myself more time and supplies, I think that I could make a much more put together piece. Thankyou for watching, I hope you enjoyed it.
For my final project I decided I would do something goofy with the word game “Mad Libs”. The video is a collage of video, audio and still images. The Mad Libs story I have chosen is about about the concept of “home sweet home”. The music track is a homemade version of the song “Home on the Range”.
The funnest part of this project was getting together with two of my friends to record the music for the video. I have not recorded music in a very long time so this was exciting for me. I purposely applied static to the music file to replicate the sound of a very old recording. The end result of the music track does not sound like our original recording, but had to be stretched out to full-fill the minimum time limit for the project and to fit with the voice recordings. The music track was originally cut in my friends basement recording studio, and afterwards I ran it through Audition before adding it to the video.
The video that I used was shot with my Elph camera. I used Eugene Skinner’s cabin as the major image for the classical rustic ideal of what “home sweet home” is and to match with the old time feel of the music track. The other images were taken from Google images and spiced into the video.
I admit, some of the audio and video transitions are a little rough. Such is life for a beginner in the media arts. I just keep faith that as time continues I will improve with all of the new tools that I am learning to work with.
It was fun being in a introductory class with a diverse group with many different creative influences. I look forward to seeing everyone next term!
Roller derby is so much more than throwing elbows and wearing fishnets. Within a derby team there is so much community and passion. Through this video I had hoped to demonstrate that very notion. Getting ahold of the Emerald City Rollers was super easy, yet I never actually expected a reply. Within a day after contacting them through Facebook I was able to get in touch with their social media gal. She informed be days, times, and locations I could get some good filming. That very Saturday I was able to go out and film a bout (a game). I was there for a good two hours, and sadly because of my poor filming had very little useable footage. I showed up with two Gopros, a T5i, and no tripod. I thought I was recording the whole thing on the Gopro, and didn’t realize I wasn’t until I brought it to class, and I only had a few two second videos. I didn’t use a tripod so footage on the T5i was incredibly shaky and unusable. In the end the majority of my video is footage from the very last day of shooting. I filmed and interviewed the Emerald City’s recreational team (T-rec) at one of their last practices of the season. It was super awesome to actually interact with the players and hear some of their stories.
I came into this project with too high of expectations and I let myself down. I think my message and overall idea was in the right place for an interesting project. I just don’t think I carried it out fully how I wanted to. My participants were so awesome and gave me such great content. I just don’t feel like I gave them justice. At the bout I was only a spectator and couldn’t really interact with players. I wouldn’t want to take their focus out of the game anyways. It was the same kind of feeling at their practice. I didn’t want to impose or distract or make anyone uncomfortable with the camera. Because of my shyness and the feeling of being an inconvenience I feel as if my project came out flat. Almost every clip in my video was from the same spot. I wish I could have been more creative with my shots without distracting the players. In a year or so when I am on the team I’d like to try this project over again with more creative and dynamic shots. hopefully next time I will be a participant and not a spectator.
In the end I am happy I constructed my project from a topic close to my heart. I’m happy I ended up footage to work with, and I’m excited to have made the contact with this team and get to join up with them in January.
This video is inspired by a time that I went to go play basketball. Sometimes, the urge to go play basketball and get outside is so strong that I have forgotten to even bring a basketball. Then, my only hope is to hope that someone is already there playing so I can use theirs.
Ironically, that is the thesis for this video. I wanted to make something that I relate to while also making something that is a little weird and funny and odd.
To walk to a basketball court without a basketball is quite obviously not the best move, but to get to the basketball court and by chance find a ball of any kind, you are most likely to make do with what you have at hand at the time.
I decided to use my friend Jacob for this role because he also knows the feeling of wanting to play basketball while simultaneously not having all the resources, and making do with what he can find on a given court.
A sense I would strive to give a viewer through this video is relatibility, as well as a sense of can-do and make-do attitude.
My personal favorite part of this video is my post-production and continuity of the edits.
For my final project I wanted to do another stop motion. This time, though, I was determined to get the green screen to work. In addition to that I was to stray away from the idea of using a green screen and to create an actual set for the scene. I also wanted to play around with some other things that would be new to me.
As far as the green screen goes, I think I had a success. This time around I had a broader knowledge about lighting and I had more lights to work with. That, mixed with a new technique I came up with made the green screen work out. The technique was that I glued together two small cardboard boxes and also glued green paper to it. This acted as a stand for the spaceships in order to raise them from the ground. This meant there would be less shadows in the shot. All in all the green screen worked great. There were definitely times where some shadows appeared that I didn’t expect or even see until editing. The same goes for green reflections onto white figures.
The scene with five clone troopers is actually six different sources all composited together. The background was one source. One of the other ones was the green clone trooper. The four was just one action figure that I used over and over again to make it look like four different people. That whole technique was very fun to put together. Going into the project I had never thought that I would have done that.
For my actual set that I had I used VHS tapes as the walls on floor. I printed off a backdrop of the inside the ship they were on. I cut out the windows and glued green paper to the back. I ended up using some green screen here even though I intended to not do so. I just wanted it to feel more accurate, so I made the windows show outer space.
In this project I created all of my sound effects. I used a snowball mic. For the last project I used creative commons sound effects. This was the first time I created my own. That was interesting. For instance, the ship sounds is just my trucks engine running. The music I did use was from a creative commons source.
The last new thing I tried was having voice talents. In total there were four voice actors. I was one of them. This was my first time having to direct someone other than myself to get what I wanted. That was a really neat experience to see how they thought about things compared to how I did. There were definitely some minor last minutes script changes that were suggestions to me that overall made the video better.
For my final project I wanted to do something that brought attention to a larger cause or situation, but i also had to tell a story and keep it under three minutes. for days i wondered what i would go with when i remembered my girlfriends brother had passed away under terrible circumstances. after asking for her permission to bring light to his situation and final days, i had found the story i wanted to tell.
having met her brother Chris only a few times before i had a bit of creative trouble on what was going to be included in the story. i wanted it to be emotional but educational about how not all homeless people are the same but at the same time a project the his sisters and family would find a suitable tribute that defined him.
I went out to find actors for my live footage and shot many different dialogs and interactions. mostly surrounding A typical assumptions around homeless people. it wasnt until after Chris’ sisters gave me photographs of him through out his life to use that the real picture of what my story was going to look like came together.
at first i wanted the project to be all film shots but after adding the pictures i knew that it was going to have to snap away from the beginning to end narrative. there was plenty of shots as him as a kid and i wanted to add those to humanize him and remind the audience that every one was a kid at some point.
I regret not adding more about how he was a homeless youth before he was a homeless adult but also a lot of my original film shots included his stories of what he did do with his life. He did alot of odd jobs, traveled more than most people i know and had an impressive story about being in a homemade airplane a random encounter made and flew back to Oregon from one of the center states. that part would have been great to put in because it reminds people just because you see a person on the streets acting stagnant and unmotivated doesnt mean they havent lived fulfilling and exciting lives.
Over all it was a very motivating project to work on and I wish i had more than three minutes to tell the story. there are many lessons to be learned from the events of his life and it was heart breaking going through his old photos knowing how it all ends.
I was trying to bring awareness to three campus resources with this project. They are the food pantry, clothing stash and the snack shack. The food pantry gives free food to all lane students with a busy Thursday. (restocking/lots of people) the clothing stash gives free clothing to students for up to 5 items per student per week. The clothing stash is at the basement of center building. The snack shack sells snacks and drinks at a decent price. The snack shack and the food pantry are in building 1 room 201. These three resources can make someone’s day when money is a little tight or even more affordable in price for a lot of students. I believe every student should know about these three resources as soon as possible so they can utilize them a lot sooner instead of stressing on clothing or food. The snack shack offers free coffee on opening week, Wednesday’s and finals week. Its something for the students who drink coffee or need the coffee.(hahaha) I have known these resources for along time and find them very useful and a great set of people that work at these places. These jobs are held by work-studies which they work to earn money (in financial aid package) instead of taking loans.
Have you ever let dreams fall to the wayside? Maybe life has hit unexpectedly, and you find yourself not where you thought you’d be. Maybe you always had that dream and are waiting for the right circumstances to make that dream a reality. Regardless of whether you let your dreams die or are waiting for them happen, I want to let you know that I am familiar with that feeling all too well. In fact, I am at a place where I am starting to let my dreams fly again and think purposefully along the lines of what it will take to make those dreams more and more my reality.
Back in high school, I went to a job shadow for graphic design and I let some elements of that interview scare me into not pursuing design as a career. I pursued Accountancy instead, thinking that my introverted self would like to sit at a desk and record transactions. How wrong was I? I went back to school to give graphic design that chance. And it has been the most amazing, frustrating, and rewarding decision of my life. Before graduating, I was given opportunities that I found recently are leading me to be the design entrepreneur I have once dreamed of. It both excites me and scares me. Yet that fire is starting to be rekindled. And things are falling into place that are becoming stepping stones towards that dream.
