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.

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.

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!

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.

   I was ecstatic to find out that we were going to be moving onto video production. I’ve always wanted to learn how to edit & sync videos with audio because I have endless ideas for shortfilms and parodies.
I did turn this in after the due date, but I am so much happier at what I accomplished with that extra time. Not only did I further the quality of my project, but I also increased my knowledge and skills in video production ( for which i am grateful that I stuck with it). If I turned it in when it was due, I would not have pushed myself to learn these tools. 

So a couple of the things I said in the video were actually ideas I was thinking of doing. “Five things wrong with The Battle of Five Armies” was a main runner-up/legit idea I was thinking of doing until I was told we had to shoot our own footage.  The main idea I wanted to do was actually the five headbands idea, that being a ripoff   reference to AFRO SAMURAI; the only issues why I didn’t do it was because I do not have more than two friends…..*sobs silently*…

For any of those curious on the backstory of the headbands, basically if you have The Number One Headband you’re immortal. No one can challenge #1 except the person who has The Number Two headband; with anyone being able to  challenge #2. So I was going to extend it to five headbands and well you get the idea. http://afrosamurai.wikia.com/wiki/Number_One_Headband

TL;DR – I struggled to execute the ideas I had, learned some new things and glad I stuck with it. 

Things I learned how to do with this project:
-Fade Video in/out
– Syncing audio with video
– Adding reverb or “thinking effect” to the voice
– I learned some copyright laws and the extension o the creative commons license.

Issues that I encountered:
– Scaling/Framing/Cropping: Most of my footage did not match, my phone decided to live its own life and switch from Horizontal to Vertical point of view mid-recording, so I spent most of my time finding out how to fix that.
– Stabilizing Audio was a problem as always.

               By Kendrick Taylor

This project was extremely difficult in my opinion, but I’m too dumb enough to come with a simpler concept of portraying what 5 means to me. The infinite of possibilities I could have done and so many easy ones I could have accomplished to save more time so I could use it to work on more important things.

Throughout this video the main character get’s paranoid of seeing and hearing the number 5 everywhere. Basically this video was supposed to be the main character was dreaming and then she wakes up from it, but ends with a plot twist of is she really still dreaming still? The story was only half finished due to time constraint and slight technical difficulties. In addition, I had always been drawing and visualizing in my mind how scenes should be played out, but doing it physically was way more difficult than what I originally thought. Being new to all this took at least 6 hours of doing the recording procedure in one day to only get 2 fine minutes of what I wanted. Although that shouldn’t matter, because the video would have been way past the 2 minute requirement for this project so I guess I’m happy in the end I met the criteria of the work.

Although at heart I feel empty that in a way my original plan was not finished and I tried so hard and been trying to get to that end goal, but I hope now that my next video recording will go more smoothly. Be it finishing it completely or finishing more progress with a lot less time consumed.

Super fun time making this video. I was a little rushed but, I think it makes the video even better. I did all post editing in imovie and found my sound on youtube. The music in the video I do not own but, I do provide list of copyrighted material in the film in the end credits. This was a good experience and I found that I am still a little rusty with managing sound levels as you can probably tell the audio is a little static. Overall, this was a fun project and look forward to making more short videos. I really like the idea of having a time limit on these kind of projects it really forces you to be creative and to use your environment and what you already know in regards to editing and creating. This video was shot on a Canon T5I. The location was my house and my drive to school.