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.