Project Evaluation

Personally I am happy about the finished video, as it's been a while since I've done any editing, so I think I've done a pretty good job doing it. I've also learned more about it, for example - how to deal with colour correction. It might not be perfect, but it's way better than the original footage.

I've chose this commission because I wanted to get some practice operating the camera which I did and got some really nice close ups of people. I really enjoyed the production, even though we were a bit late (apparently leaving 2 hours early wasn't enough) and didn't get all the shots we planned to, ran out of memory and Michael wasn't feeling well. Aside from all of those hiccups I had fun filming the conference and was excited to get back to editing. Where I actually looked through the footage and saw some really nice pull focus shots. Some I wish I could have used the tripod for some of the shots, but it was difficult to move around the tight conference room space without knocking people or squeezing them to the walls.

The first rough cut was us trying to actually make something as we didn't have much of a plan, except that it will be a montage and that we are going to use fun music to cut to so the whole event looks so much more fun than it actually was. It was dragged out and didn't deliver the message we wanted to tell with it.

The next few cuts were trying to fix it, make it more about the theFIRM rather than the Hatfields and then after hearing feedback and rethinking everything, we came up with a brilliant idea and used writing on the screen to make the message clearer and straight to the point. It shortened our video by almost a half, but it's much MUCH more better and more interesting.

The other thing I found really hard to do was cut to the music, because the first time I listened to the song I didn't listen through all of it and didn't know it gets crazier and then calmer at the end. And I didn't realise how hard it would be to cut to it. Pretty sure there's a lot of missed notes in the finished piece but I tried my best and learned an important lesson to actually listen through the whole song before using it. Personally I think the song itself fits there well, it's just that I overestimated my abilities.

Comments

DIRECTIONS

The magic 2 every director has to think about is: 1) what's in front of the camera 2) where's the camera positioned. It's important to read the script and break it down to questions: How? - style, mise-en-scene, mood. Who? - cast, crew, collaborators. Where? - locations, set. What? - production, costume, sound design, editing. Key director moments: How you pesent the character. Where you set the story. How you position the light. How you edit the story (rhythm, tone, mood). For our first Directions unit lecture we had to get into groups and have a go at directing a short scene. I found it to be very difficult to direct my DP instead of handling it myself. I ended up with a lot of spare shots I didn't need or couldn't use (mainly because it was hard to get the ball of paper to land into the bin) but the end result didn't disappoint me.

Camera workshop (coverage)

In one of our camera workshops we learned about the importance of coverage. It doesn't matter that in the end we won't use all of the footage and maybe even end up using just few shots, it's important to have multiple shots from diferent angles so that we would have options while editing. During the workshop we had two exercises. One of which was "The Chair": It ended up being pretty short video and I ended up not using half of the footage I got for it. For next exercise we were given scripts and had to interpret it in our own way. While editing I wished I would have filmed few more close up shots and to have actually filmed the whole scene from fixed camera positions.

Studio Idea

Personally, I found it really difficult to come up with an interesting studio production idea. But because "one idea is not enough" (Brown and Duthie, 2010) I came up with 3 initial ideas: 1) Guess the song type of game show, but instead of guessing pop songs, the contestants would have to guess classical music. I got this idea from a game my friends and I loved to play and the way my music teacher used to test my class. 2) Travel guide about how to make the most of your trip, places worth visiting and places that are overrated and not worth your time. I got this idea from my sister who travels a lot and from the way she does loads of research about each and every place she visits. 3) Debate/Game show where 2 groups of people debate about nerdy topics ( whats better Marvel or DC, which Doctor was the best etc.). The idea comes from noticing how much rivalry there is between comic book lovers and overall 'nerds'. I feel like this idea is the stronge...

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