A product of the Alt Ending video assignment:

Thoughts

This post-apocalyptic film is fairly grotesque and captures the violence behind survival. Few people are your friends, and even friends kill each other when one is exposed to the virus and turning. The concept of family is one of the most prevalent motifs seen throughout the film. The small groups of survivors stick together as a family unit, fighting for each other. When they all run into the soldiers, the soldiers turn on them for the promise of family, in a way. The violence that’s shown behind the defense and acquisition of family serves to juxtapose these two concepts, as “family” often carries the notion of innocence with it. It all shows the struggle of survival.

Our take on the alternative ending hyper-focuses on the innocent portion of family. What if everything was just fine all of a sudden? Low chance that would happen, so we accentuate the ridiculousness of it.

Hello everybody! This week I was able to watch the movie “28 Days Later”.

To be completely honest, I absolutely hate zombie movies. Like really hard. So this movie, with its pseudo infected/zombie, was not my jam. However, I did like the story behind it and the premise of the infected having “pure rage”.

One random scene that really stuck in my head was the Grocery Store Scene. Firstly, it reminded me of Supermarket Sweep. I told my two coworkers/friends who were watching it with me (S/O Chris and Katie) about this and they HAD NEVER HEARD OF IT. Honestly, Supermarket Sweep is life.

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Moreover, this scene resonated with me as it was the happiest moment in the movie. This scene almost feels misplaced in the movie because of its happy, go-lucky vibe. However, it’s almost erie because the laughs and music feel just out of place. This topsy-turvy scene foreshadows the drama that will happen. Almost like the calm before the storm.

I think that the aspects of the story that worked well was the relatable characters. I felt myself relating to the characters, specifically Selena. Selena is a badass and she really holds her own in this apocalyptic world. On the other hand, at some points the story felt slow. When the survivor gang goes to the soldier base, it felt very slow and I lost interest. I think this disconnect was from the change of place. In the base, I felt that sense of place differ extremely. The base seemed too real/normal so I felt that the apocalyptic vibe was almost gone.

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Despite this slowness, the story did have very interesting points. Specifically, I found the fact that Major Henry West kept one of his infected soldiers to track how long it will take for the infected to starve. I honestly would have never thought of that, so I found that story aspect very interesting.

I did really enjoy it, despite some slow parts in this story.

An amazing part of watching “28 Days Later” was the assignment that followed. Because Chris, Katie and I watched it together we decided to do this Alternate Ending assignment. We mainly chose to do this because there are three alternate endings of “28 Days Later”. So we thought, why not create our own alternate ending?

The original ending was okay, but I think that I enjoyed the alternate ending more. The alternate ending was more tragic and fit more into the darkness of the movie.  

Here is our product.

Behind the Process

So we decided to be really weird in this video. We made this video literally *right after* we watched the movie.

We had a rough idea of what we wanted in this alternate ending, namely Jim living and then all of us being eaten by zombies. It’s like a real high followed by an extreme low. We used the Advanced Media Production Studio. The green screen and lighting in there is easy to use (once you learn) so we used that. After shooting the video, we edited it real quick on Final Cut Pro. I decided that the video should feel surreal and really random. I tried to achieve this vibe through my use of effects and sounds. Editing the video to be weird was something I found easy and something I felt I did well.

The difficult thing about this assignment was that Chris is a tall boi and Katie and I are shorter. So using the cameras was difficult because we had to account for all of our heights. I also learned that Chris is tall enough that when he jumps he scrapes the ceiling in the studio.

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Something I want to improve is the green screening. I think because there was a lot of us and we were casting shadows everywhere, the green screening didn’t work too well. When you use a green screen, you want to have nice even lighting which we really didn’t have in this video. So, if I could do this assignment again I would improve this.

I really liked this assignment. I think our dopey acting and strange comedy made this video fun and interesting.

Well, that its for now. I’ll catch you on the flipside folks.

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The assignment was Alternate Ending worth 5 stars. This was the hardest part of my final project for two reasons: I was shooting with inanimate objects by myself and it was hot as heck outside when filming. The original scene I picked was from Terminator 2 and it can be seen below. Watch up to 2:20 or so for the reference.

I first set up my set. I pulled a few things from my backyard to be the trees in the scene. Yes that is a Sesame Street house and a Ninja Turtle van.

I then filmed everything with my Sony camera. I used Windows Movie Maker for the entire project except for near the end when the Terminator is shooting out electricity. I used PowerDirector for that effect.

I imported my video and used the Firework effect under the “effect room” button. I clicked modify and used the offsets to move the effect around until it was in a nice spot. I saved the video as a WMV and then did my business in Windows Movie Maker.

I added each scene by clicking the add video button. I then added titles by clicking the title button. Music was added by clicking the add music button. The narrations are the actual Terminator 2 theme but I wanted them to sound off so I would not get flagged for copyright issues on YouTube. I hit record narration and then played the theme song from a YouTube video and it is recognizable but different. I saved the entire video with the YouTube option and uploaded the finished product.

Now some may argue my scene ends the same way as Terminator 2 and I say no way! The cyborg Terminator shot the liquid metal Terminator in the original, in my vision an Ewok shot the cyborg Terminator and that is different in my book! There is also another movie reference in my video, did you catch it?