Although I graduated from high school just last year, it seems like a long time ago! My years at Stafford High School were pretty great, despite the many, many hours that I spent on homework and studying for AP and Honors classes. Four years of varsity basketball, combined with awesome friends, provided an outlet for the … Continue reading A Walk Down Memory Lane!
This is a 4 stars assignment and it should include clips from artists live performances and make them into a music video! I have spent at least 5 hours making this video. I chose this video assignment because it is the best way to describe my character and get her out there more. It gives a short summery for her professional dancing level and show how much she is attached to this type of art. I chose different techniques of dancing for each part of the video to kind of show how professional she is. I have chose to split each of the photos with a video and then go back to a photo just to rest the viewer eye and give a hint about the next technique used. There were lots of edits to include it terms of video or picture lightening and and also how fast the video is. I chose this song because it represent love and it is classic fast and slow kind of song which goes well with the videos. I had to change some parts to match what the dance flows like. Here is the Youtube link embedded! Feel free to give feed back.
For the video essay assignment, I decided to watch the movie Notorious by Alfred Hitchcock. For my video essay, I focused on the scene when Grant tells Bergman about the about his plan to have her seduce one of her past acquaintances. I read through Roger Ebert’s How to read a movie. I concentrated my essay on his talk of movement and the meaning behind left/ right, background/ foreground and top/ bottom. I enjoyed reading his article because I had never thought of the placement of characters on the screen having a meaning. It made sense for foreground/ background and top/ bottom but left/ right was a new concept that I hadn’t heard of before. I also looked at a few other videos about cinematic techniques.
First, I looked at the three parts of the Top 20 Cinematic Techniques video series on YouTube. I didn’t know about many of these techniques. I knew about panning, slow motion, and special effects but I had never heard of some of the other names that certain techniques were called. For example, I didn’t know that panning upward was called crane- up. The videos were very informative and I enjoyed seeing the different cinematic techniques of movies I have seen. The second video I saw was called Camera Angles and Techniques. I liked this one because it showed different ways that my group can later approach our video show. It will be a good reference guide when we start shooting for the show. The third and final video I saw was called Star Wars continuity mistakes. I wanted to watch this video because I have always had an interest in Star Wars and I’ve always been interested in the mistakes that people make during shooting. I usually find a lot of mistake videos with animated film and shows rather than live action film so it was cool to see what mistakes big budget films make.
Video Essay
I used the Firefox video downloader to get my video. I have a sound recorder on my computer that I recorded my essay with. I found different points where my audio would fit best and mixed it in with the scene I chose. I was originally very hesitant to finish this assignment because I’m not confident about video making. I found Windows Live Movie Maker on my computer and it ended up being easier than I thought.
Here’s the video.
This week, I spent a long time planning. I saw the “30 Second Documentary“, and decided to plan for a stop motion LEGO assignment. “The Last Bit Lost” is about the most tragic time in Donnie Rawlen’s life–when his family…
Read more
The post “The Last Bit Lost” — A Stop Motion LEGO Short Film appeared first on Coding Spencer.
I put a slight twist on the ‘Special Person Montage’ assignment for the week of 3/16 to 3/21. It is worth 5 points.
I wanted to use this assignment as an opportunity to show my significant other how important they are to me. I dug through old footage we filmed together last year and attempted to edit it into a coherent narrative that still comes off as a slide show. Since the Movie Maker editor is already somewhat in slide show format, the result is a video that is not high quality, but has the perfect feel of being made with love (I hope).
This is my way of saying thank you for allowing me to constantly stick a camera in your face and use you for various artistic endeavours. This is my way of saying thank you for being my intellectual counterpart before anything else. This is my way of saying thank you for letting me take care of you, and for taking care of me.
This movie is an assembly of clips that summarize what we spent the early part of 2014 discussing. We did our best to impress each other with our theories behind the meaning of the universe. We searched, and referred to what we hoped to find as ‘The Fifth Wall’. We tried to determine exactly what this ‘fifth wall’ would be made out of.
The narrative is hopefully not too difficult to follow: one character walks away, and the other attempts to find them, getting help from memories of their discussions together.
Above all else, this movie is meant to be a love letter, not only to my significant other today, but also to our younger selves, and to the act of falling in love.
Here is the letter:
5 Stars
Take a journey through the friendship of Shirley Mayfield and Veronica Smith. Shopping pals, with a flare for fashion and fun this video from Veronica to Shirley is a symbol of their friendship. Friendship is very near and dear to Veronica’s heart and she created this video to honor her best friend.
This video was no easy task. At first it seemed easy but I quickly realized it would take time. I first found several period pictures on Google. I tried to keep all the girls within the pictures looking some what the same… to create a visual identity with Veronica and Shirley. After I found all the imagines, I knew I wanted to add words… but how? I searched and searched on YouTube to see if such a thing was possible. If there was I couldn’t find it. So plan B! I used PowerPoint to type out my slides. I used a black background to stick to the black and white theme. I used courier font because to me it looks like typewriting and therefore more 1940s. I typed out my sentences on 7 slides and then made them into photos. I finally uploaded all the slide photos and other pictures and arranged them in the order I wanted. I played around with the slide transitions and durations. I also added a jazz tune for more 1940s effect. This assignment was fun to make but was also tedious at times. I hope Shirley enjoys Veronica’s video montage!
Facebook narrative assignment, 3 stars. I did it because it was 3 stars and didn’t look like an insane amount of work.
The thing that took the most time was going through all of my old social media to find these photos and videos. And since I’m a huge weeb, most of my photos are from conventions or are of me in costume. #sorrynotsorry. Unfortunately, I don’t have a few of my more recent costumes because I couldn’t be assed.
I went through my Facebook, Peter’s Facebook, and some of my friend’s albums before heading into my old tumblr. I found the hair video there, and it’s the first one I ever edited. I downloaded all of the pictured that I liked, put them into categories kind of, and added the transitions. I then added Mozart’s Piano Sonata 11 in A. Love public domain.
The major theme of this is that you can’t really tell what happened when, because I haven’t changed my core personality at all. I think that’s a good thing. I’m still a goofy dork who makes weird faces and finds the silliness in everything, because what’s the point of being a tight ass when you could make light of things? Bad things happen. This narrative has photos of some of the most difficult, heartbreaking parts of my life, as well as some of the happiest. People enter your life and leave it without warning or reason. Lives end, drift apart, come together. People can lie and hurt you, make you feel worthless, or lift you up higher than you knew you could go. All of this is guaranteed to happen, and there will be photographic evidence. Can you tell which is which?
This week for one of my video assignments I did the Return To The Silent Era assignment. This one was a lot of fun. I chose my one of my favorite movies, The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I liked the feel of the film a lot and when I was going through the trailers this one stuck out for me. I took out parts that I felt did not belong in the silent film era. And then edited the rest to make the video silent, black and white, and a couple other minor effects that I felt added to the trailer. I did all of this in iMovie. Fun first project!
Okay, so my days are definitely not 60 seconds, and this assignment definitely took much longer than 60 seconds, but, hey, the title worked, so I went with it.
The hardest part here was remembering to actually film things throughout the day to use in this video. I kept trying to capture aspects that actually defined my day, but I spent a little too much time filming my morning routine.
Additionally, I’ve definitely learned that when filming with a mobile camera, it’s much smarter to turn your phone sideways, something I’ll definitely remember for future video assignments.
I’ve definitely been intimidated by these video assignments, but this one allowed me to incorporate one of my favorite things: poetry. I also knew after watching the example version that this would be a great opportunity to use my character as part of the story.
Picking up where we last left Damon, he’s still feeling lost, confused, and more scared then ever since he’s now mixed up in additional trouble after that radio show and vacation with Bev. Damon has become scared of everything, most notably the darkness. Fear has crept into his life the way light creeps over the shadows, and it’s completely consuming him. Everywhere he turns there is mystery, and with mystery, there is terror.
I really liked this because I got to play with a lot of different ideas here. Most notably, I wanted to make sure I incorporated aspects of noir, so I played up the use of shadows and dramatic lighting. I learned the importance of making sure your camera work is strong, and in retrospect I should’ve been more careful with my shots, but the shaky feeling actually adds a human touch to the narrative I think.
