I chose this 3 star assignment to show the transformation of the character Mufasa from the radio show Apocalyptic Airwave. We didn’t really know much about Mufasa other than Carson had saved him from certain death and nursed him back to health. Here is a little clip of Mufasa as a small pup to becoming the threat he is today. Hope you enjoy it’s better with the Volume up FYI.
I did this 4 star “How to” Documentary. I did this assignment because I figured it would be neat to record something but not use any sound. I was going to do a documentary over how to cook food, but I had already started beef and noodles in the crock pot earlier in the day. So a 2 min plus documentary over cooking was out of the picture. Well guess what after you get done cooking there is always dishes go figure right. So I decided to do my documentary over me washing dishes. I made sure to blast out all the steps at the end of my video just in case someone didn’t know how to wash a dish or 5.
This week I read Roger Ebert’s article How to Read a Movie and I also watched all 8 of the videos about filmmaking which gave a lot of insight to what we would be doing with our own video work. Adding in the other resources given to us, I knew this was going to turn out to be very interesting. There were some things in Ebert’s article and the videos that I had already subconsciously known. I think if you are able to watch, understand, and predict things in movies and films, these things are already something that comes naturally to you when involving yourself in the filmmaking process. On the other hand, it still gave a lot of explanations for why these things work so well in setting the scene.
The movie I chose to watch this week was Night of the Living Dead. I have known about this movie before, but I had never actually watched it. I found it interesting, but it definitely wasn’t my cup of tea. Barbara’s character being the one thing that really bothered me about this movie. However, I was also mainly just watching it for some of the filmmaking techniques talked about in the other resources. Right at the beginning I noticed the tilt shots used throughout the entirety of the first action sequence. I knew straight away that that was what I would want to talk briefly about. The tilt of a shot is something you register, but it’s not something that is really thought about by the audience too much. It’s something I hadn’t really thought of to use for portraying certain feelings, so it was something I had learned and wanted to talk about.
Looking back on it now though, I hadn’t really talked a whole lot in my video essay. I explained what tilt shots were used for and that they were used for those very purposes in the film, but I hadn’t really gone in depth on the subject. Knowing the trials the characters would go through as the film progresses, I hadn’t seen much reason to go too in depth on it, but it may have been useful if other people hadn’t seen the film.
So I decided to do this two star assignment to share my journey through college. Over the past 2 years at UMW we have had our son, served in the Army, have gotten out of the Army and have become civilians. And now that I am finally out of the Army I can finally devoted more time to my studies than what I was able to do while I was in. I did this video in the Open Shot program, for some reason after I uploaded my video a few of the pictures had flipped. Instead of going back and fixing it I went ahead and left them that way giving them a different transitional effect. If you can’t tell over the past 2 years my family and kids have meant the most to me as you can see in my collage.
I was really excited for video week to come around because I knew I wanted to make a stop-motion video! I thought about it for a couple of days and was having a hard time coming up with an easy way to get our theme into a stop motion video, and then I figured maybe I could do something about blogging! Thus came my video of this small turtle quickly learning how to blog and getting ready to read about what needs to get posted on the End website!
To make this video I used an app called “Stop Motion” to collect all of the pictures and mash them together. This was a really easy way to do this because it kept all the photos together for me! For this 22 second video, I ended up taking over 200 photos! It was really fun to figure out how to make it look like the turtle was moving. I made a trial video and I was glad I did, at first I was moving too quickly and jumping between shots.
I then uploaded the video to my computer and used iMovie to pull it together with some royalty free music. I added the clicking of the keyboard too!
Overall I really enjoyed making this assignment and I would definitely love to try and do it again!!
Video Assignment 2058
I really enjoyed doing this video assignment, it gave me time to reflect on some of my most favorite pictures and memories and tell you guys a little bit about my life!
Video Assignment 2031
This is a video collage of all my favorite pictures from my last year at UMW! I can’t believe I am graduating in just a few short weeks! I will really miss this place and all the memories I have made here, but I am so thankful for the opportunities UMW has given me.
Video Assignment 1981
In this short trailer, I am using our radio show characters from The End Apocalyptic Airwave to give a glimpse into what we dream our journey through The End will look like for all of us. Starring Sarah Thatcher, Winifred Hart, Carson Gordon, Alex Whitmore, and Joan Williams.
I decided to complete the two minute silent documentary assignment (VideoAssignments2032). There were so many things I could choose from and I would love to show what I do at work, but 1) the school district I work for is on spring break and 2) I cannot take videos or photos of the students I work with anyway, let alone have my phone out. So, as I was getting ready to make and eat dinner, I decided to create a how-to for cooking box mac and cheese. Yes, they give the instructions on the box and the fact that I eat this frequently is probably questionable at my age, but can anyone really deny that mac and cheese was not their favorite food at some point in their life?
Recording the process was not terribly difficult, but there were some troubles. Holding a camera and recording water boiling is extremely uneventful, and you can tell that the person recording is switching a few times as I went to go feed my dogs, grab something from the fridge, etc. I also cannot believe that some of the cheese did not make it into the pot! I was looking at my phone (which is what I used to record) to make sure the angle was right, and that makes pouring cheese a lot more difficult than you would think!
I used iMovie to add the images at the beginning and end, and to vary the speed of the video so that it would be about two minutes long (and so you wouldn’t have to stare at boiling water for so long). This process probably took me no more than fifteen minutes, which is less time than creating the raw video took! I am overall happy with the outcome, although I wish I hadn’t spilled that cheese.
Here it is! The trailer I made for Geoff and I’s documentary we’ll be making this coming week. We worked on both of ours at the HCC today to make sure we were both on the same page and to check each other’s work.
Geoff’s is super awesome!! 
My trailer mostly focuses on Evelyn. It includes groups that she was in before reaching Washington, DC, by herself. She encounters a lot of the creatures, or zombies, that had been created due to the pandemic. Fortunately for her, she makes it to DC perfectly fine (the same can’t be said for the groups she had previously travelled with). The trailer also shows a bit of Fredericksburg and the rest of the world before disaster struck and during it. It includes videos from other people during bombings and their own travels.
Making this trailer was a bit of an adventure for me. I haven’t been feeling very well the past couple of days. It’s mostly due to allergies since Spring has arrived. Still, I was feeling pretty terrible today, so I wasn’t quite feeling it while making this. I was able to bear through it though and make this trailer. I used iMovie on the HCC computers using a Trailer template provided. I then used the 4K Video Downloader to find videos on YouTube to use in my trailer. Some of the videos used were found using CreativeCommons, but not all of them were. I made sure to leave a little note in the description of the video that they are not mine. The actual documentary we will be making will have mainly our own videos in it though. We hadn’t had anything prepared for our trailers though, so we had to make due with other videos.
It was a lot of fun though finding videos that would fit our storyline and our characters. We even came up with our own film production company name: A&G Films!
I think both of our trailers turned out really well, and I hope you like it!
So this week I started on Path Two of our film assignments!
Geoff had messaged me this week to see if I would like to partner with him on this assignment, and since I enjoyed working with him on our radio show, I said yes!
We were a little late in the game in planning, but we met today (yes, on Easter ) and went over our plan for filming.
We decided to go with a documentary/interview show that follows how Jim Tomsula III and Evelyn Sparrow make it to Washington DC separately, but end up meeting each other at the same camp. They interview each other and talk about what they had gone through to get there. Jim will have taken a flight to DC before the flights stop running. Evelyn will have travelled from the overrun campus to DC on foot (most scenes shot in the woods and stuff like that).
This format was decided because Geoff will be travelling this coming week for work, so we had to do something that we could ultimately do separately. We plan on filming some scenes on our own and then combining them together to show a story over time. The interview will both be played over these scenes and be shown as the interview is taking place.
This week we will right out our parts of the interviews on a shared Google docs, and then on Tuesday we will be meeting to record this interview. After that, we will focus on our own filming before meeting up again to edit it all together once Geoff comes back from his business trip.
I will, of course, be posting a second blog to go over my trailer that I made today as well.
I’m really excited for this project and I think it will turn out great!
Plotagon is amazingly fun! This (free) program lets you pick characters, scenes, dialogue, and emotion to create stories. It took me a while to figure out how to add four characters because only two can be shown at a single time. Once I figured that out, it was simple to create this video! Exporting it, however, has been a difficult process and is ongoing as I write this post.
I chose the four star assignment, Animated Classic Reading, but I decided to slightly twist the requirements (I hope that’s allowed!) I saw this assignment as the perfect opportunity to involve my group’s apocalyptic narrative! Besides, the Apocalyptic Airwave radio show may be a classic one day. I had to make Joan into Jonas due to there only being two males and two females in the free version and I cut out a lot of the flashbacks (making the video a reasonable length), but everything they say is exactly from the script! It definitely meets the dramatic reading requirement of the assignment, even if I cut out many of the background stories.
I am so in love with this program, and I have no doubt I will use it again in the future. If I had to change anything, I would change their voices. The women sound so much more monotone than the men, which takes away some of the emotion that this script has. There was also not a good place to face the camera during Alex’s speech because (since I can only have two characters in a scene at a time) only Carson and an invisible woman were there. I did not want to reveal the whole table because I try to make it appear as if hey are all sitting together, but if I zoomed out, it would reveal that Carson is alone. There are likely some tutorials on what to do about this on YouTube, but I ended up going with my best judgement instead.
I know we are supposed to upload via YouTube, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to export the video other than by putting it onto Twitter or Facebook. I tweeted the video (which you can watch below), or you can go to this link (that for some reason will not embed). Regardless of the difficulty exporting, which is probably an issue from me and not Plotagon, I would suggest everyone check it out!
"Apocalyptic Airwave" https://t.co/OhpEVi3M9D
— Samara (@Sam_ara106) April 1, 2018
