"Always Ready, Ever Vigilant"

With project four came new experiences and new opportunities. The assignment was to team up and shoot a documentary. When we first got started we threw around a few different ideas. Finally, we settled on doing a piece about Sean's brother, Derek, who is a firefighter for the Plainfield Fire Department. We had at one point toyed with the idea of actually doing a documentary about making a documentary based on this topic, however we did not figure out a good way to make that particular idea work, so we went with this one.

Once the idea was cast, the next step was figuring out what we wanted to do and where we wanted to go with it. With that, came filming. We were lucky enough to be invited out to Derek's station and be able to tail him through a normal day at work. We got a lot of great footage and were able to take part in some pretty cool parts of a firefighter's life. This in itself was a cool learning experience for me. I really enjoyed the opportunity to be able to shoot this documentary and learn along the way. We had a relatively easy shoot, aside from the fact that for whatever reason the cameras we had did not charge well and we were working with extremely low battery by the end of the day, trying to keep them on charge as much as possible.

After capturing the footage, the fun began. As always, getting the footage is the relatively easy part, figuring out what to use what not use and how to use it brought new challenges. We came up with a basic outline of how we wanted the documentary to go and we ran with it. After getting it laid out we did a rough cut to see how our time was looking. We were a bit long and realized to fully present this piece to the best of our abilities, we were going to need more time. We spent most of Tuesday night editing and working on everything that went into the project. However, even with that, we had a lot left to do; which of course called for another late night. Wednesday night and well into Thursday morning we were slaving away trying to complete our project and get it working properly. We finally got it about all the way done, minus the burn onto disc which we are currently doing as I type.

This project, all in all, was a great experience. I really feel as though we got some great footage and came out with a great piece of work. Creating a documentary is a sort of new thing to me, so getting the opportunity to work on one, even as a project, was pretty cool and exciting. We logged some long hours, some hard work, and some fun times to get this project as presentable as we could, so hopefully it pleases.

SportCraft Commercial

The creative process that went into this commercial was a fun one. I played around with different ways to create a fun commercial that was only 30 seconds long. I knew pretty much from the beginning that I wanted to do some sort of small spoof on the real serious sports ads that Nike and Adidas run a lot. I batted around a few different ideas of how to promote their shoes in fun ways, but in the end I just couldn't get over this idea. I knew it would be too irresistibly fun.

Once the idea was in place, I had to obviously start coming up with exact ideas and writing the commercial. Once again, I batted around a lot of different ideas, whether or not to use actors to be playing the game for shots or to just use pans and such of the general layout. In the end I thought about the real serious commercials I was trying to parody and remembered that typically they use a lot of images and footage without actors to really set the mood of intensity. So, I went that route as well. Then came the writing process. I had to figure out exactly what shots I wanted in the commercial and what I wanted to VO to be. I think in the end, the ideas were definitely solid and the VO is a nice addition to the commercial, although I would have preferred to get someone else to do the VO so it wasn't my voice, but oh well, Indy doesn't have a large market for voice actors.

I think in the end the commercial came out pretty well. Right off the bat, I know the main weakness of the project is the low light and difficulty to see everything on screen. This was a problem that came up due to a bit of a lack of planning on my part. I knew I wanted the lighting to be authentic so I scoped out the location ahead of time and decided that the lighting would be sufficient to produce a good piece. However, the one thing I did not account for happened. Apparently, cameras in general, or just the one I rented from our technology department, do no mix well with blacklights. And since the area of my shooting was lit primarily by blacklights, I was in trouble. I tried many different ways to still use the light from the blacklights, but it just would not work out. For some reason, anytime the camera was focussed in on an area lit strongly by blacklights, the camera would pulsate in and out of focus, it was quite the dizzying appearance. So, in the end I had to use the rest of the light from the room and not the blacklights. So, I guess that hurt a bit. However, even without the best lighting I still like how the project came out. The VO turned out quite nicely and adds well to the spoof of the commercial. Also, I like what I was able to come up with for the tagline scene at the end. It's not quite up to par with the people who do this for a living, but hey, I'm still learning the programs a bit too and am enjoying the chance to work with them. All in all I enjoyed the process, shooting, and editing of this project and look forward to debuting it in class.

Enjoy.

My Photo Story

So, this was definitely an interesting process all around. I had numerous different ideas that I wanted to incorporate into this project, however, due to the complexity of some of my ideas a lot of them were thrown out the window. My main two ideas just didn't seem to work for me as photo stories, so I figured I would save them and try them out as video stories some other time. Then, I moved onto telling the story of a song. When I was trying to come up with my song I was listening to my Ipod in my car and Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire came on, I immediately thought "Perfect!". So, I took that idea and ran with it.

Once I got my plan together I started going over some ways to jazz it up a bit in my head. I came up with a really neat thing to do during the chorus, then after about an hour and half or wrestling with After Effects, I got it to work on a stock photo. But, it was late so I decided to save the animation idea and reapply it to my project the next day. Well, when it came to to reapplying it, none of my settings saved, so it was basically a blank animation. So unfortunately for my project, that little animation idea was not used because of time constraints. I also spent a good deal of time gathering photos, because my particular project had a lot of different photos to use.

All in all, I think my project turned out pretty well. I like the use of different transitions throughout to keep it going. I wish I could have had more time to apply the animation that I had intended, but oh well. Also, I think my titles sequences are a bit weak due to the fact that I did not play with this version of After Effects long enough before plunging into that part of it.