These past few weeks we have been learning how to use the program After Effects. After watching some tutorials, I feel like I have a basic understanding of how it works and how to create simple projects. Just yesterday, I created my own project. I made an image of the Eiffel Tower have a winter feel. By creating an animation over this image, I made it look like it was snowing over the tower. I think I am really going to like using after effects. I have already come up with multiple ways I could have used this program on previous projects. I would love to go back and use these animations and effects on our musical documentary: Behind the Curtain. Did I mention that we finally finished that project!? I am happy with the way it turned out! I do think that if we had a little bit more time we would have added some more segments to the project and maybe fixed a couple of the details. Another idea I have for a project is to create a fun video of the bloopers from creating the musical project. After Effects would be fun to use on a project like this. Overall, this has been a great semester and I am super excited to use After Effects on future projects.
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The news story is a challenging, yet fun project. After being sick for a week, my partners, Braylin Hiem, Isaac Tarango and I decided to do our news story over the Spencer Flight and Education Center. We had a late start because I got sick, and then Braylin got sick. Another bump in the road was coming up with an angle for this story. This project had to be over news but nothing new was going on at the center. After our interviews though, we knew just how to go about it. The interviews went really well and were very insightful. I enjoyed editing and choosing the materials we would pull from them. My favorite part of this process was pulling in the b-roll with the interviews. Braylin said this part was like a puzzle and that we are trying to put all of the pieces together and in the right spot. He was not wrong there. We tried multiple different mixtures of b-roll, interviews, and voice-overs until it felt right. I learned how to add text to video, edit volume levels, and got a better understanding of how this process worked. This project was fun and I hope to do something like it again.
For my first project this year, I decided to go big. I am working with my brother Eric Shapland and friend Misti Wick. We are doing a documentary on our high school’s musical program. This project has been full of many firsts, laughs, and lots of work. At first, I was nervous we had put more food on the plate than we could finish, especially with this being our first project of the year. We had multiple interviews, b-roll sessions, and editing times to set up. We are not only working with ourselves but with a program who has work to be doing as well. The timing of everything got stressful to say the least. However, as time has gone on, I feel like we made a great decision to do a big project first. I have learned so much with this project that I could not have possibly learned doing anything else. I know how to conduct interviews, work the mics, lights, and camera. I am still learning how to use premiere pro, but have gotten the basics down for the most part. We are working on getting b-roll now. The directors want us to record the performances, which will not happen for a few weeks, but will provide a surplus of shots we can use. We would also like to get some shots of practice, the pit, and all of the other details that go on when putting together a musical. I am excited to see what our project will look like!
I also worked on a movie trailer. I decided I'd make Toy Story 3 spooky. I was going to make the movie "IT" a comedy but someone in another class was already talking about doing it. Toy Story might not have been my best idea ever, but it ended up being really fun and I learned a lot. in scary movie trailers, the video tends to go dark before another shot comes on. I was going for that kind of theme at first, but then I realized it was too blank. I really liked the content but it needed more. So I added some more shots but just wasn't as happy with it. It was really fun and exciting to work more on the editing side of things for this project. I've really learned a lot in this class and have had a blast.
This month we had an assignment where we had to produce a six word story in six shots. I wanted to work with pole vaulting, (which is what I'm doing currently in track) but I couldn't figure out a time that i could bring the camera out to the track and vault and edit the video before it was due. So I ended up doing mine on loving instead of hating. I had a lot of fun working with the people in my class and figuring out how to add a story to my videos.
The next project I did was the stop motion video. I didn't know what I'd think of it, especially since I haven't really worked with video making and adding some small details to the project to make it look cool. I really enjoyed working on this one though. I incorporated basketball, one of my favorite sports, into the project which i think also made it a little more enjoyable. Editing and watching all of the pictures flow together was probably my favorite part of working on my stop motion video. It seemed like it took forever to make the video though. We needed at least 10 pictures per second and it was about a 30 second video. That adds up to a lot of pictures. Plus I had to move the basketball so far in front of the camera then walk all the way back to take the picture. Over all though, this was a really fun project.
This month I did my first project. It was a learning experience for me. For this project, I didn't have to be on camera which I think helped me focus more on the video instead of freaking out about being on camera. I enjoyed working on my "Did You Know" video and am excited to learn more about editing.
This is my second day in this class and I'm still trying to figure everything out. I'm in Jazz band the same hour as this so I don't get all of the time that everyone else has to work on their stuff. I also didn't join the class until this semester so I'm a bit behind.
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