Over the past four years in ecomm, one thing has been the same, there have been 5 guarantees that we stand by: Technical skills, communication, collaboration, leadership, and project management. Something I took away from Technical skills was that it helped me learn how to handle equipment and adapt more quickly to things I haven't used before. I think that's pretty important in life because evolving and adapting is something we do all throughout our lives. I learned it through experience on set and teachers showing me how to use the equipment. It could be difficult at points, especially when it wouldn't work, but I would power through. I'm still not great at operating the camera, but I am proficient at using adobe software.
Next up, communication. Communication made me take away that to get something done, everyone needs to be on the same page. If you aren't on the same page, then the project typically is a jumbled mess. I faced many challenges in this one, on a few projects, I've had team members that refuse to communicate and try to do things their way, which rarely ever works out for them. Collaboration is a big part of that as well, to communicate effectively, you need to collaborate as well. Collaboration is always a necessity in a video project because there are so many responsibilities, you need a team for it, you can't do it all by yourself. I learned this over many projects but more specifically the feature film. I would have team members that weren't fans of collaboration and that showed me just how important it is to have that. Another thing I learned from the feature film was leadership. I used to be a pretty quiet guy but especially when I was chosen to direct the feature film, I had to step up. I tried being a hands off leader and I learned that if you do that, the work won't get done so one day I came in with a game plan and laid it all out. If I hadn't done that, I'm not sure we would have had a feature film to show. Without good leadership, a project rarely turns out the way you want it. Finally there's project management. With project management, I learned that to keep a production on track, you need to keep things organized to ensure its quality. This was yet another one learned on the feature film, which (more so at the start) was a pretty disorganized production, had we been more organized, I think it would have been miles better.
After the feature film I would honestly say that leadership is the category I am the strongest in. Now that I've gone through that experience I know what needs to be done to keep a project on track. I would like to improve on technical skills though, as I said, I'm not great at camera operation. I'm going to use these skills on future projects. Overall, had it not been for these guarantees, I think I would not be nearly as prepared to work on projects in the workforce.
My projects this year
Over this past school year I have had quite a few projects but I'll focus on three for the sake of length. First up is my Wii commercial from this past fall. I chose this because this is one of the projects I had the most fun working on and it also showcases my skill with special effects with the lightsaber duel. It took us 2-3 weeks to make. A week of preproduction, two days of filming, and maybe three days of editing I want to say? It honestly went much more smoothly than the rest of my projects, not many difficulties other than figuring out how to do lightsaber effects. This project helped me learn how to do more vfx work. The feedback was very positive save for one sequence where the lighting was rather dark and grainy, it received a lot of praise for the lightsaber fight. After that, I became more careful about low light conditions. Overall I feel the this is a fun video and a great start to my senior year in video.
Next is my most recent project, Royale: Infinity Blade. This was a "music video" of the song "Chug Jug With You" but we decided to use a cinematic remix of the song and turn it into an action movie trailer. This one took maybe over a month to do. It required extensive preproduction and editing as it was very vfx heavy. the biggest challenge we had was finding locations as we had to use airsoft guns for the video and it isn't a great idea to use those in a public space. I learned what it is like to shoot a more cinematic production so it mad eye feel like I was shooting an actual action movie. The feedback was universally positive across the board, garnering praise for the visual effects and cinematography and how creative it was. Overall this may be the video I am the most proud of, as well as possibly my best work yet.
Finally is the big kahuna, the feature film, Jack and Todd's Legendary Poker game. Now, I directed all three of these projects but this was the one where I was the big head honcho. We began work on this film in January and it took us up until late April to get it done and ready for theaters. We faced an extraordinary number of challenges, like everything that could have gone wrong went wrong. We had difficult (crucial) crew members, I caught Covid, recast of half the cast, cars broke down, etc. We somehow pulled through though and made a good movie. I learned how to persevere when times got tough. Feedback we got was that the shots could have looked better. Going forwards I've ensured that no matter what, we need storyboards even though they suck to do. Overall I'm proud of the film, with everything we went through I'm glad it's as good as it is.
Inside of class we would use time for preproduction and/or editing if projects overlapped. If we filmed that night, I made sure we were ready for that. Outside of class, especially on Royale, we would go location scouting, buy props, meet up for more preproduction, or actually film. If we had a project we were passionate about, that was all my group would focus on. I there isn't a project, I will usually watch video essays about films or make my own little side projects. I would consider my strengths to be more in the directing and editing departments. I take feedback well, so I think as an employee that's valuable. To maximize these strengths, I did work outside of class on my own time to improve, especially editing. I would like to improve in the camera operation area. We are planning on doing more films this summer soI plan to learn more about that there.
As I have said, I was the director of the feature film. That meant that I was in charge of all aspects of production and ensuring things got done, which I wasn't great at for my first month or so but I stepped up and got things back on track. Inside and outside class I worked on this film day and night to the point I basically had little to no social life outside of my crew, but I do attribute that to the stressful hectic production we endured. Whether it was writing the script or discussing ideas with Ryan, there was always something I could do outside of class.
I loved that I got to be more ambitious with my video projects this year. Last year felt like a test run for what we wanted to do this year. Our goal was to try things that hadn't been done in ecomm before and blow minds and I think we did that. The only thing I would change is that I wish I had stepped up sooner in the feature film. Honestly what I took away the most was the importance of communication and collaboration. One goal I want to set for myself is to challenge myself with videos I make in the future. I want Mrs. Smith to know how thankful I am for her and her class, without her this wouldn't be possible. She cares so much about us and there isn't enough I could do to repay her. Overall, this has been a legendary program and I wouldn't trade these last four years for anything in the world. This is Andrew Duwe, signing off.
What we did This past week we created another web page but this one was for a poem called "Another Reason I don't keep a gun in the House". We began by adding in the starting files and we then created new rules on the different parts such as the headings. Those got changed to different colors, sizes, etc. Once done we added some links and text of our own. The project was fairly easy and simple to be honest. At the beginning the site was just a white page with a dog picture and some text but by the end it had a black background with different text colors and a great variety. CARP Contrast is the first letter of CARP and boy was there variety in this project. The texts were different colors and the colors had great contrast with each of their respective background. A great example is the darker tan text on a light tan background. Another was the text sizes with each other. Alignment is the next letter, this relates to how the text was aligned. The heading/titles
How We Did Each Thingy Last week we started something new in photoshop, frame animations. It reminds me a slight bit of stop motion but it is not really pictures at all. Restarted by using the paint brush tool, and made the paint brush style for grass instead of a standard brush. The brush's colors also are varied between a dark and light green. Then we painted it as grass. After, we created a circle that looked like a ball and changed its opacity to about 37 percent and created its path, using option drag. We then created a frame animation and went frame by frame showing only one ball at a time using the eye icon. We really honestly did that for every animation for this project. What was learned We learned this past week how to create frame animations, something I did not really know how to do. Sometimes it got a bit tricky though because the layers would occasionally pop up in other frames and then I would make those go away and they would all go away. It got fairly tri
The process So over the past few weeks we have been working on creating new film reels for ourselves. As we started, I had an idea to use"Don't Stop Me Now" for my music in the reel. Clearly that didn't work out, as I found out, I didn't have enough high energy clips to match the pace of the song. After that I was stuck on trying to find a new song, but I was also working on the feature script so I had to make a decision fast. I ended up using "Gangsta's Paradise" from my last film reel. Needless to say, it fit my style perfectly once again. On top of my clips from the last film reel, I now added more scenes from "Lazy Sunday" and my "Wii" commercial. Overall reflection Overall, I thought that my reel showcased my style really well. I tried to go for a more comedic style of reel as that's what I prefer to make genre-wise. Some solid examples of this is many of the clips from "Lazy Sunday" and my "Tears of T
Comments
Post a Comment