Andrew's ecomm blog

The Five Guarantees 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 ...

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...

  What the project was So for our first project this year we were asked to make a commercial. My group, Alex, Ryan, and I, decided to do a commercial of the Nintendo Wii. We thought it would be a cool concept if we played on how immersive the motion controls were supposed to be. Ultimately, we decided to try and make it that we transition from them playing the game, to an imaginary sequence of them actually doing what is happening in the game as if they were there. Preproduction Our preproduction actually went by really smoothly surprisingly. First, we had to decide on production roles, I was the director, Ryan was the editor, and Alex was the cinematographer. We got the script done rather quickly, along with the storyboards. Casting was not stressful at all (usually it is, audit's a struggle to get actors) we were able to get actors rather quickly. Our two main cast members ended up being Zeph and Silas and they did great. We were ready to shoot within a couple days, which is rare...

With my new updated film reel, I wanted to give a sense of fun and make it more comedic. I used Gangster's Paradise for the audio to show that, so I used some funny clips of people walking like gangsters and some other fun clips. I feel that by using these specific clips and audio, it showed my directing and editing skills, for example like showing some of the performances I got out of my actors and how I got some shots in sync with the music. These shots are some of the ones I'm the most proud of like for example the shot of Noah silhouetted against the window, and the one of Joey and Connor at the checkout lane. My editing process was fairly easy, I just looked for clips I liked and dropped them in there and played around to see where each worked best. I changed some things from the last reel, like the music and some of the shots used were rather different mostly because I got new shots. I did reuse some shots and I kept the same font from the previous reel because I liked ...

The music video I am reviewing is Gangnam Style by PSY. I'm going to be entirely honest with you here, I'm not entirely sure what the story is, I've seen this a hundred times, still no clue, basically it was a ton of random shots that were fun. So I guess you could say, if there was a story, then it was not told very well at all. I can use how he lip synced it so well that you almost couldn't tell it was dubbed over, and I can use the quick editing used in here. I can use my knowledge of being a director to bring out the best performances from my actors. The creator did the lip syncing well, and the editing, especially the editing, the quick cuts were great. He could have told more of a story in my opinion, but that's sort of part of the charm of the video so take that as you will. Overall, it was a fun music video that while being absolutely random, it somehow worked.

The Process Preproduction Basically for our short film we used Malik's script. It was proposed as a drama-thriller about two kids protecting a kid from the evil organization called the ESO. The process was very long and pretty boring. Malik spent quite a bit on the script trying to get it just right, but in doing that, it cut into our production week quite a but. The casting process was crazy, we had actors dropping out left and right, we finally got the cast of me, Connor, and Ryan. We had to cut out entire characters too, so it was a bit rough. Production We only had one night to shoot. It was pretty rushed in all honesty. We had to abandon most of the script because it took way too long. So we had to improvise and I'd say it went fine, not as good as it could have been but it was fine. It took a while though because we were goofing around a little bit and it was too dark in areas we wanted to shoot, so we used iPhone flashlights. I was an actor for this so I had to ...

Over the course of the semester, we did three video projects. Those were a Profanity PSA, a Beats commercial, and a short film called REDACTED. The PSA The PSA took us about a week and a half to make. I wrote it, and I did act in it a bit. Some challenges I faced were differing ideas and methods with my team mates, and that they really didn't give me a lot to do for some reason. Along the way, I did learn how to work with people that had different methods and also difficult actors. Some feedback we got was that it was cringey and that it wasn't very good, so that was fun. We really didn't change much because that would mean reshooting the whole thing. I didn't like it, the rest of the team sort of threw out a good chunk of my script in favor of improvising it, which resulted in it being a lot messier. The commercial So, the commercial took a LOT longer than it should have. It ended up not getting done until about a week after the due date. On this project, I w...

The Projects themselves The first project was my typography project. In that project I had to choose 4 quotes that I felt described me. The project roughly took close to two weeks to complete. I found it to be fairly easy. The hardest part was actually a fairly simple part, the color schemes. It was tough to find colors that worked well together. During the project I learned how to utilize typography effectively to make the quotes pop. Mrs. Beaudoin gave me good advice on colors and what looked good. I changed the Ron Swanson quote because of the type of food visual I wanted to use. Overall I liked the look of the project and especially the Han Solo quote. The second project was the vector illustration of myself. This project was the one where I had to choose a picture of myself (the one I chose was truly majestic) and use the pen tool, something I was seriously inexperienced with, to illustrate it into a graphic. The overall project was fairly challenging, my biggest challeng...

I overall had a good time making the short film. It was a good experience for me to learn how it's like being in charge of a production.  I learned that communication between the cast and crew is crucial, and when there is little to no communication it doesn't work as well, in our case it caused problems with continuity such as with Cassidy's outfit because she did not have her phone. Noah was very cooperative though and was very clear with us about when he would be available. Overall, this project went pretty darn smoothly if I do say so myself. Next time I would definitely make a clearer schedule, this schedule was fine but I think I need a better schedule for the next time.

Pre-production and development So when Mr. Cooper told us that our next project would be to recreate a movie trailer I was very excited.  But then he told us that our groups were assigned and that lessened my excitement, I was fine with working with Anna but Blake was the one I was worried about because every time I'd worked with him in the past he was super lazy. When we decided our project would be the Breakfast Club (mostly due to the cast size and the location) we started the casting process along with the storyboard. Blake was fine in the beginning, he volunteered to be Bender and was  the cinematographer, but he also wanted to do part of the storyboard and never ended up bringing it. The casting actually went really smoothly and we began to shoot. Production The production was rocky at the start, the scheduling was tricky due to Crew and Emma's theater rehearsals and on top of that, Blake didn't show up for shooting so we had to recast bender in less than 24 ho...

Preproduction When I was told that I needed to find a glorious, high-quality picture to use for my vector project I knew exactly what to do. I have this picture from 2017 that I took with my head out of a car window on the highway and it looks absolutely majestic so it was an easy choice. So before I started the project I had to do this thing in photoshop to show the different shades of color on my face in the picture. In Illustrator, I then made two artbords, one with a lower opacity version of the and the other had the full opacity. Production When I started the project I immediately ran into problem, as I picked an extremely complex photo. The face was not one shade anywhere, it was all just a ton of different shades. That made it much more complicated and trickier than anticipated. It got to a point where I genuinely considered choosing a new photo but I persevered. Each part of my project was split up into separate parts such as mouth, eyes, eyebrows, etc. I did learn that ...

Over the course of the past month my class has been working on recreating music videos. My group chose Rick Astly's Never Gonna Give You Up music video. In this blog post I will break down the process of the creation of the video. Pre-production Our pre-production was very busy once we picked the song and music video. Ryan was tasked with the story boarding, which is quite a feat considering how many different shots there are. That took close to a week. I did the filmscaping as I was the cinematographer. That took about twenty minutes, I also helped find the props. Alexis was there to tell us what to do, can't exactly remember what her document was that she had to do. Alexis and I then did the casting, which was mostly her friends, I tried to get my amigo Zeph to do it but he was like nope so we cast Nathan as Rick. Once that was all finished, we finally got to start production. Production Our production was pretty hectic to be quite honest. Our main actor did not want ...

The beginning's beginning When I started this project and was looking at quotes to choose from, I looked to movies, tv shows, and books for quotes that I felt I could relate to. I only was able to decide on 5 quotes because either I could not find one that I really liked or it was not appropriate for school (see: "Don't half *** two things, whole *** one thing" -Ron Swanson). The five that I found were:  “I knew exactly what to do, but in a much more real sense I had no idea what to do.” -Michael Scott, “Not all treasure is silver and gold mate” -Captain Jack Sparrow, “It does not do well to dwell on dreams and forget to live” -Albus Dumbledore, “When I eat, it is the the food that is scared” -Ron Swanson, “Never tell me the odds!” -Han Solo. I ended up not using the meaningful one (Dumbledore's) because I liked the others more. The Creation During the actual production of the project was trickier, mostly because I just jumped into this class a semester late...

Reflection Recently I took a ten day fast from social media and it was gloriously difficult. It was definitely something I needed because I am almost always on social media, and it was something that I really felt like I needed to do. The first day was extremely difficult, u the following days were super duper easy, it also caused me to use my phone lesser than usual, another plus. The only con that I ran into was the fact that I use Instagram to communicate with my classmates, but that was easily solved by just giving them my number. It was every now and then annoying not being able to access my memes, but I then remembered that I could just use Google to find memes. Once I had finished the fast, I found that I was using social media not as much as I had before, so overall, I thought it was a good experience that all should try at least once.

Over the past couple weeks, I was assigned to do a feature story over somebody in the class. To start, we were assigned our partners, we talked for a bit to get to know each other and to find a topic for the interview. Once that was done we started to write our questions (twenty-one were required). Over the course of the writing of the questions, I found that I would have to dig deep with the questions because I found that some questions I was going to ask seemed far too similar to other questions. Once we started filming was when most problems started to occur, most of them involving the camera as either the lighting was off and would not want to be fixed, or we accidentally picked a crappy camera. I learned through this, that sometimes problems would occur and that I would just have to persevere through them. Ince the editing process began, I decided I wanted to do a more entertaining and goofy take on the interview all while staying on topic. That is the second video, the first is...

1. This past quarter we have been working on our products. My team's product was ZapKey, a key that shrinks your car, thus making it much more portable. The graphic design portions took a considerable amount of time, about just under two weeks. The animations only took about a week. The video portion took about a week and a half, mostly due to the lightning special effect, that took forever. The greatest challenge was definitely the lightning bolt effect, it was very frustrating and not too awfully clear on how to apply it. Something I did learn is how to work with a team that I may not entirely be too similar with, for example I was the only introvert (I actually am an ambivert) on the team. Some feedback from my team was to just go for it and to see how it looks on a design, because I would always ask, "Should I do this or that?"Some changes I made were just subtle changes in the designs to make them look sharper. I personally think my work done this quarter was very ...

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 ...

My Personality Type: INFP So I took the Myers-Briggs personality test and I got INFP. The I stands for Introvert, meaning I am more thought oriented and not nearly as social as one who is an extrovert and I sort of keep to myself so that makes sense. The N stands for iNtuitive which means I see patterns and impressions and I think about the future and possibilities. The F stands for Feeling, this makes sense as before I make a larger decision I think about how another person may feel about like yesterday for example I took the donut my dad wanted even though I thought quite a bit about how he may feel about it. P stands for Perceiving meaning I'm a pretty flexible and adaptive person. I would say this is pretty accurate to be honest. Apparently I share the same personality type as Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and J.K. Rowling, so pretty much my favorite authors which is pretty cool. I also took another quiz called Lion, Otter, Golden Retriever, and Beaver. I turned out to be a Golden Re...

The Process First we created our storyboard and decided what we wanted to do with it and picked the roles, mine being director, Jeremiah's being the actor and Halee's being the camera person. The idea to use the spinny chair stemmed from the previous projection which we were going to do that but it didn't end up working for the project. Once that was all sorted out we started to shoot. The first day all we did was shoot most of the spinny chair scenes. Day two we filmed most of the other scenes except for maybe three or four shots. Finally on day three we finished the shoot and started the editing process. The editing process took a couple days as I had to trim clips and cut scenes along with finding the correct music. Now I'm writing this and sitting here wondering why I am writing this while listening to the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack. Then I suddenly remembered I have to for the grade. Group dynamic The group worked well together in my opinion. We g...

The Process What we did to start was create a storyboard. In that storyboard we had an idea to have one of us print of a page and then we fly down the halls in a spinny chair. We all then realized how unprofessional it was so we then decided to just have it so we just print off the page and then walk down to the library printer. Once we had that figured out we took pictures of shots we would use on an iPad. We took turns taking the pictures. After we had done that and put them into a powerpoint/google slides presentation showing what types of shots were in the video and what the viewer was seeing. Once that was done we shot the video clips on another iPad. Finally, we put them into Adobe Premiere Pro and edited the clips into one video. Once done with that t was uploaded to YouTube. Other Stuff We used the Five Guarantees of e-comm quite a bit. For Technical Skills, we needed those in using iPads and Adobe Premiere Pro, a program most of us hadn't touched before. Communicati...