Andrew's ecomm blog

  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.