So this time we were filming a chase scene. Which mean lots of action, two or more actors, and a truck-full of running. The rule of filming a chase scene successfully is to never stay on one shot for too long. Stay on one shot for too long, and you have lost some of the excitement. This wasn’t a problem for me. What was a problem was continuity. I also had to reshoot a good deal of it over for some reason. My poor guy Aden had to wear the same shirt for three days. It was a jumbled mess and we all hated it. After shooting all the film, I assembled it and got my boy Garri-san to say a line. Once again I had to get music from Artlist.io (check them out). I also got effects from footagecrate.com. I was looking for kind of a biomechanical feel, so I used lightning and targeting HUD effects, which I feel, worked really well with what I was working with. The electricity worked so well, and while the HUD required outside text, it still worked really well. Overall, I really like chase scenes and would probably do another one, if given the chance.
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This time we worked with premade shots to create a horror scene. Yup, no satisfaction at doing crap ourselves the right way after four hours of wasted time, laughter, and rage quitting. This time we had to edit a bunch of stuff to make somewhat of a chase scene, somewhat of a struggle scene, and somewhat of a dialogue scene. Everyone had to do theirs individually, so if you see my boy, Garry-san with something similar, no one copied each other, well, mostly. The saddest part was all getting rid of all the darn bloopers. Or maybe it was that sometimes when I need a clip to run a little longer, they stop it. On the outside I was alright, but on the inside I was a great wall of fury and demise. Though being chased by an axe-wielding maniac would be scary. The video sparked no emotion without scary music. Cue Artlist.io. I love these people, I would recommend this to people making crap like me. The most recent cause of torture was a short story. So easy. Well, not really. We had to do it without dialogue. Oddly enough, I already knew what I wanted to do. I drew a few storyboards and decided to wing the rest. After bugging my boy, Henry, a few million times, we had a crew for the set. We shot me doing some things, and some objects doing sorta things. It took about three days to do it all, one day I had to record at ma house, and so I was tired of it all. There were some creative shots, one of them being, the camera facing our school’s security monitor. After I had wasted time awkwardly dragging hallway trashcans into bathrooms, I was at last ready to edit. I pulled a sweet effect off of footagecrate( go check it out), and assembled it all adding in a few custom-made effects. The next day I found some music. Let me tell you, I was forced to edit one song over and over and over again. I actually like using little to no dialogue. I think it is overrated. Shout-out to my boy Henry for putting up with my crap and getting a nice shot of my rear end. Peace out. We had to do another PSA. Whoop-dee-doo. Rather than doing mine sad and alone with help from Henry, him, Garrison (otherwise known as Garri-san), and I did a bullying PSA. We would not look stupid like stupid depressed kids; we would look like stupid jerks. And boy do I mean stupid. Garrison was the brain of the operations, Henry was the midget bully, and I was the victim with longer legs and a lack of will to live. We set off to work with nothing but a whim, a camera, three PC’s, and I guess the other two had a will to live. I drew some art that makes your five-year-old look like Leonardo da vinci. As soon as my “friends” finished laughing at my masterpiece, we recorded. We had to shoot about 7 times. At that time, I learned that being a bullying victim is painful, very painful. When we were done shooting, everything was out of my hands, as Garrison set off to edit. This experience taught me a lot. Three boys running into a bathroom with a camera looks weird. Trying to shoot while a guy is relieving himself is near impossible. But most importantly, PSA’s are the Devil’s spawn. After a week or two of vacation, it has officially been a decade since I worked with premiere pro and adobe audition. And with that amount of time in between workdays, a refresher was in order. I started by dinking around with effects. I made a tennis player bend with reality. I made anti-gravity. Heck, at one point I made the PSA actor Henry, cheers bro, and I look like degenerates in our PSA. Let me tell you, it is hard to take something seriously when the video is waving around and the people in it are rippling like a flag in a tornado. However, I also created a false sunset in an outside shoot using effects, so I wasn’t being a complete idiot. Back to being and idiot, I went to working in adobe audition, our audio editing program, and created a ten second audio ad, then set the frequency to maximum pain.
The class assignment this time was a to make a public service announcement (PSA). The first step in making it was deciding what I would be advocating. After two or three days of watching PSAs, I decided to make a depression PSA. The good thing about Public Service Announcements is the fact that not all of your time must be spent on actors and lighting. Some of it can just be black screen with text and a bit of fade here and there. Add a voiceover here and there, and voila, solid product, the acting could literally be put to a minimum. The bad thing about a PSA is balancing what you can, cannot, should, or should not do. You may be wondering what I am talking as should or should not. Well my teacher, Mr. Holt, told me that he had a few kids suffering from mental illness, represented by derpiness. Another example is the scare tactics used for PSAs like anti-smoking or such. Probably the worst part of making the PSA was shooting the scenes. As you can see in the first shot the sink area didn’t have a lot of room for cameras, but I still powered through. This time, we had to create a full-on T.V. commercial. That scared me because audio and video are two very different sides of the same coin. I think, for me, it was hard because of my organization skills (or lack thereof). It’s fun because, it’s a lot harder for people to get the wrong idea about your product. This time around though, my approach threw me for a loop, rather than pulling up my modern salesperson approach to selling my product on commercials, think commercials for products like gamefly, I decided to put the viewers in my games world so they can watch the event unfold(Don’t expect that to be in the actual product by the way). Unfortunately, a low budget, commercial for a fiction game is just that, low budget. That did not mean that I was miserable though. Shooting scenes was exciting. Shout-outs to my boys, Aden and Henry, without them, the world would be full of me. We all know that would be horrible. Anyway, probably the ugliest part of making that horrendous commercial was making the storyboards. I know I have good imagination, but it drains you when you have to put a ball-and-chain on it. Anyway, here it is. The horrible horror. We were learning about the importance of audio, and so, to grasp it, we had to make a radio commercial. This really gave me a kicker, because the product did not have to be real. After about ten minutes of hardcore thinking, I came up with nothing. Then it hit me. Why make a product up, when you were making one fresh off the works. Therefore, after a lot of brainstorming and a lot of chuckling, I knew that I would be “selling” my game Quarantine. The good thing about a strictly audio product is that you do not have to rely on people doing anything other than talking. And when you or someone else makes a mistake, it can easily be fixed. The bad thing is, it’s a commercial, so you have to keep it short and simple. This means a lot of cutting out breaths that takes seconds up of my time, and revising my script. Probably the worst that ever happened to me was recording the audio. The first time, I took excessively long to finish, and the editing didn’t work. So I went back to record again, and learned that a tone of voice can make all the difference. So after about three minutes of wasted time, I had my voice down on a drive. |
AuthorI am biracial and I love Kingdom Hearts. I am a child of God. I like to read, and watch Star Wars, the matrix, inception, lord of the rings, and other geek pride projects. I am also getting into an old video game franchise called metal slug. Archives
March 2020
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