Kyle's Super Swag Film Blog

Once again, I've begun working on the pre-production stage of another film. Currently, I've felt that I have had a lack of ideas that I wanted to really pursue for films. It also felt like if I did have an idea, I wouldn't be able to stretch it out into a full film. However, over the past couple weeks I've managed to come-up with a decent idea that I think will make a decent little short film. The following is a collection of the pre-production work for this next film. Concept The concept that I have for this film involves a briefcase that when opened, releases a random event and resets time back to a set time. The briefcase is given to the protagonist with instructions to not open it. As we can expect, curiosity gets the best of the protagonist as he opens the case. The film then progresses as the case is constantly opened, it's contained chaos being let out, and time returning to back to just right after the case was received. After coming up with this concept I f

Typically within my weekly blogposts, I chose to focus on investigating a general topic that is either involved within what I am currently working on or is something that I am interested. But currently, I've been running out of new things to investigate each week. When I mentioned this to a few of my classmates, they said that they have been just describing what all they've been working on for the week. Since this week has been one of my busiest in a while, it should be a good opportunity to give a sort of progress report. Marking Period 3 Film Today also marks the end of the pre-production stage of my next film. I go more in-depth about the pre-production stage within my pre-production blogpost found here. A brief description of the film is that it is about a man and his curiosity to open a briefcase that was given to him. Each time the man opens the briefcase, something different happens before time ultimately rewinds back to the moment he was given the briefcase. The film is

Ever since the rise of digital cinema cameras over the past couple years, the debate of Film versus Digital has soared. All across the internet, you will see people argue over which is the superior format to use in order to produce a film. While there is not real answer as to which is the overall best format, both film and digital have their own strengths and weaknesses. Digital Digital has become the most popular format for the everyman. Phones and digital cameras can quickly take pictures and record them to digital memory for instant review. Recording with digital doesn't take any money out of your pocket other than the cost of the camera and recording media. If your shot doesn't look exactly like you wanted it, you can easily just delete the failed take and try again and again until things end up the right way. Since your digital photos and videos are essentially computer code, it is extremely easy to edit and manipulate them while having infinite flexibility to do so. Digit

Over the past few days I have been working on a variety of different videos for THON factor this upcoming Friday. Working on these different types of videos has taught me some new things that I might not have learned through only working on personal films. Here is a few interesting things that I've learned over the past week. Editing To Music With most of my previous films, music has really just been something that I added in towards the end of post production. While editing the promo video for THON factor, I selected the music prior to working on the visuals. This put me in a different situation as I would now have to make the visuals fit with the music. The only previous experience I had of this was with editing last year's Mini-THON recap video on the night of. The music track was prepared prior to editing and Tech Chair Georgea Hall had mentioned the importance of cutting on musical beats to add emphasis. After editing the promo video, I think I did a fair job at taking thi

Over the past couple weeks I have worked to complete the post production stage of the project. During this time I ended up redoing a large amount of work that I had completed during the production stage of the project. Now that I finally have a film that is completed, here are my thoughts and experiences about the post production process. Re-Doing The Film As I previously stated within my production post, I wasn't too happy with my progress on this film originally. The work that I had done didn't feel like it was coherent or had any quality to it. The footage that I had was really just random clips of nature and objects that I had intended to edit together with narration over it in order to make something that felt "emotional". After I completed my production blog post, I immediately began thinking of what I would need to do in order to save this film. While I know that this film is in no way perfect, I still feel that I made something presentable out of the ashes of

As someone who has been interested in learning more about color grading, I decided to look more into LUTs. Throughout my time as a film student, I’ve commonly heard the term used whenever I would watch YouTube videos about filmmaking. Despite hearing the term, I wasn’t entirely sure what exactly a LUT was. What Are LUTs? LUTs, also known as Look-Up Tables, are files used within color grading that are designed to quickly manipulate colors within footage. LUTs were originally meant as a way to synchronize visuals between different cameras. Due to different brands of cameras recording colors differently from one another, footage of the same scene from different cameras might look inconsistent. The solution to this would be to use a selected LUT on your footage to hopefully get more similar colors between the two cameras. While LUTs can still be used this way today, one use that has become more popular over the past years has been the use of LUTs as a quick way to color grade. By color gra