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Investigation 2/28: Progress Report

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 supposed to be a short little film in which I hope to focus on doing some new creative things visually.

Mixing Man Pageant Music

While Man Pageant is still a few months away, I've already began working with the Special Events chairs to create the dance mix that the boys will dance to during the show. So far, I've mixed 5 songs together which equates to around 2 minutes of music. Mixing song hasn't been as difficult as I had originally expected it to be. The most important thing to have in mind is knowing that the songs you want to mix need to flow well into each other. Since different genres of music all have different feelings to them, there can be issues when transitioning between say a moderately paced rock song into a very fast tempo country song. While there are definitely ways that you should likely MacGyver two songs together, having a selection of songs that aren't too drastically different make the process much easier. Another thing I learned is that it is important to avoid simply just fading one song into another. Fading songs gives the mix a very "edited" and "unintentional" feeling to do. To counteract this, we've tried to use elements within each song as transitions. Similar sounding percussion and answering one song's line with another song's line have been two of the better ways we've used to transition so far.

Stand By Me x Sean Kingston

One of the songs we had attempted to use within the Man Pageant mix was Sean Kingston's Beautiful Girls. After listening to the song a couple of times to try and think of where it could fit into the mix, I noticed that the song had used the same bassline found in Ben E. King's Stand By Me. Once I figured this out, I couldn't unhear it which lead me to do the one thing that anybody would do, make a mash-up of the two songs. Using my little knowledge of mixing I managed to successfully create a mash-up that I think sounds pretty good. The purpose of doing this was really just to see if I could do it and I think that doing so gave me experience that I probably wouldn't have gotten without it.

Work Log

  • 2/22 - Continued work on general storyboard
  • 2/23 - Continued work on general storyboard
  • 2/24 - No Work
  • 2/25 - Juggled different ideas for film
  • 2/26 - Decided concrete idea for film
  • 2/27 - Worked on script
  • 2/28 - Worked on script

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