Skip to main content

Investigation 3/14 - THON Skit Reflections

Over the past week I worked with members of Mini-THON to film a skit that will be shown at the elementary schools. The focus of the skit was to teach the story of the Four Diamonds in a way that was both entertaining and easy for kids to understand. As the Technology Chair, my duty for this project was to serve as both the cinematographer and editor while other chairpersons acted and directed. The following is some of my thoughts about working on this project.

Shooting

Due to myself acting within my previous film, I haven't had the opportunity in a while to solely serve as a project's cinematographer. However, due to one of the Mini-THON Overalls taking charge as the director for this skit, my only duty was to be the one behind the camera. The amount of time we had to produce this skit was very limited, so when I arrived at the school on Friday to film, the only amount of preparation work that we had was a script. Despite this, I worked with the director to come up with ways to frame the shots that she had wanted for each scene. Actually shooting the skit went fairly well, with us having a "run & gun" approach to it. We began with filming all of our interior scenes at the start, in order to best make use of time and the space that we had. Following that, we relocated outside and spent the rest of the time running around the school and getting shots in different locations to create different settings within the skit, despite just filming on school property. The final product looks decent visually, with some standout shots being our few tracking shots and an attempt of forced perspective.

Editing

Editing the skit was a pretty fun process. Most of the more recent videos that I've worked on have had a more professional and serious feel to them. With the target audience being elementary school students, the skit ended up with a fun and childlike feel. The actual process of editing was easy but tedious. Putting each clip into the timeline and lining it up with the relevant narration was simple but the challenge lied within putting the polish on the video. Denoising and color grading took a good amount on each clip to make sure that it was right but the most annoying part was dealing with audio. Recently, I've gotten into the habit of recording audio from an external microphone on the left audio channel and using the camera's built in microphone as scratch audio on the right audio channel. I mainly due this in order to have an emergency back-up track in case there would be any issues with the external microphone. So far, I haven't had any issues but implementing this change into my editing workflow was definitely annoying as I now had to be sure to put a "Fill Right With Left" effect on all of my audio tracks. This paired with having to denoise most tracks and having to try to negate some wind sounds made editing audio not very fun. My favorite part of editing was probably adding music to accompany the skit as I feel it really pulls the video together.

The skit can be found here on google drive: Link To Skit On Google Drive

Work Log

  • 3/8 - Script changes
  • 3/9 - Misc prep for film
  • 3/10 - Filmed THON videos
  • 3/11 - Eagle Scout Board of Review (No Work)
  • 3/12 - Filmed skit
  • 3/13 - Scheduled shooting dates
  • 3/14 - Edited various THON videos
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Elements and Principles of Cinematography

Bird's Eye  Curved Lines  Diagonal Lines  Emphasis  Formal Balance  Framing  Horizontal Lines  Informal Balance  Leading Lines  Movement/Rhythm Proportion/Scale  Repetition  Rule of Thirds  Simplicity  Unity  Variety  Vertical Lines  Worm's Eye
Post a Comment
Read more

Critique Reflection

(Submitted on 11/8/18 since I was sick) For our recreation of the scene from High School Musical, I felt that our process of recreating what was present in the actual scene was one of the better things we did for our project. When comparing our scene to the original, I feel that our shots were lined up very closely to what was originally present. As for what I feel I need to improve on, the main thing would be preparation. There were many points that we should've been more prepared which can be seen in the final film. Since we weren't prepared, some of our shots weren't close to what was seen in the original and some audio issues were present that could've been avoided if we had taken time to prepare before shooting. My strengths for this assignment would probably be my knowledge of the scene and trying to plan by day for what we needed to do. The weakness that I had was not being able manage my group as well as I felt I could. This prevented us from getting work d
Post a Comment
Read more

End of MP 1 Blog Post

After now reaching the end of the first marking period of the 2019-2020 school year, I am able to reflect back upon the work that I have completed so far. Intention Definition & Exploration Of Ideas Having no prior experience in any particular area of film, I set out to choose a topic to focus on that would allow me to help narrow down my focus. The area I chose to focus on was documentary and mockumentary styled film making. I made this choice with the intention to be able to explore both formal and less formal ideas while also not relying on having to create an entire original idea by myself. The topic of my film (The Game) was chosen because of my familiarity and pre-existing personal opinions about it. Planning Planning an entire production entirely by myself was a change of pace in comparison to how I worked in previous years. I began the planning process by typing out all of my thoughts in order to help establish what I am trying to do. Once I developed an idea for th
Post a Comment
Read more