What’s up gang? I’m working on yet another blog post. This seems to be most of what I’m doing right now.😅 we’re currently finishing a project called Think Like a Movie Maker, and its about you guessed it, thinking like a tree! This project was super fun and not super “grind work” intensive. Grind work it kind of what we call the more studying and memorizing and stuff. Let me explain why this project was different.

The video skills

We worked on 4 different “video skills” that where kind of our milestones for this project. The product for each of these video skills was a short film using the guide for the individual skill. The first skill was “think like a movie maker”, which was pretty straightforward. The assignment was make a short film in an app called clips with a few basic movie making techniques like, adding live titles, adding music and photos with panning or zooming or posters and stickers and stuff. The next two where a bit more interesting. That video’s really bad, so I’m just gong to let your imagination run wild here.

“Framing shots and developing angles” and “planning and shooting”. The first one was again by ourself, and we just worked on making a silent film, so we could focus more on the angles and camera for the story as to the conversations or narration.

The third film was our first one with a group. Planning and shooting, we used the team to make a more planned film. We made a storyboard and had an good idea of what, where and who we needed to shoot. We did this in class time as well, but we didn’t film it in class, as that would’ve been too hectic with all the groups. The assignment for this one was making a tutorial video. We decided to teach the wonderful world how to walk down to the park which is right beside our school, and you can imagine the shenanigans that occurred as we filmed ourselves (away from the class and teachers) walking to the park.

The fourth film, again in a group was about using special effects. “Making the most of effects”, also in class time was probably the most fun one, just because we got to watch everybody’s crazy, silly videos about blowing up our peers, the White House and everything else under the sun. I don’t really have any words for this, we just kinda ran around trying to film as many bad attempts at special effects as we could. Here is our masterpiece:

Things I learned

This project didn’t have a driving question that I can sander, but I can confidently say that I learned a few things from this short project. I’m fortunate enough to have made quite a few short films in past and so I hade some experience and knowledge on the things we learned. I did learn a lot about the visual effects that I didn’t know before, that’s not something I’ve played around with before.

Thanks for reading this short little post about a short little project we did.

I hope you guys have a good rest of your day. Declan.