RUNning out of time…

Welcome back! It’s been awhile. I never thought I would miss writing blogs But here I am excited to be writing about my most recent project. The PLP teachers decided to welcome us back by giving us a challenging project with only 3 days to complete it. When I first heard the task I wanted to curl in a little ball and not think about school for a month but that wasn’t exactly an option so we jumped right in…

The first task was to create a video about our hobbies and to be honest I’m not very good at making videos at all. But like anything if you want to get better at something you’ve got to practice. So my first draft was…… interesting. But luckily for me it got better, my second draft/final video ended up being better then I thought. And I learnt a lot making those drafts. I learnt how to do voice overs in Clips but also how you can use story telling to talk about hobbies. When I first heard that we had to use a story mountain to talk about a hobby I was skeptical because how was I supposed to make singing sound interesting?? For reference here’s my story mountain..

Like all things in PLP I had to get creative. I decided to talk about joining choir. Without the story mountain this would have been a very boring video. If your curious this is what my story mountain looked like:

And now you probably want to see my video…. well here it is

When ever you make something in PLP you should always ask yourself what the competency is. For this project it was How might I design a solution to a problem, process, or challenge? So how did I? Well for this video I designed a video. This sounds weird but I feel like some of my shots are designed like you would design a poster. I’m really happy with how that made my video look because it made me look at making the video in a different way. I became more creative and artistic with the shots. But enough about me let me tell you about the big part of the project which is the “Gold Standard Video”. So we were asked to recreate a horror short film shot by shot, angle by angel, even the credits and sounds had to match. The short film is 1:17 long which doesn’t seem like a lot but my group discovered later that this takes longer then you think but you’re probably wondering what the film is so this is “Run”…

I learned the most when we were filming this project, though planning is important I didn’t learn as much as I did while we were outside. When we got outside for the first time we realized how important it was to have someone to play the video for you over an over again. Since I was filming I need to make sure I got the angles as close as possible to the original. I learnt a lot about problem solving on our feet. Like we had to figure out how to not make the camera wobble. But it was also great to see how everyone had a role in making it work every step of the way. For example Raymond did an amazing job planning. Then Dries showed me the video over and over again no matter how many times I asked, he was always there. And Keenan was the best actor and sound editor I could have imagined. Our first draft I thought was really impressive because I’ve never done nay kind of film making before, however the teachers had different expectations, a big the was our costume. Here’s the first costume:

The second day when we went back out to re film we had a good, a better log, and a better idea of what we were doing. I’m really glad we did a final draft because our second one was so much better! Our timing was pretty much perfect when you play them side by side, the sounds were almost perfect and Keenan did a great job mimicking the original actor. I’m really glad we did this project because I learned so many basic video skills and I learned a lot about editing. This whole project really pushed me out of my comfort zone and I’m glad it did. Here’s our final video…

This project also made me look at every single detail when making a video. For the future this will be very helpful because I’ll know better how to plan every shot.

If you want to see a little bit of behind the scenes here are some photos: