day 18 response

Overall I think this summer semester was one that was well worth my time. At least now I have some credit hours done with. I think the first few weeks with the film create/film destroy and the animation process was fun. But I also liked the chance to direct the one take film, although there were some things I wish I could've improved on while making it. Other than that this class was real pleasure to take, my classmates were a pleasure to work with, and Dr.Silva was a pleasure to have as an instructor and I recommend this class to anyone who wants to take it in the future.

day 17 response

Thursday night we had the "One Night Stand" party at the Silva house. I went ahead and tried to get there as early as I could but made it there in time all by myself. Our class helped mainly set up the decorations and deal with electronic devices while the editing class came with just food. Around 8:30 we started the showing of all the videos selected to premiere. The videos were from our class and also the editing class's as well. It a fun night viewing everyone's different videos done over the semester, and I was also thankful to have two of the videos I worked on show. I felt it was a good and fun way to end the summer class on a high note.

day 16 response

Tuesday was nothing really special. In fact all we did really was discuss the end of the summer party that was to be held at Dr. Silva's house on Thursday. We went over everything that we could think of that would be required for a party like this. When it came to assigning positions, James and I were assigned to be location managers. Around 8:00 that night, we both rode together to the Silva house and looked around for good positions to up everything. All seemed real simple and then we just wait Thursday to arrive.

day 15 response

When we were about to feature our one take videos to the class, I was not really excited about the one that my group did over the weekend. Making it was fun, but it wasn't as fun we when we actually saw it in class. Once again I dislike my work solely based on the decisions I made during production and editing. I thought to myself that this movie would seal my fate as a filmmaker, and as it turned out, as a director, I don't know if it's my decision making, or that I have a lot of ambition but no talent.

day 14 - filmbeatz and last project

We showed our film beatz projects today in class. After a long day yesterday of shooting and editing (which took practically the rest of the day to do by 11:00 by the way), we were all pretty much nervous about presenting our work. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t turn in my project properly, so I had to go back and export it the right way, with some help from Maura as usual. Since after I posted my video, it was initially the first one to go. I think everyone got a chuckle out of it, especially at the end where I had added the snorting sound effect for a little comic relief. All of the other videos looked very good as well, in fact some, if not most of them looked like music videos. After we presented our projects, it was time to move on our last assignment which is to create a 1 minute one take video. We looked at two examples from the films Annie Hall and The Graduate to a basic Idea of how we would construct our videos either similarly or originally. The ten of us in the class were broken into two groups of five with different genres to tackle. My group, for which I am the director apparently, is tasked with making a scifi zombie musical. This alone got me worried because, while I could probably do the zombie genre by itself, I the scifi and musical aspects of it could prove to be a little difficult. Nonetheless, our group got together during the last remaining minutes of the class and discussed what our plan would be for the rest of the week when we start shooting the movie.

day 13 - viewings and new project

Today was the day that we got present and view all of our animation projects. I kind of more excited to see how our animation turned out since we edited it yesterday, but also at the same time, I was a little too see how ours compared to the others. The group to go was Viet’s group, and their animation was pretty well done, almost professional like. The style looked very vivid and the motion of it looked very clean. I was surprised that they used the idea of a man smoking a cigarette all of a sudden turns into a cockroach. Maura’s group’s project was up next, and it a little bit more abstract than the other one in which it features a butterfly hatching and flying around the foreground. The part where the sound pitch suddenly goes up higher is what I think got everyone in the class a little scared because they weren’t expecting it. It then transitions into various clip out art pieces that form a woman who slowly ages as the pictures goes on, and then the same butterfly appears and then dissolves in the shape of a skull. Our group’s project was the last one to show, and it received a somewhat warm welcome response from the class.

The difficult part was determining which ones should play at the finale of class, Dr. Silva thought all three of them looked eligible enough to be featured, but it was a lot more complicated than that, as each film had its flaws. So we did the process by elimination strategy that we did for the audio projects. Each film had meet a certain requirement and criteria in order to pass inspection. In end, thankfully, all three films passed inspection and could be featured in the finale, which pleased me the most, personally.

The last thing we did today was discuss our new project assignment which is about creating a film with “beatz”, like montage editing. We were divided into groups of two this time, with me teaming up with Paul and we discussed what our battle plan would be for this project. Hoping that everything goes as well as planned and that we just have fun with it.

day 12 - project continued

Thursday was just the continuation of our animation process. I, of course, was the first person in the classroom per usual, so I just waited for Knox to arrive first and then we waited for Natalie to arrive later. Once all three of us were together, we immediately went to work on continuing the animation process that we left the day before. I acted as camera operator the whole period, and took the remaining shots of Knox’s 200 frames. After I had shot all of Knox’s frames, it was time for Natalie to animate her 200 frames, by this time Knox had to leave early for work. We also had to change out cameras since we had to change the lens and focus of the first camera. So it was just me and Natalie all by ourselves to finish the project. As we went along, we decided to just make stuff up in order to fill in the gaps between sequences and to make up for all 200 frames to be shot. Also worth mentioning is the fact that as I was shooting the pictures, the battery on our new camera was on one bar, and blinking red. At this point, we were both nervous that the camera would soon die on us and delete everything that we all worked on, so we just tried as best we could to go ahead and animate as much as we possibly could before the camera shut off. Thankfully in the end we finished just in time for us to complete the project, turn off the camera, clean up our work station, and then make plans to meet up on Sunday in the edit lab to edit the project with a soundscape.

day 11 - project

My group started working on our animation project today. At the start of it, we had originally planned to animate it with charcoal and sand, but seeing that Maura’s group also wanted to animate their project with charcoal, our group decided to just animate the entire film with sand. It sounded like a daunting task, but since our film required the use of color, sand was our best option. We also planned who would animate each of the three stages of the storyboard. I went ahead and started animate the first stage, which showed the formation of the character, Pilgrim, and his acknowledgment of his own existence. Natalie served as the “director”, while Knox acted as the camera operator or in this case button pusher. We wanted to use black sand like before, but due to limited resources, we went with blue sand instead. It was quite a job just to animate a single frame at a time, and trying to animate the character perfectly for that matter. Unfortunately, Natalie had to leave early, so it was just Knox and I left to finish up as much as we could. After we took 200 pictures for my stage of the storyboard, Knox went on and began to animate the second stage, while I took the pictures this time. We had gotten around 207 pictures before taking a lunch break at Chick-Fil-A around 3:00. When we came back, we started again and moved along quite nicely, ending up with about 273 pictures before calling it a day for today. Tomorrow we can hopefully finish up with the project and then add sound effects later on.