This week was dedicated to just movie making. We were asked to do three things this week. The first was to take our previous foley challenge sounds and piece our work together with our fellow students to make a new story. I remade my foley sounds into a story of “How I Met Your Grandmother”. I worked with the “vintage-ness”, if you will, of the original Chaplin Movie to remake it into something more familiar. But since the video was clearly an old one I wanted to stay true to the visual aspects and used a old rag time song, similar to one that would probably be used.

The second assignment I did was a comparative piece on dancing. I chose to do breakdancing and uprocking (a predecesor to breakdancing). Some of the clips I originally chose to exemplify these two types of dance I was unable to upload onto ilivid so I had to choose new pieces but I think the video came out really well. I really enjoyed playing around with Final Cut Pro, a video editing software, because it made the really daunting idea of making movies pretty simplified.

The last video assignment I did was the top ten moments (in my humble opinion) of Oprah! I chose moments that were very culturally influencing. I chose not to put music to this piece because I felt that it might seem both overwhelming and jumbled since so much of this video’s story was based on the talking interactions of the show. This was the assignment where I really deepened my understanding of buffers between the clips and I think that each of them really gave the viewer sometime so soak in each clip and prepare for the next.

This week I had some difficulty with the video editing in that I had never used Mac’s Final Cut Pro before, so there was a learning curve there for me. The past two weeks assignments gave me a new found appreciation for everyone involved in the creation of cinematic movies, seeing as I had difficulty making short clips I could only imagine the amount of patience and work that goes into making 2 hour long movies! I think I also really learned a new aspect to storytelling through digital media, that being the influence of audio with visual. I think that audio effects really tie a video story together in a way that the visual alone can not do. This is not to say that one is more vital than the other, but undoubtably there is a need for audio and this was really exemplified I think in my Just Dance movie. Again can I just say how shocked I am that I can do all this?!

Until next week,

Chelsea