Hello to my blog readers!
This past week in Media Studies has been super exciting. First, we got to choose groups for our new project, the one word film. For the assignment, we were given a random word that we had to develop into a short, one minute film. It seemed like a simple task, but as my group worked to develop our idea, we found it much more complicated than we thought. The reason being we weren't allowed to use any sort of sound in the video, it had to be completely silent. Because of this, we had to rely completely on shots, angles, and camera/editing techniques to convey the word we received clearly.
As a group, we came up with a storyline and developed it using a brainstorming sheet (attached below). Additionally, we drew up a rough storyboard that was incredibly useful for planning what each shot would include. In fact, we followed it almost completely and it helped my group visualize what the film would look like without having recorded any content.
Our story starts with two characters who are studying together, a boy and a girl. In order to establish that they already knew each other, we included a laptop in between them that they both glance at as they "study". While studying, the guy then drops his paper. Seeing this, the girl picks it up and decides to draw a heart on the back. She hands it back to the guy and he smiles, deciding to fold the paper to a heart. Once again, he hands the paper to the girl and she smiles, resting the paper beside her.
If it wasn't completely obvious already, the word we received was "loving". Our group loved filming the scenes together in the courtyard at school. Our goal for the project was to effectively convey the feeling of a relationship past friendship between the two characters, and I think that for our first time making and editing a video, we did it pretty well. However, if I were given the chance to tweak a couple things in the project, I would definitely add in some more film techniques such as eye line matches, cutaways, and maybe even a graphic match (which would have been difficult to execute properly in the school setting). In our next project, I would also work on making the shots flow better in some parts. However, some things we did well/included were shots/counter shots, zooms, and various pans/tilts to help show movement (amongst other things).
In my opinion, the hardest part of the project was the editing portion. After filming the clips, my group and I imported them into Adobe Premier Pro and worked together to fit them together as best we could. Since it was all out first times using the software, it took some time to get used to the commands, but we eventually got the hang of the basics in order to cut segments effectively. I found it really interesting that some people's job is to edit for a living, it seems really cool and creative.
After editing the clips, we watched the video and made some last minute changes before submitting. Overall, my group was pretty proud of our project, even though it may not be perfect the skills we learned while producing the "One Word Film" will likely help us improve next time.
If you would like to see my project, here's the link!
OWF_Sarmiento_Hernandez_Sosa.mp4
