Weekly Reflection

So I forgot to blog about Saturday so I am going to add it in here. On friday we talked to Jim about helping us put it on a DVD with a play button. He told us that it would be better if we put the credits in our movie using Final Cut because sometimes iMovie can degrade the quality of the film. So on Saturday Jim came in and helped me put in a title and credits in Final Cut. Once he showed me how I was on my own. I wanted the titles like starring and edited by to be bigger then the names listed below. The only way to do that was make several clips with different names and try to line them up properly. After trying for almost an hour to get it to work I gave up and decided to use spacing instead of size for an effect. That looked just as good if not better then what I was trying to create for the last hour. Now all we have to do on Monday is move it into iDvd, if I'm correct, and add a menu with a play button and make a DVD.

Hours worked: 1.5

I enjoyed this week much more then the week before. Editing can take you anywhere. It is what you make out of the footage you have. The week before consisted of walking around and gathering all of the footage we needed. Following people from class to class to driving around campus to get shots of buildings was what our first week consisted of.

This week we took this ordinary footage and pieced it together to make art. There are parts in our video that reflect the lyrics of the song by the special effects that we used. For instance part of the lyrics in our song are “ Twisting my stomach into knots.” For that part of the video we took footage of someone running down the hill at Polar Swim and overlapped faded, rotated clips to have the effect of a knot.

This week I learned so much more about Final Cut Pro and cool editing effects you can do with it. There are things in our video that I never thought were possible. We have a shots of Orlando and Will Cudahy spitting on the mic. We faded both clips and put them on top of each other. Because they were shot from different angles it worked out beautifully. I wish that I could list all of the special effects that we used but that would be spoiling the video for all of you so that is all I will tell you about.

I also learned there is a program where you can fix or change the color of anything in your video. This editing software is called Color. This was thanks to a few lessons with Sam Johnson during his independent major class with Jim Cox. I new one could change anything in a still photo using photoshop but I didn’t know that it was possible to do that for a video. I didn’t use it very much in our video. I fixed two different shots where the camera had focused on the light in the window making the window brighter and the rest of the room darker then it actually was. Other then that I just learned that it is possible to change the color of someone shirt or the wall in a room. It is also possible to tint the whole shot a different color. It would be possible to make a shot look like one is looking through night vision goggles.

Although I may not use Final Cut again to make a video it has still be a blast learning new things about the software and making the video. Having a completed video is great accomplishment that I will enjoy looking back on later in life.

hours worked: 24.5

Time Posted: 11:35