Hello again, ‘tis I, Dylan. Today, I’ll be writing about another Maker project, Vibrant Video. In this project, we learned about moviemaking and how to storyboard. It intertwined well with our last Humanities project, A War to End All Wars, as we made comics in that project and did some storyboarding in this one. We also both did a lot of preparation in each one before making final products. In the Humanities project, it was doing outlines of characters and writing stories before we coloured them all in. In this one, it was blocking and rehearsing before we filmed.

We started the project by refreshing ourselves with the program Clips. Clips is kind of like iMovie meets the normal camera app. You can pause videos while you film them to make the effect of having cuts or transitions and you can also add filters, music, stickers, effects, etc to your video. I found it really easy to figure out and thoroughly enjoyed working with it. We did basic videos with the app, which honestly I didn’t really enjoy and found myself getting distracted often while filming it, which unfortunately showed when the video was finished. I learned a good lesson from this and luckily it didn’t happen anymore throughout the project as I made sure to stay on track and stat focused which I’m very happy with myself for. After that, we learned about the first films made and watched the first motion picture ever produced. It was exciting, intense, romantic, dramatic and heartfelt. It was a ~2 second video of Thomas Edison sneezing. I really love how people payed what then was a fairly hefty sum of money just to see that. I’d do it honestly. I can completely understand how it must have seemed like magic to them. Well produced big budget movies today can seem like magic as well. Here’s the clip of the famous sneeze:

Heartwarming, isn’t it?

We also watched some of the first actual modern-ish movie. It was a western, and was about a true story of a train robbery. It was made in 1903 and was creatively titled “The Great Train Robbery”. After learning about silent films, we were tasked to make our own silent films, using Clips. I made mine with a friend and his dog. I’m actually really proud of it. We spend a while on it and I think it’s pretty good. Here it is:

Now, it might be a video, but it isn’t exactly “vibrant”. So next, we started making movies with colour. Believe it or not, there’s actually a lot of adjusting when switching to fully coloured, because then you have to worry about if things are contrasting well or what colours look nice next to each other. Nevertheless, we got to work on our next movies.

We made little tutorial videos on day to day things. My team and I made one on how to make friends. It was fun because making friends isn’t something you’re really given much instructions on, so it was fun to make some. Here’s the video:

I really enjoyed this project. As someone who works in the film industry, I enjoy doing this sort of thing. I also found it to be really cool to take a step back to behind the camera, and sometimes focus more on setting up the shots and directing rather than acting. I definitely learned a lot in this project. It was a nice break from the usual things we do and was quite refreshing after doing DI. Reflecting on this project, I honestly wish it was a little longer. I’ve had a blast doing it and I’m a little sad that it’s over.

That’s pretty much it. I hope you enjoyed all words of this blog post, and I’ll see you next time.

Bye!

-Dylan