Hello again. I’m being forced to do another blog post. And again with the maker subject. This time it is reflecting on our first term of videos. This reflection should include around ten videos so it will be pretty long. In this post I will cover the videos and if there was a blog post on them I will links to that so you can learn more on each of the videos and the process of making them. So lets get into this big blog post.
The first video we did was the four shot film. This was our first video assignment and it was pretty simple. We were split into groups and we had to make a film using only four camera angles. Ours included four angles but with many different shots from those four angles. Sadly I don’t have a copy of this assignment.
the second film we planned for and filmed was the ghost town film. This was a group project. This was a maker film that we did on the Alberta field school. This was our first properly planned for film. It was a silent film based in the three valley gap heritage ghost town. We started by planning out our plot and our script. This was easy because there was no dialogue but we still had to do it. We then got to the real challenge filming it. We had one day to find locations and film the entire video. I thought our final draft was pretty funny. Here it is.
The next video we did was the How does place impact who we are video. This was one of the two main humanities projects so far. This was the first and this was the first time we had to make a video solo. This was also the first time we used milestone to make a video. The video was a very tough one to make and it included multiple interviews and multiple different scenes. The basis for my video was how does place impact wildlife. One thing I liked about this video is the background footage. So if you want more on the process of this video and what we did for it here is the link to my Specific post. And here is the final draft.
After the humanities video we started on the next video, big surprise. This time it was another maker video. This is one of the maker main projects. This time it is called running a remake. For this we had to recreate a film on YouTube. The film is called run and it is a horror film. Here it is.
We had to use lots of different pieces of tech to make this film. We used a mic to create our own sound effects and we used multiple things to create spooky nosies for the film. One problem we had was finding the right soundtrack. We figured it out by looking through all of garage band and toying around with all the soundboards and such. Another challenge for this video was getting all the pre production work done. We got it done by communicating effectively. In total I think we did a good job recreating this film. Here is our final project.
https://youtu.be/kvyOztzKUfY
After the run project we got started on the next video. We are now going into the next humanities project. This project is on revolutions. We did four videos for this unit. Each video was on a certain revolution. For every revolution there was going to be a certain format. There were four format options, animation/explanation, act it out, rap, animation. For each video we were working in the same group. In my group was Kaden, Brenton, and Jude. I am now going to talk about the first one. If you want more detail on this subject here is a link to my blog post on it. https://www.blog44.ca/thomasj/2019/11/18/revolution/
The first revolution video we did was on the French Revolution. The video format our group decided on was the animation/explanation. This was our first video with this group so at first our communication was not great but we got all the pre production in on time. At once our group ran into a problem. The problem we were were facing was that we didn’t have any props whatsoever for this film. So our group decided to make the best out of the school and its props. We used a hallway with a bunch of posters and education things on the wall. We where very precise and got the entire video filmed in one day. We then edited. This is where we ran into some difficulties with tech. Our mic did not work in the filming do we tried our best to fix it. Here is our video.
The next video we did was the American revolution video. For this video we decided that we were going to do a act it out or a dramatization. For this we got right to work. After the not so good last video our communication skills had gotten a lot better. We got our pre production routine pretty good this time and got all of our stuff in on time. We used our text group to our advantage getting it all done. Our goal this time was to have no tech problems so we had to go through all the scenes and make sure that they would work a long with the music and the soundtrack. We got our filming done. We thought it was pretty good but we wanted to make the narration well done and a good explanation. Let me know in the comments how we did. Here is our video.
Then right after we moved on right to the third video. The third revolution we studied was the Russian revolution. After two revolution videos we got the whole thing down. The format we chose for this final video was a rap. The pre production was a little harder for me this time as I’m no hotshot at writing rap songs but I pulled through. One thing I used to overcome this problem was rhyming websites. These were websites where you put a word in and it give you all words even close to rhyming with it. One problem we had was communication as some group mates where away on some days. We arranged a day where we could all be here and got filming. The post production was hard to as we had to make a rap beat. We used garage band to make our own beat and then the song was done. Here it is.
Now one to our final revolution video. We chose to do the Russian revolution for this video. The reason we chose the Russian revolution was because we had lots of props for it and the information was fresh in our mind. The first problem we encountered was that Kaden was not going to be here for most of the time we had to make this video as he was away in Vegas. So we decided to do our best without him. We chose a information/act it out for this video. We went through pre-production again and got ready to film. We filmed over two days and accumulated pictures for the voice overs. We decided to go with and new route and did acting scenes to support our voice overs. The final problem we ran into was communication. On te last night we failed to get some revisions done and that lead to a not so good video. But that is a learning opportunity for us to get some feedback and try our best to move on. Here is our final video.
The final video I am going to talk about in this post is the take your kid to work day video. This is a PGP video where we filmed our take your kid to work day experience and made it into a movie. To start out for this we had to make a story telling diagram and survey questions. The survey question were for the mandatory interview we had to have in the video. If you want more on the process here is a link to my blog post. Anyway the first challenge I had was that I forgot to take a mic to the day for the interview. The solution I used was the feature on iMovie that turns the volume up. The second problem was that we didn’t have a lot of free time to film as there was already a day plan for the kids. The solution for this problem I found was that I would film whenever possible. Anyway here is my video that I came up with from that day.
Thank you very much for reading my very very long blog post and I will be back with more videos and more blog posts soon. If you have any questions just ask me in the comments.