Personal Planning, Reflection and Development

Evaluation of Second Year

I have enjoyed my second year on this course a lot more than the first I’d say, I feel this is because it becomes a lot more focused upon the areas that you become interested within. This allowed me to focus upon my filming which I have particularly enjoyed this year, it has inspired me to sort out my camera charger and start to produce my own skateboard DVD with some good mates, this shall be coming out online in November as part of a side project that I have going. I feel that I needed this inspiration as I was lacking enthusiasm towards the start of the year and now I’m fully back onto the filming skateboarding route especially with the sun being as amazing as it has been recently.

Future Cinema

The first project of the second year we did was Future Cinema, I found this quite interesting and we looked at some cool concepts that sparked some ideas.
We ended up putting on a DJ and visual projections within my local indoor skate park, this was definitely a lot of fun but didn’t turn out as well as we’d first foreseen.
Unfortunately we were a little disappointed with our work and didn’t account for poor lighting conditions, which definitely harmed us. I’d love to try this kind of thing again as I think that projecting into an environment makes people react to the situation. You’d never normally experience this kind of thing within a skate park. I’m proud of the fact we were creating an immersive experience for everyone that attended though.
Everybody loved Lewis, the DJ, he definitely helped us create some sort of atmosphere through music and with him being an ex-skateboarder he enjoyed being there and getting involved. I’m planning to do a little more work with him involving his hip-hop DJ-ing and turntablist skills. He is a very handy contact for me to have.

Performance video.

This unit was all about music/performing music. This was tricky for us as Jack was the only one of us with any musical talent.
I’m quite happy with what we achieved but given that we all managed to read the brief incorrectly and interpreted it the wrong way, I feel we did reasonably well. I wish we’d understood fully at the start of the brief so we could’ve created a musical masterpiece, which would’ve allowed us to fully experiment with a lot more musical techniques. This was definitely a fun project; it’s definitely up there with any of the skateboarding that I’ve filmed anyway! I especially had fun playing with garage band and being able to use it as a midi controller definitely made this project a lot more interesting. This is because I have the most minimal musical talent. This allowed me to feel as though I was contributing something to the group because Jack can play drums and Olly plays a little guitar. I liked the fact that I could switch to any instrument within garage band so this allowed us to use a lot of different noises within our final piece.  The video does need a little sound mastering so all the levels are correct but I feel that it still sounds ok, not amazing all the same.
I really enjoyed the Wii-tar concept, it’s really clever and I’ve shown many people about it after the project and it has amazed them. I think that is an achievement itself as I’m passing on a fun aspect that we had whilst we played our  ‘music’.
Our video was wicked; I really enjoyed the end result. But there is only two faults I can pick out of it, the first I already mentioned which was the mastering of the levels which we didn’t take much into consideration at all. This would’ve helped anyone that watches it to determine it isn’t just noise and that there were individual sounds.
The second problem was that our genre was experimental and we based it around the terror of war, if you look at the video we all look far too happy to be portraying such a horrible time. I’d like to reshoot that scene and make us look rugged and try getting some emotion out of us. I feel that this would’ve helped us create what we were looking to perceive.

Professional Project

Coyote Was Going There.

This was a production by AUCB students at The Lighthouse Theatre in Poole. It was a fun experience for us and was the third play that we’ve had the chance to film over the two years on the course. It didn’t quite go as planned which is unfortunate as its part of our professional project. We first experienced problems during the break in between the first and second half of the show.  This was because it was still dark in the theatre and Olly accidentally tried to put a tape in upside down and it jammed the camera. We had to switch Jack’s camera which was positioned at the back of the theatre as the wide shot to where Olly’s was on the right hand side. If this hadn’t have happened I think our footage would’ve come out a lot better as there are some parts where characters go out of shot where only Jack’s wide shot could’ve got the shot.
We also experienced problems with capturing as a lot of the camera ports were broken/extremely dodgy but we eventually somehow got around this.
The editing of the first half of the show went well as we still had selection of all three cameras but the second half was far more difficult. I think we salvaged something from this but if we could shoot this production again it would be of the highest quality and professionalism.

Matt White.

For me this was one of the easiest things I’ve had to edit during this professional project as I was lucky enough to just be given the clips. Matt is a good friend and I’ve filmed/edited for him before so I know his style of riding and how he’d like his riding to be portrayed. The hard part was creating a video that had a decent flow and kept the viewer interested and I spent several hours re-editing the video just to get that perfect build up to the last trick.
All of the sponsors were very happy with Matt’s riding and I’m happy that I was a part of his biggest and best video so far. This is the kind of exposure that I need to be getting as a videographer.

Ship of Fools.

This was another production put on by AUCB held at Pavilion Dance, the show was great and we all really enjoyed working on it. It didn’t take long for us to set up our cameras which is always a bonus. We recorded the dress rehearsal on a wide shot and sat to watch the show so we could take notes on key scenes and shots we should be using.
With all of that planned and the fact that we were using one fully wide static camera and one controlled by us we took it in turns to operate it. I was happy with how my footage came out but the audience blocked one of the key scenes which was a monologue by one of the characters. We had to reposition quickly to make sure we got the majority of the shot.
When we got around to capturing tapes is where we had the most problems out of all the projects, it was mainly a problem with camera ports and we’re still trying to get this production sorted.

The Longest Day; Music video and live show.

We had big plans for The Longest Day, first of which was to shoot their first music video. This was to entail a post apocalyptic situation, similar to the film ‘The Road’. We discussed and developed ideas with them but unfortunately due to their work commitments and problems we had with borrowing equipment this video never happened.
This is why we shot a live show with them in Portsmouth at the Railway Rifle Club. The venue wasn’t the greatest and unfortunately there was only about 15 – 20 people there which didn’t create the best atmosphere but the band still played exceptionally.
This had to be my favourite part of the professional project although it was a back-up it was one of the best experiences I’ve had during the two years on the course.
We had a few problems during this part of the project (Except for being able to find the venue) and that was two of the cameras shot in 720p and the other was in standard DV format. This means we must be a lot more careful whilst setting up gigs like this. Another large aspect was the lighting, a lot of the time shots were dark and a third of the time you couldn’t really see what the band were doing.
I believe we’re now going to re edit the video and improve all the sound levels and adjust the lighting within After Effects.

Course Evaluation

During the course of the year I’ve discovered one main thing, the more I decide to sway away from this course and get a job within the more I’ve enjoyed filming and editing again. I know this may sound bad at first but I think it’s important to rediscover that initial love that you have for something. That love started with filming skateboarding. I’ve definitely enjoyed everything that I’ve had the chance to do over this year especially everything to do with The Longest Day. They’ve been a lot of fun and are a very talented band. I’d love to be able to put my name on one of their videos as it didn’t work out for our professional project.
I think that I’ve learnt a lot about trying to be professional at all costs and when you aren’t it hurts you. This is something that I’ll definitely try to take with me with every job I have as why bother doing a job at a low standard.
Organisation and time management skills need to be improved following this year as a lot of the work that I’ve been involved within have been very disorganised and scraped us through or completely last minute. These aspects have definitely hurt our grades but in hindsight I’d love to give each of these projects another crack because I’d make sure there were to the highest quality and to of a professional standard.
I’ll be starting as an apprentice in agricultural engineering, this is the complete opposite end of the spectrum to Digital Media but I think this will encourage me to go out and film a lot more because I’ve learnt a lot of skills over these two years. But to be completely honest all that I want to portray within any video I’ve filmed or edited is fun.

Coming soon, need to be scanned in! But this shall include rough shots that we know we need to follow.

I also feel that this video is a good representation of how they’d like their video. I know that the story lines will be different but I really like the shots used within this. I think we’re going to try use a similar style, for example following the videos main character and then cutting to the band and mixing between the shots of them playing and then obviously it’ll cut back to the character. It’ll take a lot of work, but I think this is easily achievable.
Unfortunately the film stores are closed when we’d like to film them, and Olly is away in America. This means we may have to use a DSLR that I have, it still records in HD video which I have played around with only a few times. This is an edit I made with it in an hour just to show how good it is; (Watch in HD)