Elias Allan 1007998 Week 9 Blog Post

Since my last blog I haven’t really done much in terms of production for a film. I’m currently on as an editor for one of my classmates capstone test that we are shooting next Friday with on of the scenes being filmed at my house. Last week we learned a bit about after effects in class. We learnt how to rotoscope as well as track both something within frame as well as 3D tracking the entire shot so you’re able to add a 3D camera into the shot allowing you to do some pretty cool stuff. After that class I actually went home and downloaded After Effects on my computer so that I could try out some of the stuff that we had learnt in class. I don’t know if the computers at uni are better at tracking and rotoscoping because when I tried it at home it went nowhere near as good as it did in class. Out of all the shots that I tried to 3D track it managed to some what track one of them, but even then it was nowhere near the what the uni computers were doing. My After Effect just couldn’t do it for some reason, it kept coming up with ‘analysis solve failed’. At first I thought it was that the ones at uni were a later version then mine but that couldn’t be the case because I literally downloaded the latest version that day. My second thought was something Julian said about rotoscoping and how it learns from what you do and tries to make itself better and maybe that also happened for 3D tracking and because I’d just downloaded After Effect it didn’t know anywhere near as much as the ones at uni. After a bit of googling it seems that maybe the clips that I was using were a bit to dark which made it really hard for my computer to track points, I’ll have to try some of the clips again and just turn up the shadow highlights and contrast and see if that helps at all. 3D tracking would really really help me improve the overall quality of some of my video game edits that I do. There was one recently that I did were I was trying to do just that but at the time I was only using Sony Vegas as my editing software and trying to track things on that was impossible and time wasting to say the least. In the end I ended up just putting the text in the middle of the screen instead of it being tracked onto something. I really want to go back to try and do a proper job of it using After Effects but I don’t think I have any of the unedited clips still which sucks.

Today in class we learnt how to use a steadicam, it was really cool to see how the footage turned out when filming on one of those. The exercise we ended up doing was making a one-shot lip sync video the the song All Star by Smash Mouth. It was actually pretty fun and I was really surprised with the fact that we managed to get an alright looking video made in 3 or so hours which only like 3 takes in total to get it all down pat. Marcus was great as DOP and Beth did great lip syncing to the music.

I’m actually a bit nervous about editing this short film that I’m on for our 2nd video we have to do this trimester. Not only am I editing it but I’m also colour grading it to which is something I haven’t really done much of outside of the small class we had on it were we learned a bit of DaVinci Resolve. I haven’t really done much editing in my life for other people and one of my biggest fears is that I won’t be able to produce a product to the quality and standard that other people want or expect of me. That fear of disappointing people is something that I have to really work on in these coming weeks so that I able to concentrate and try and do the best that I can regardless of how it turns out, who knows it my come out better than anyone could have expected. Also another thing I’m quickly realising is that no one in this class wants to be gaffer on shoots. Everytime someone asks me if I want an onset role it’s always without a doubt gaffing. So I think I got roped into doing gaffer again on this next shoot, which sucks but I guess someone’s gotta do it.

Really looking forward to finishing my degree at the end of the year. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get something out of the work placement that we have to do. The problem is I have no idea how to right a resume for media jobs, pretty much all the stuff that I have worked on has been uni related and everything else has been video game related, I realise that’s what a showreel is for but I haven’t made one of those yet. Adding onto that I have no idea how I’m going to edit together a showreel for our uni assignment. I don’t think that I have enough different projects that I’ve worked on to put in one. And with most of my video game edits being done to sound queues and build ups to songs and what not, picking a song that will work to show both that and my uni work is going to be a big challenge. All in all this trimester so far has been pretty good, I’ve started to make some good friends within the class which has really helped me be more at ease around people and more confident with my own abilities. I feel like once I get to know people they’re are going to be more understanding of me if I do screw up in one way or another as opposed to just silently judging the new guy.

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