Personal Conclusion: Video Project
Daniel Davey, Teegan McGilton, Daniel Jo and Danielle Renfrey.
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I have to admit, I was quite nervous about this project as I had never really worked with video before. Knowing that I was going to be working with such clever and creative artists was exciting but also frightening, because I knew that we would all have great, strong ideas, and that might make it difficult to decide on one concept and allow everyone to be happy with it. However! I was so pleasantly surprised by how well everyone worked together and how we were all able to comfortably input opinions and show versatility without having to pull out our hair.
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We came up with two strong concepts, one relating to fractured memories and one relating to Greek mythology. As a team we discussed them in great depth, what methods we would have to use to achieve the desired effects, and when it came down to it we decided the Greek mythology concept was the more practical, well plotted out and achievable of the two.
There was an amazing amount of scrutiny involved before we started shooting, we discussed shooting methods, symbols, sounds, actors/acting, costumes, props, lighting, angles, schedule, timing and pace among other things.
Our concept leant itself to a jilted, abstract appearance, and so we took inspiration from the AES+F group and created our video in stop motion. This allowed us to play with some interesting effects using multiple layers of Daniel and the ability to make things disappear and reappear. This involved a lot of position plotting and holding still for periods of time.
During the preparation and shooting phase of our movie making we each had pivotal roles we focussed on both individually and as a group. My input involved building and acting out the character Kairos, considering editing, sound effects and shooting angles, creating individual scenes through Photoshop animation and later the final editing process.
Acting out the character Kairos was particularly difficult for me, as I have not had any experience in front of a camera nor do I enjoy that kind of exposure. I found it quite confronting, however I did my best to try and embrace it (not sure how successful that was, but I tried haha).
The final editing process was very illuminating to me, it was the first time I had the chance to really delve into some of the effects and editing processes within premier, I explored the colour corrections, transitional effects, volume controls, layering of sounds and images and key frames to much further degree than I had before. It was stressful, time consuming and obsessive- but very satisfying. In particular, the way that adding sound and music effected the overall feel of the video was very interesting. I experimented with emphasis using volume, reverberation, flowing and repetitive sounds, trying to keep certain areas loose (Footsteps not matching up perfectly to the images to assist with that slightly strange, surreal feeling) and other areas very tight (the magic unlocking of the lock).
There are still many sides of premier I would like to get to know, for example I am still not very clear about why in the final rendering of the video I still sometimes end up with a poor quality video instead of 1080p like I selected and also there were so many aspects of the sound file editing that I had no idea what they were about.
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To be critical of our video there are a couple of things I think could have been changed, for example it was a fairly convoluted concept which I think would have benefitted from either a bit more length, or perhaps stronger focus on certain aspects, and less focus on others. Secondly the symbols within it could easily be misunderstood- and in fear of that happening during presentation we placed emphasis on what our video was about, in hindsight due to its slightly surreal and abstract content this may have been better left to the viewer’s interpretation.
