Finishing Newscast

By now you have finished making all the parts of your video; your background, your announcer in front of the green screen, your part that goes into the picture-within-a-picture. Hopefully, you have started putting all these together into Adobe Premiere. The Adobe Premiere program can do more things than MovieMaker can, but that makes it more complex. Since you have version 1.0 (version 8.1 is currently out at Best Buy) it can be really buggy, so save often as you work. You also need to remember to keep everything in a folder on your desktop. Once you are finished putting it together, export the movie to your desktop and do the credits and title in MovieMaker. You should have everything finished by next Thursday!!.
How are you doing in getting your video done?

Newscast Cue Cards

Most of you are not really taking the cue cards seriously. The number one reason people are scared to be in front of the camera is that they are scared they will make a mistake and look foolish. The main way people make a mistake? They forget what they are going to say. Thus the cue cards!!
Writing the words on the cue cards helps you remember what to say, as long as you can read them. So it is very important that you write them in letters that are at least three inches tall. The person with the cue cards has to stand behind or beside the camera which means they are not close. If you have to squint to read the card then you look foolish again. You really should have no more that 6-8 words on each card. You also need to write in phrases so that the last word is not on the next card.
How is your movie going?

Newscaster Video

We have just started a new video project. This project will involve two different video effects, green screens and a picture-within-a-picture. You will sit at a table and pretend that you are a newscast type host doing a story. Your story can be about the news, sports, music, gossip, whatever you want (providing its appropriate for school).
I have given you a timeline that is on the back of your script page. Try to follow the timeline and get at least one thing done everyday. Do not put things off to the last minute!!
What do you see as being a problem creating this movie? What subject have you chosen to do for your newscast movie?

Return To The Door

After some basic instruction on how to use the camera correctly, we went back and re-shot the scenes for The Door. I'm somewhat pleased by how you took the idea of the movie and changed it to make it your own. I do wish that you had made it a little more suspenseful but it was your first acting job and its hard to act scared or look scary when you are giggling;>.
The people who I have seen doing the basic editing on their movie have done a pretty good job. You have cut out the blurry and unneeded parts, but some of you could have taken some small parts that you cut off and placed them into the parts you left and actually created a better video. Many real movies do this, as a matter of fact, normally that's what happens whenever you see a change in the camera angle.
Some of you have also gone ahead and added you title and credits, which I had planned on doing next week along with sound effects and some basic special effects (mainly for one group's movie.)
This is great and I'm impressed that some of you already knew how to do this!
How do you feel about your movie so far?

Storytelling Alice

This week we took an adventure into creating 3-d animated movies using a downloadable program called Storytelling Alice. Many of you were very confused because you had to identify every single little action and every direction. You also had to tell it exactly how far to move, although I don't think any of you had problems with that.
Creating 3-d animated movies can be very hard, but you should know Alice makes it easy! (Yes it does) After all all of the scences were created by pre-created figures. You didn't have to create your own 3-D figures and objects, all you had to do was tell the program which one and what to do with it. That's the easy part. Creating the figure is even harder.
How did you do on your Alice project? What was the most frustrating problem that you had?

The Door

You've started working on filming with video. I gave you a basic script, you made changes to make the movie yours, and then we started filming. Using the video camera is different from just taking a picture. You are going to find out that editing (trimming out the bad parts) takes some careful work also. If you are careful when you are shooting the video, then editing is a lot easier.

What problems have you run into using the video camera? How is your movie going so far? What character did you make the "hero" run from?

Photostory Finished

Today is the day all of your Photostory projects should be done! Some of you have finished already I know. It was interesting with what you came up with. A few of you actually used your own music instead of what the program could give you. :> I realize having no speakers made it a little hard to do the music part but by the time the next project is due we will have the new computers and their speakers. (YEAH!!).
How did your Photostory project go? Was this too easy? Did you have trouble coming up with an idea?