Making the Images For Your Video

In your "How To" video you have to create images to illustrate your directions. Think about your directions and what you are going to be doing with the images. For example; if you are making an omelet you would have eggs, but you would also have an image cracking open the eggs, mixing the eggs, frying the eggs, etc. Don't forget to include all the pictures you will need.
If you can you can use the same image over again, as long as nothing about the image changes! You should have all your images drawn and cut out before Thanksgiving.
How is your film progressing so far?

Moving On to the Next Task.

Yesterday, you should have finished your newscaster video and your final copy should be turned in. I only know of two of you that actually met that deadline! This truly is not acceptable, because those of you that did not get finished were wasting so much of your time earlier. You can not waste so much time on filming or thinking "Oh, there is plenty of time," when you are not even half way done with your project. Most of you took two and a half weeks to do the first five tasks on a list of fourteen things to do. This is why you were given a checklist, so you could pace yourself!
Your next project is going to be fairly simple, but it will require planning. You are going to create a movie and then do an "audio dub" or narration of the movie. You are going to create what I call a CommonCraft movie. This is a movie that uses pictures, normally hand drawn, to illustrate ideas while the narrator explains how something works. They are fairly simple, are easy to fix with basic editting, and then you can read your script into a microphone. The timing between what you say and your images can actually be fixed by simple film cutting.
First, you must choose a subject. Think of a Science concept such as one of Newton's laws; or something from Social Studies like explaining the Battle of Gettysburg; or you can choose how to do something that you can physically do well, such as play soccer, and explain that. Take the time to look at an example from CommonCraft (I recommend the zombie or the election ones).
Keep in mind that people actually make a living doing these movies and selling them. They are quite effective at teaching something to people.
What do you think about your next assignment? What will you be planning on doing?

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?