This week I started working on the final presentation as well as some research for the Davie County High School video. The Davie project video has been getting more ambitious lately, so it's position as my final presentation may be moved. As I was editing and cleaning up the intro/conclusion sequence(which I showed a part of as the project Davie demo video a couple weeks ago), I realized just how much there was to cover in order to make a full and comprehensive historical video on the old high school.
While looking for voice and sound clips to use for the intro/conclusion clip I went through a couple interesting videos that got me thinking about the aspects I would cover in the analysis part of the video. For one thing, information and history of the origins of old Davie are hard to come by on the internet. Proper research could probably be done by looking through public records or the library in Mocksville, but both of these would take time. On top of this I noticed just how important it would be to talk about the aftermath and plans for the old Davie, all of which would need additional research and video clips to match up with the speech given. I still consider the project to be an important one, yet it will likely have to be pushed back into summer production as I would hate to rush out an unfinished project as I have in the past to meet a deadline. On the other hand I have started considering other presentation options and the creation of the presentation as a whole. As of right now I am still planning to make a slideshow giving an overview of the skills I learned and used as well as how others can learn them and do what I did. However, while a slideshow is important for detailing the route taken and the content learned throughout the duration of the project I feel that, especially in my case, the final presentation would benefit from a demonstration. Last year my final presentation was much more focused on the process behind making my game, rather than the more interesting game itself. Because of this I want to make a comprehensive video showing off a variety of the skills I learned, while still staying simple and effective in the approach. What I'll likely end up doing is creating a channel trailer for Sandwich Industry as a whole by creating a slideshow of sorts showing off all of the videos I've made as well as introducing some other effects. The main thing I want people to see from my presentation is what I have learned and how I have grown, and I think the best way to do that is to show off the previous videos in tandem with the newer, higher quality videos I've made thus far. Another thing I would like to improve upon from last year's presentation would be to entertain and bring attention to my creations long after the slideshow is over. Previously not many people played the games I had made last year outside of those who had already tested and heard about them. I think a large part of that comes from the fact that I didn't really show off the games or where to find them in presentation itself, which I already mentioned I plan to resolve this year. It's especially important this year however in that we have been trying to grow our YouTube audience for a while now and showing people how we have improved as a team and as creators is important in cultivating that growth. So as we enter the last days of Genius hour for the 2018 season I have a few final goals I hope to achieve with this project. For one, I hope to make an effective and interesting presentation that will draw people to our content. On top of that I plan to finish up the slideshow as well as the video for the final project over the coming weekend in a way that will achieve that goal. Unlike last year I have plans to continue with the goals of this project far beyond the twelve weeks set. This, the growth, and the work that I've put into the products and the channel through Genius Hour are the primary reasons I consider this project to be a resounding success, especially when compared to the failures of the previous project. In the meantime, I thank you all for following my growth and progress on this blog, and I hope you'll continue to support myself and the channel through the final presentation and beyond. Thanks for reading.
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This week I decided on what I want to do for the final presentation, and I also filmed a quick little video in a new format. My current progress on existing scripts and the Davie project have not changed unfortunately, however luckily I was able to put out at least one new video this week, one which I do feel pretty good about. For several weeks now I've been teasing the "Goodbye Davie" project I've been working on, and I am still working on it, but things have been going really slow. A major factor going into it is the time required to get other people's voices, edit old clips and photos, and then research the old school on top of all that. The tribute video is pretty ambitious, especially when compared to other videos I've made, but I feel like I'll be able to get it done in time for the end of the project and that it will be worthwhile overall. My current plan for the final project is to premier the Davie project video as a display of all my editing and filming skills I've picked up over the course of the project. If the video isn't super long I plan to make a short presentation detailing the process and course of the genius hour and my growth since the start, similar to my presentation from last year's genius hour. Today I actually made a brand new video, filmed, edited, and uploaded all in the span of an afternoon. Now this isn't the first time that I've made a video on such a tight time-frame, but it is the first time that I feel like its turned out as well as I hoped. Normally these types of projects end up being super rushed and turn out okay at best, however this time I feel that while the video is still a little rough around the edges, it's very much what I expected and wanted it to be. This video is the first in (hopefully) a new series for the channel, known as Patrick's Conspiracy Closet. The concept and style of the video is very reminiscent of the presidency video as well as some of my earlier skits. I really hope to find a definitive style of comedy through these videos which I can apply to other videos while also being funny and entertaining for people. The concept of a conspiracy analysis video has a lot of potential for a wide variety of topics and is also something that I and many others are interested in. To add comedy to this already interesting topic was a lot of fun to make and I have a lot of hope for this format as a future mainstay of the channel. Consistency in videos is more what I'm trying to move toward these days. As much as I enjoy the experimental format of something like project flying goose, consistency in videos is what makes channels more enjoyable for viewers, as well as making projects easier for production and editing. Over the summer I hope to clean out the Sandwich Industry company drive and place everything into its own definitive style, to standardize the channel in a sense. I still plan on experimenting with creativity through my editing and filming techniques, but as far as video content goes the formatting will be taking much more of a structured setup over the summer, if all goes according to plan. As I enter this final week of Genius Hour I really hope to find the time and drive to finish up the Davie project as well as planning out the long term future of the channel. One of the things that has been so fun about the channel is seeing how I've grown and changed as a person through the months, years, etc. Hopefully the channel will allow me to continue to grow and evolve as a creator, and to have a lot of fun with myself and my friends while I do so. There's still some stuff coming down the line, so stay tuned for what's to come. I've got a lot of different things to talk about this week so lets just jump straight into it. Over the week I began thinking about what I'm going to do for the final presentation (seeing as the project ends in 2 weeks) and my mind immediately went to creating a short film to showcase all the techniques I had learned over the course of the genius hour project. After doing some planning and thinking on a short film premise I found out that it would take way longer than 2 weeks to make a truly good and complete video. That doesn't mean that I'm giving up the project entirely, but it does mean that I'll be unable to use that as the final product. I would like to make a short video showcasing a wide variety of techniques and shots used, maybe a slideshow as well to explain how the project progressed. The short film idea has progressed into the planning phase and is currently scheduled to start filming this summer. As of right now the film is planned to be over 10 minutes and revolve around a group stealing a strange stone from an area. This project will be the first one to make use of practices used in the film industry and other indie filmmakers. At the end of this blog post there will be a picture teasing the concepts. In addition to thinking about what to make I also thought out how to make them. Last week I discussed the stabilizer rig I was looking at buying in the coming months to decrease the shaking in my current footage. In an attempt to decrease working costs and use what I have I tested out some shots using the tripod as a stabilizer, as the pictures at the end of the blog indicate. I filmed a couple of basic panning shots to test this, which can also be found at the end of the post. The tests proved to have a marginal increase in quality, but an official stabilization rig would likely be more efficient and easier to carry than the tripod setup. I'll likely purchase an official stabilization rig over the summer to prepare for shooting of the short film. I've also continued working on my previous projects I had planned weeks ago. The Davie project is still taking a while to produce as more voice clips and video footage are required to make a complete product, but I do believe the video will be out before the end of next month, if all goes according to plan. I started editing some of the footage I had gotten from Laurens and Tanglewood over spring break. The Laurens video I had planned is proving to be a lot more of a hassle to edit than I first thought, but I did learn how to apply filters and more advanced techniques to make the videos have a different look and tone to them. One short example of this technique can be found in the "lost and found" video at the end of this post which had 80s and VHS filters applied to a standard video. The footage still isn't perfect in its filtering but the idea and concept is there and can be improved and applied to future projects similar to the flight of the goose video. In the coming weeks I would like to finish the Davie video in time for the end of the project, film some new types of content, and make videos off of the scripts I have written. In regards to what I will be doing for the final presentation of my project I still haven't come to a definitive conclusion on what I want to make. Be sure to leave comments and feedback on the videos posted below, as well as any ideas of what you would like to see for the final project if you have anything you would like to add. In the meantime I'll continue working with different techniques on the videos I haven't edited yet and work on the other projects throughout the rest of this week. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for some big new stuff to come! I've got some great news for this week's post, mainly because I actually had the time to do something. Over the weekend I finally got around to finishing up project Flying Goose (which you can watch at the end of this blog post), planned out some other videos to work on over the week, and looked into some new equipment to buy. Today and the past weekend I continued working on my project flying goose video, of which a demo was published in the last post. The previous demo is a segment from the first take of the video when I ran out of goose footage to use. After going back and getting some more footage I got around to adding those clips into the second take and syncing them up to the music. Once I had all the background clips sequenced and synced up to the beat I went to my green screen studio to record myself dancing to the tune. So I got about three takes of my dancing and then synced it up to the second take to make the third take. For the fourth and final take I had to use a pretty advanced technique to make the layered green screen effect. To create the layered back masking effect seen in the final product I had to first put a chroma key on the video of me dancing like a standard green screen effect. To make the video of me dancing keyed into a colored silhouette as it turned out, I voided the colors on myself and then created a multi layer mask. With the mask I made the videos I wanted to show in my silhouette a child of the parent video of myself to make it appear inside of me. Once I had that done I used a back-mask generator effect to put the geese videos in the background and everything turned out the way it did. One day this week while I was bored and looking through my goose footage I noticed how shaky everything was and thought back to some videos some of my favorite entertainers had made. This ultimately led me to an Amazon store listing for a DSLR stabilization rig. After doing some research on various rigs and how they work I found a cheap and efficient one to use while filming moving shots to help stabilize things. This piece of equipment will help me stabilize the footage, making everything look better and help to prevent re-shoots. While I was editing the Flying Goose video I also planned out several other videos. I'm planning at some point this week to rig a tripod setup in my car to film some driving footage as well as a video blog on how I make some videos. I also plan to get the voice clips needed for my Davie video, which I didn't have time to do this past week. I also hope to edit some of the video clips I got from Laurens and start making some videos based off of the scripts I've written. So that's about all I've done this past week, I should have a good amount of free time to work this coming week as well so there's still plenty to come. Don't forget to leave some feedback on the new video and stay tuned for more to come!
This past week was really busy (thanks to a certain research paper haha) so I was unfortunately unable to finish my work on the Davie and Goose projects. I did however get to work on some scripts for other videos so for this post I'll be talking about my writing process and how video scripts are written.
Writing scripts for videos essentially boils down to two major things in most major productions. One portion revolves around the words that the actor needs to say as well as how they act, another focuses on lighting and how a shot should look, and another focuses on things that will be added on in post. In terms of word scripts Sandwich Industry really hasn't worked on too many. The vast majority of our videos are primarily improvisational. Only a few had lines that were written for them, being the MKUltra project, Quance Has a Bad Idea, and the Anniversary Special. The primary reason so many of our videos rely on improv is due to the fact that our productions never really need in depth script writing. On top of this most scripted videos are bigger productions that are harder to make, thus ours are few and far between. Despite our lack of scripted videos we still do write a bunch of scripts that haven't been used yet. Many are just placeholder docs on a google drive with ideas for videos rather than full scripts, but there are some major productions we have planned which will require scripts to pull off effectively. The reason so many video scripts get planned but don't actually get produced is due to a lack of time, people, and previously materials. With the skills and materials gained through this project the channel now has the ability to make these big projects a reality, at some point down the line. Other than words to speak scripts for bigger productions usually involve detailing how a scene should look. This tends to exhibit itself through italicized comments about the lighting or panning of a shot. Writing how a shot should look is extremely important as it can mean the difference between incredible footage and unusable or ugly footage. If you've ever seen an amateur webseries, you can tell the difference in lighting and shot composition between it and a high budget film. Now obviously the sandwich crew can't afford to bring out studio lights, record on a set, or get drone shots, but being conscious of the natural lighting, camera movement, and sound can make a huge difference between looking amateur and looking somewhat professional. As for editing notes in scripts, these tie in to the idea of the scene notes. Making little notes of things to add in post-production makes editing a lot easier and less time consuming. So far I've really only had faint ideas of how I want to edit my videos and then end of adding a ton of stuff as I'm editing, making things take a long time. Organizing exactly what should be added to a scene through editing on the script significantly speeds up the whole process as things are far more efficient. As someone who has filmed with other people before it is also important to mark any mistakes made during filming in the notes for similar reasons. For example, if someone sneezes and it gets in the sound of a really good scene, you'd probably want to edit it out rather than re-film the shot entirely. In that instance you would note that the sneeze would need to be edited out later. Those are the basic concepts that make up writing scripts and screenplays for movies or videos. Obviously a lot more goes into story boarding, sound design, etc., but these are the main principles that I follow when writing my own scripts. This week I hope to have time to finish Project Goose and get some more work done on Project Davie as well. After those projects are completed I plan to return to the format of the President video I made for a couple different scripts I have written. As for the remaining weeks of the project I hope to make a final product or video which shows off what I have learned and accomplished so far all in one, as well as to find a consistent format with newer videos. There's plenty to look forward to so stay tuned for more to come! So this past week was Spring Break, and that means that I had a lot of time to work on some video projects and ideas that I've been thinking about for a while now. Unfortunately the videos I had planned to make I didn't have the time or resources to produce them efficiently, so my mind started coming up with much more crazy and inventive ideas for videos to make with what I had. At the beginning of Spring Break I visited my grandparents in Laurens, South Carolina. This town has always been one of my favorite places in the world because of the old buildings, architecture, and friendly people. Anyways, after Easter dinner with my family my aunt and I went out and drove around the town to record the various sights and buildings for the afternoon. I got a lot of really cool footage which is unlike any other videos I've shot before so I'm pretty excited to start using it in upcoming videos. Now me and my aunt got a lot of footage that afternoon (4 GB worth, yeehaw), however I had no idea what I wanted to use it for exactly. I'll probably end up using the footage as the backdrop in various green screen productions, but the footage is so great I really want to use it for its own original video. I did have one idea to make a 70s style sitcom opening parody using the green screen and the footage but that probably won't come out for a while, if it comes out at all. In terms of more concrete projects I did start working on two new videos this week, both of which aren't completely finished yet but will likely be out by the weekend. The first video I started working on uses some old footage I got of Old Davie back when I went there to record for the "what you wont do" video. The footage I got at Old Davie was really good and I hadn't used it for anything in a while so I decided to fix that. I started trimming the clips I had into a video slideshow tour of the school set to some sad music. Then while listening to the sad music I had the idea to put voice clips of people talking about Davie in the background. Halfway through I ran out of voice clips from around the internet so I had to ask people to record some for me, which I still don't have all of them. After that clip I'll probably talk about the history behind the old school and the build-up of the new school as a sort of tribute to Old Davie. The other video I worked on involves some high quality goose footage. This was another video idea that came from nowhere. After I came back from visiting my family in South Carolina I wanted to film some of the sights of Tanglewood Park in Clemmons. After walking around Tanglewood for 2 hours (and getting a wicked sunburn) and recording stuff around the park I reached this pond at the back of the park. All around this pond were a bunch of geese which I decided to start filming as part of my park footage. Eventually I got so much high quality footage of the geese I decided to make an entire video using the clips. So I got home, started editing the clips in tune to music, ran out of clips, ran out of internet clips, and then had to go back to get more clips this afternoon. The video still has a lot more work to be done on it but I'm really excited to finish working on it as it looks really cool so far. So that leaves me with no full video to show for this week's blog post. However, I did upload some of what I worked on for the two videos I mentioned above to my second channel to show here. The goose video will probably be out on the main channel by the end of the week, but the Davie video will probably be out later unless I get the voice clips I need sooner. Anyways, that's all I have for this week so stay tuned for more to come!
This week I haven't had a lot to do with the project as I am currently in between production stages and I haven't had much time to start the next projects I have planned. That being said I did still do a few things, most notably practicing my editing techniques by testing a credit roll, testing with the mic on multiple targets in a scene, and some script writing. Over the weekend I was going through my phone's camera roll trying to clear off some space and I found some various footage clips I meant to use but never did. Whenever I go places or see something cool I try to get a standard shot of it so that I can edit it for whatever purposes later. Several videos have been made with these clips on the Sandwich Industry channel those being Water on Mars, Legacy, and Brinstar which edits the two in a music format. The credit roll sequence I made has one such sample clip I got from a trip to Florida over last summer. To make the credits I just blurred the footage by putting a defocusing effect over it to blur the background and then I placed the credits over it. The stock footage I've gathered over the years are usually pretty unstable as most of them were filmed on my phone, but with some stabilization and other effects they can be used for just about anything. Brinstar and my "what you won't do" videos are great examples of this, and you can see a few other sample clips in my green screen edits. You can watch the credits sequence and some of the other videos I mentioned at the end of this blog post. Also over the weekend I gave some of my friends a tour of the recording studio and we recorded a simple fun video. I probably won't upload it, but the video did help me test my shotgun mic some more by giving me multiple different targets to focus the camera and mic on. In my previous sound test it was just me testing the different settings of the mic itself on me from different locations in the room. While this was and is an effective test for the majority of the projects I'll be making, if I ever have multiple people involved in a specific project I'll need to learn how to use the mic in that situation. In addition to these things I've also been working on writing new projects out and preparing for several commissioned projects. The script writing process doesn't apply to every video I make, mainly due to the fact that not all of the videos I make are actually planned out or involve speaking roles. Major projects like the President Patrick video or the MKULTRA Documentary used basic script outlines and scripts respectively, but the majority of the videos on our channel actually don't use any type of planning. That's definitely something I've been trying to work on for larger videos and I hope to practice more in this Genius Hour. Also, speaking of the documentary, one of the projects I've been planning is an HD remake/remaster of the original video. The original MKULTRA Documentary was a project for AP World last year, and it was easily one of the most well polished videos we had made at the time. Looking back at the rushed time frame for producing and editing the video there are definitely a lot of mistakes that could be easily edited out as well as plenty of missing information which could be added in easily. There's still no concrete planning on what the project will look like or when it could be released, but it's something I would love to re-produce knowing what I know now about editing and video production. Alright so Spring Break is coming up next week and that means I'll have a ton of time to use for editing and getting some new footage. I've got some great stuff planned as far as my own projects go, but I'm also helping out some other people with their own video and music productions. There's a lot more stuff to look forward to after the break, so stay tuned for more!
This week isn't nearly as big on announcements as last week's major editing and setup additions, but I do still have some pretty important stuff to announce. First off, I heavily reviewed the video making process I used for the President Patrick video and I've been working on improving it ever since. One of the most glaring issues with that video is how the green screen begins to tear in a few scenes. This is because of inadequate lighting and shadows cast on the background by my movement. So this past weekend I decided to go on down to the local Home Depot (I passed three Mattress Firms getting there) to buy some clamp lamps for lighting the top corners of the screen where it was most dark. After setting up the lights I filmed two test videos with them, one with the lights off, and another with the lights on. That test can be seen below this blog post, and I can definitely see the improvement between the two setups. The screen tearing I mentioned earlier is actually the reason I initially had so much panning/zooming in on myself in the video, which is now part of what makes it so funny. While in the process of trying to minimize the screen tearing I inadvertently learned new ways to execute an extremely useful and important skill. Another thing I realized about that video is just how much of it was improvisational in terms of both acting and editing. While these kinds of videos are super fun to make and have a sort of "magic" quality to them by their random nature, my future videos will lean more toward the use of scripts. I've actually been planning some new videos after I finished my work on the President Patrick video as well. Most of them will be in a similar style as the format used in the president video, but me and the other guys at Sandwich Industry have been planning some different types of videos as well. Zane and I have been talking about making a live-action web series for several months now, and are planning out the story and script soon. This plan will likely be the biggest project on the channel yet, and the first episode likely won't come out until early Summer, if that. Quance has also been planning out some fun music and video edits akin to the content he has produced for the channel so far. All in all, the channel of Sandwich Industry and my plans for videos aren't going to be ending any time soon, and that makes this particular project all the more important as a result. The most recent president video has been the greatest video I've made yet, and there's still room to improve from there. Several people have asked me to help them make videos for various classes, and the channel idea folder is still full of stuff for me and my friends to make. This project has really allowed me to put more time and effort into the videos I love to make, and has allowed me to entertain more and more people as a result of that increase in quality. Anyways, the point is there's still plenty of cool videos to come so stay tuned! This week has had several more huge landmarks for the project. Over the weekend I finished the first video I planned to make with this project and received the shotgun mic which I ordered for my sound production. Over the week I've been putting the finishing touches on that video and I am currently planning on releasing it this Thursday. In the meantime, you can find the preview for the video along with the sound testing I've been doing at the bottom of this blog post here.
So the video I've been working was the President Patrick 2018 project, which continues the series I started on the channel with my good friend Will Schreiner this same time last year. Now this video does require a little bit of backstory to fully understand, so I'll go ahead and explain it for those unfamiliar. A little over a year ago my friend Will moved from here to California. While in California he realized his school did student body elections, and decided it would be hilarious to nominate me as President. I made a video to campaign for his school, and it now sits as my most popular video ever made, while also remaining one of the simplest in its nature and video quality. This year I made a similar video for this project and for the campaign. Instead of following the same pattern of using my iPhone to shoot and edit a simple video I wanted to do something greater this year. So I sat in front of my green screen and shot the video on a high quality camera and spend 6 hours editing it instead. The final video turned out to be what I think is currently the best video I've ever produced. It won't be released until tomorrow as it needs to be timed for California's schedule, but as soon as it's out I will make a separate blog post announcing it. One thing you can see right now though is the continuation of my studio setup with the addition of a new mic. This mic is a simple shotgun/condenser mic which has far better quality than the built in mic of the Nikon camera I'm using. The mic is specifically designed to pick up sound from a specific target or direction from up to 6 feet away. It can be mounted on either the top of the camera (as you can see in the picture below), or on a separate boom pole/mic stand for further reach. Most studio productions use a boom pole which is lifted above the speaking target while still being out of the frame of the shot. For my productions I will most likely just leave it mounted on the camera, which is already mounted on a tripod for maximum efficiency as I will not be further than 6 feet from the camera and mic. In addition to both of these massive developments I have continued learning how to set up my project. This week I started moving away from learning how to edit as I have pick up all the basic skills I will need for now and I have moved into learning about cinematography, sound design, and lighting. I learned all of these skills through YouTube's Creator series, which is a great set of video tutorials made by creators who are teaching how to make great, low-budget videos. I have the link to this series below the blog post as well. As for next week I plan to improve my green screen setup by getting some better lighting equipment in the form of clamp lamps and other cheap, yet effective tools for lighting up the set more. I also have a script for my major video with this project, as well as some more minor videos I plan on making in the coming weeks. Don't forget to leave me some feedback on the sound tests and this blog post as well so I can better improve the quality of the setup. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more to come next week! |