Week Eight Reflection

The final product is everything I hoped it would be and more. This is not to say though, that editing the music video was not a difficult task. On the contrary, it took about 10 hours total to edit the music video in its entirety. The song used turned out to be "Such Great Heights" by The Postal Service. I found the song simply by scrolling through my iTunes library until I found something that stuck out to me. I didn't want to do simply a song I liked, but rather one that sounded like visual images could mesh well with the song in unique ways.

Coming up with the idea for the video took quite a while, and we moved through several different ideas. Looking back upon our older ideas, I am glad that we finally came up with the plot dealing with an ironic sort of death. The plot allowed for a lot of creative scenes as well as some interesting B-role film. Shooting went smoothly for the most part, though of course laying "dead" on Charles Street wasn't the easiest of tasks. However, we got all the shots that we needed to in a short amount of time and we had more than enough material. Originally I thought that the movie wouldn't have enough material to fill four minutes, but I ended up having more than I needed.

The editing process was excruciating. Nearly ten hours later though, the final product is something that I am very proud of. I realized that there are tons of problems that come up throughout the process; most of my problems dealt with problems with the film clips being available. In the end though, everything came together very smoothly and I have another video to add to my portfolio.

Week Seven Reflection

Commercial project, check. I finished all the final edits to the project yesterday, and it came out looking not half bad. The commercial was the first video I have uploaded to YouTube that can be viewed in high definition, and honestly, I don't see too much of a difference. Regardless though, the movie idea itself worked its way out. The toughest part was without a doubt doing the actual challenge. The cinnamon challenge, that is. The final idea of our video ended up being that "A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Medicine Down". Medicine in this sense, meaning cinnamon.

The cinnamon challenge is an essentially impossible challenge where someone attempts to swallow a spoonful of cinnamon within 60 seconds. Our spin on this was that, with a spoonful of sugar, this seemingly impossible challenge is a piece of cake. Thus, our final outcome had different "actors" swallowing the cinnamon, and then promptly coughing/spitting/choking it back out to the tune of the aforementioned song. The final actor took a spoonful of "cinnamon" followed by a spoonful of sugar, and had no problem whatsoever. Then the commercial ends with a zoom out to a box of Domino Sugar.

Editing the commercial was not too much of a problem. The only really challenges were timing the swallowing and spitting of the cinnamon with the beat of the song. I feel that a music video would have much more opportunity for editing, though this is not to say that I disliked the commercial project. Overall we all had a good time filming it (after everyone was done choking on the cinnamon).