Tuesday, November 4, 2008

The Muppets!

This video project turned out much different than I ever expected it to. The types of ideas I had originally went over in my head before I had a set partner were to film actual places on campus that might possibly have a history (like the English building, or Altgeld). However once I got into a group with Farhanah and Glenn, deciding on something to do wasn’t so easy because of time constraints and creative differences (including talent differences). After discussing everything from filming the history of corn to the basement of the English building, we decided on something a little unconventional and random: The Muppeteers. What makes our video and the process it took to create it different from probably most of the others is the fact that Glenn had footage from a few years back of a “convention” style show of the Muppeteers and the people who perform them making the focus of our project not to film something, someone, or some place and put it all together but to take something that was filmed years back and making something useful out of it. Personally, at first thought, getting a message across with this film was challenging for me because #1 it was not my film footage and #2 though I am a fan of Jim Henson and the Muppets, I have not watched or paid attention to them since childhood. However, after going over to Glenn’s to watch and start organizing all of his footage it was easy to go back in to my childhood memory and relate things that I have saw and heard with what I was watching on his projector, almost as if 12 or 15 years had not gone by. One of the things I like most about our project is that we incorporated written text (in the form of quotes), actual home video footage of a meaningful event, and music to make one creation. The quotes were needed to give direction to the footage and our overall message, while the music selection “The Rainbow Connection” connected all the missing pieces. As far as the editing project went, Glenn definitely had way more knowledge of using editing software and took charge with helping Farhanah and I get the hang of it. We used Vegas Studio Pro 8 which seemed a lot more difficult to use than iMovie. One of the things I was in charge of doing was inserting text in between clips, messing around with the sound track (lowering it, raising it, snipping it out), and inserting fade ins and fade outs with the music. I think the first thing one ends up realizing during the editing process is how tedious it is. To fix one mistake you have to rewind and pause, fix, check the fixing (which requires rewinding and pausing again) until you get it right. Depending how picky you are and how much knowledge you have of the software, this can take hours. Once you fix something the way you want it, the overall completed project is quite rewarding and makes the tedious work worth it. I’m very satisfied with our video project and dam thankful that Glenn offered to let us use his footage and was nice enough to show us how to use the software and get a good feel for the video editing process.
Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)