Blog #15 Constructive Criticism

2.3.20

I came in on Monday at 4. It was just Todd and Tracy in the office. Tracy left soon after I got there. The first thing we did was look at my progress on the video. We watched it through, and then Todd went through the things he wanted to be changed. There was not a whole lot, but I won’t go through it all here. It mostly consisted of shortening it up, being more efficient with time, and switching up some content. Nothing unexpected, and the whole process was informative. I enjoyed taking criticism from Todd, as he is a veteran in the industry and knows what he is doing. The rest of my time was used doing member stuff. I was thought how to use the software properly to see free ticket usages. But there is a technical glitch within the system, so I have to figure out some of the usages amounts manually.

Blog #14 Creating #3

1.29.20

I am starting this session from a pretty great place. I have my pacing established, my score set, and I'm 30 seconds along. I was looking for a way to spice this up. I could follow the music logically and have nothing exciting happen, and it would still be a good video. I had the idea of putting a rise and a ticking clock. It would build to some trailer footage then cut to a title card. It is a little hard to explain, but I am going to try my best. At the beginning of a lot of these trailers, there is some film festival award or label. I thought id take those clips and put them into a montage. So as I said, I found a score and a clock sound effect. I had the clock accelerate with the score to the climax, where I would end the video. Each "tick" in the clock sound effect, I would change the clip. As it accelerates, the clip would only be a couple of frames long. Not long enough for the viewer to see the content but long enough to register the change. It took a long time and was very tedious, but I got the acceleration to a place where I was happy. The ending is a bit rough, so il revisit that later.

Blog #13 Creating #2

1.29.20

I thought I had everything to start assembling the actual video, but I was wrong. I have a large folder chock full of footage. For some reason, I overlooked this in the organization that I did a couple of days ago. I sorted the footage into 4 or 5 categories. Some of it was just regular B-Roll of the outside of the Tower Theatre. A lot were speeches, and some was the after-party. It took me a good 20 minutes to sort all that footage. After that, I felt better and got to work. I started with the intro. It has the cool old school footage that I mentioned before. After a lot of reiteration, trial, and error, I found a sequence that flowed well. I took some scrap from the end of another old video that I had downloaded, added a score that built, and a bass drop at the end that would have a cut to black effect into the old-school footage I found earlier. There was some drone footage that I stumbled upon and decided to use that for the opening title. After poking around for a while in my plugins, I found an effect that would make the drone footage flow well out of the old film. Now, all the festival footage is on a standard digital camera, so I needed a way to transition from the film look to the modern era. I decided to do the painstaking process of keyframing the old film effect out of the drone shot while the score builds, and the title appears. The effect isn't set up in a way where I can easily do this. I have to keyframe each sub effect out manually. Doing this wouldn't be a problem if the effect weren't so dense. Each time I changed something, I had to render out the footage, which would take a second to make sure that is what I wanted to do. Every time I changed a number, my computer would seize up. So it took a second to get it where I wanted. After I was happy, I started to skeleton some footage. I believe I made a lot of progress today, and I am pleased with how it has turned out so far.

Blog #12 Creating

1.27.19

In my last post, I mentioned that I was given a couple of hard drives with festival footage on it and told me to start making a video. I have now started this process. The first thing I did was open up both of the drives and sift through the footage. I found a lot, but only some of it was usable. Some folders are just full of photos or project data. I then collected the bulk of the footage into a premiere pro project. From here, anything is still possible. Something I have been doing in my projects lately is finding old vintage footage and cutting it into the video. I find that it gives an excellent aesthetic and a great jumping-off point story-wise. To find some relevant footage, I usually go to Archive.org. I found a neat recording of an old White house film festival. Then I worked on finding some music. I typically look for 2 to 3 tracks to play around with. Now I have everything set to start assembling the video. This took around 3 hours.

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Blog #11 Spreadsheets

1.17.19

I arrived at 4 o’clock at the Bend Film office. Todd and I talked for a second about things that I could do. We landed on me updating the Bend Film member list. There are six tiers to the membership each with their benefits. My job was to take new members from the hosting website and add the information into a master spreadsheet. It’s easy enough but you have to be careful. If you mess up a date you could charge someone early or be sending confirmation emails to the wrong email. After I finished, we worked on what I could do at home. Todd gave me two hard drives full of festival footage that I could make selects out of. Remember, selects is just cutting down footage into its usable or preferable parts. I got upwards of 150 gigabytes of footage so it will probably take me a while.

Blog #10 Hours

12.13.19

This was the last day of my internship before brake. I mostly helped around, dropped off some mail and worked on a template for a while before we scrapped it. We scrapped it because I would not be able to finish before 5 o’clock. I am writing this from the perspective of two weeks after the break. At this point, I am worried that I will not be able to get enough hours by just going into Bend Film on Mondays and Fridays. Especially since my schedule has been super volatile lately. I have talked to Todd about this and we agreed that we need to find a way for me to get hours at home. I suggested that I could try my hand at making a trailer. Todd thought it would be unlikely that a filmmaker would need a trailer but he would keep his eye out. I am confident that I will be able to meet my hour requirements as long as I can work at home.

Blog #9 Slides

12.6.19

Think week on Jackson’s adventures at bend he makes a slide for Tin Pan. Bend Film has released a new app where you can view and buy movies at the Tin Pan feature. I was tasked to create a 1920 by 1080 slide telling the people of Bend Oregon about their magnificent new app that they would display before movies at the Tin Pan. I repurposed an old advertisement and spiced it up a little bit while adding new information. I did this work in photoshop. The project was pretty simple so I didn’t have much trouble. I checked it with Todd before I left and sent him both an exported png. file and the photoshop file so it can be edited later.

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Blog #8 Spreadsheets!

11.18.19

My job this session is to add new Bend Film members to this huge spreadsheet of the total members, their status and what they paid and when their membership expires. There were many more categories than that. They got me connected to their membership program and survey monkey. When new members are added I add them to the email list and the spreadsheet. The task was tedious but simple so I was content. I don’t want to do it again

Blog #7 App Promo

11.15.19

Continuing of the theme of pamphlets, I was tasked to create two different promotional things related to the Bend Film membership program and their new app respectively. I am again using the template from last time. It was considerably more difficult to make these promos, mostly due to the empty space. I needed much more direction this time from Todd. He gave phrases and topics to include and that was very helpful. It took a whole lot of time to create both promos but I think I did a good job.

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Blog #6 Menu

10.21.19

Bend Film recently bought the Tin Pan theater. For my session, they asked that I make a concessions menu. I repurposed their currently used pamphlet that shows movie times. It was in a google doc instead of photoshop so that was refreshing and very easy to use. They logged me into their square space app so I could copy down all the available concessions. Creating the menu was much easier than I expected and I only had one revision which was re thinking the placements of the zeros in the prices. This was a pretty relaxed day and I was glad to be there.

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Blog #5 Video

10.21.19

I arrived at 3 o’clock as usual at the office. We started brainstorming what I could do today and landed on making a promotional video. Finally, I could actually flex some of my creative muscle. I coordinated with Tracy and Todd to see what they are looking for. I started building a draft with my selects from the festival. I have a subscription to a music licensing service so I found a track that fits the video. I wanted the video under 30 seconds because its for Instagram. I finished the initial draft and then I got about two to three rounds of revisions that then I was all set. I think they were impressed with the quality of the video based on the speed I made it. I’ll include a link to the video in this blog post. After I finished the video and sent it off to Tracy and then I was done. I think it was a pretty successful day and I enjoyed it.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/z7et1nlfi2yd0rv/Tower%3AHub%20Reel%20Final.mp4?dl=0

Blog #4 Selects

10.14.19

I arrived on Monday at 3 to a surprisingly calm office. I am not sure why but I would think that things would be popping the Monday after the film festival. Todd recommended that I do some selects of the footage I gathered. I took all of the footage that I gathered on Saturday and put it in a premiere project. I cut down each clip to its usable footage and then separated each one by two seconds. I ended up with around 4 minutes of usable footage which is a pretty good amount. This only took around an hour and I really didn't have anything else to do so we called it an early day. It looks like I will have plenty of things to do for the rest of the time I am interning to get my hours up.

Blog #3 Festival

Festival B-Roll

10.12.19

The film festival was on Friday through Saturday. I volunteered to grab some B roll on Saturday for promotional footage. I went to the tower theater when the documentary shorts were starting. I dusted off the gimble that I haven't used for a while to get some nice tracking and movement shots. The Bend Film Hub was right next to the tower at the Library Arts Center which they have rented out. So I stopped in there to try and find Tracy who I was supposed to talk to when I arrived. I couldn't find her, someone told me that she was in the offices so I called her. We just talked for a second about what Il be doing and how soon my turn around time was. After that, I took B-roll in the hub for a little and then moved on to the tower. I got exterior shots first then walked in through the front door. It was fun being able to walk past the ticket counter because I was press. The lobby of the tower is really not that great aesthetically but the theatre was nice and the exterior shots were really what you wanted. The next day I dropped off a USB key with all the footage.

Blog Entry #2 Singular Task

I arrived at 3 o’clock right on time at Bend Film. The first thing I did was talk to Todd about what I could do to help today. The office seemed busy because the film fest opening day is right around the corner. Todd and I decided that the best thing that I could do was to download trailers. Bend Film has all their films and trailers linked on their website. Although to play the trailers at their venues they needed to download them all from the internet. That was my job today for approximately two hours. The work flow took a second to get into because of the various websites that the trailers originated from. I believe this is where the origin of my joy came from, trying to download trailers from all these different places was a challenge and I enjoyed it although it became tiresome. After I was finished Todd and I talked about my job on Friday. There is no school on Friday so I told Todd I would be available to record B-roll for the festival.