Major Project: Research and Idea Development

This is a short video Casey and I made yesterday. We were doing a How To in light of my ideas for the Major Project. So we did How To cure hiccups. There are so many things that could be better about it but heck it was less than a days work.

The decision of how long the film is is important. If I decide to do 1 minute films, I have to make sure nothing unnecessary is in them. For example in the hiccups film, Casey and I had filmed a bit about what hiccups are. When it came to the edit that took up 40 seconds of our 1 minute and Simon pointed out it wasn't necessary.

I am looking forward to the lighting workshop because I don't feel that it's easy to make a film look slick and well made without good lighting. I feel I managed to achieve this on my Direction film by adjusting the lights in the house I used and using lamps or dimmers to achieve better lighting. Yesterday however, we were limited to natural light. Yes it can look good, but HD Cameras pick up everything and natural light is the perfect aide to this. Good lighting could perhaps smooth over those impurities that natural lighting allows the camera to pick up. Such as on The Pub Game, one the lighting was shining down on the floor, you couldn't tell that it was bare studio floor on the cameras. I might be wrong about this as I haven't learnt anything about lighting but these are my observations. I really want to try using different cameras to see what kind of look they could give that differ from the HD cameras. I would love to try a Canon 5D with all those different lenses that Will posted about. Alot of amazing internet videos are shot on those cameras or similar and I would love to give it a go. I will see if the UCA stores have them but I doubt it. Apparently UCA favours Nikon. Not to mention 5Ds cost a bomb.

The editing also needs to be much more snappy and smooth for a 1 minute film which means shots have to be really thought out because long dialogue and long shots won't work. I really like the idea of it being cut up with loads of varying shots to make it visually interesting and fill that 1 minute in style. I will try to find some examples of one minute videos just to see how they are done. Once my idea is refined I might find that I need more than one minute.