April 24th Reflection

This morning I ran into Cole Johnson while walking through the cafe to Mrs. Walters room (where we have been working). I talked to him a bit about our video and told him we were in the final stages of editing. He offered to help out and I gladly accepted. He immediately made some small but influential changes to the project. For example, he was able to edit the interview footage of ourselves that we have to make the colors much brighter. It still looks very natural, but when you put the new footage next to the old footage the older one looks pretty gray. He also helped us make the image stabilization look better, and added a few transitions. During period 6 we showed the video to Mr. Silverman. He made us realize that we have a few places we could "trim fat", meaning we could cut out places where we have too long of a pause, a breath, etc. He also suggested that we add music at certain parts and gave us some possible choices. We lost track of time and worked all the way through lunch! Ben and I also created a "Google Earth Flyover" to put in our video. It shows the entire length of our trip. We made another one that was very detailed that we may show during assembly. We didnt finish in the two hours after school, so we well have to come in on saturday.

April 23rd Relfection

Today we continued to work on the documentary. It seems like we have been working on it forever. At the beginning it was obvious that we were making progress because we were syncing video from the trip with our voices-concrete evidence of moving forward. Recently we have just been making touch up changes- adding and reformatting pictures, stabilizing and trimming footage. I thought the last part was tedious so this part is especially not entertaining. We wanted to be done today but we didn't have a chance to run the video by Mr. Silverman. We will show him the video tomorrow and get his advice on whether or not we need to add music and what other small changes we need to make. We hope to have it completely done for the weekend!

April 22nd Reflection

Blog for Wednesday April 22 We are almost done with the video! I worked for a total of 6 hours on the documentary today and it paid off. We have each piece of footage where we want it and lined up with the audio. It was a very tedious process but I like how the video is looking so far. The only thing we have to do tomorrow (Thursday) is finish stabilizing some of the footage and make some final touches to make it better. We also need to add some credits to the end of the video and make the ending a little better. I only have two free periods tomorrow, so it looks like it will lead to another long day after school.

April 21 Reflection

6.5 minutes- thats how much I got done in 4.5 hours today. Splicing the footage together was so tedious. Even after organizing the footage into categories, it still took a while to find what scenes I wanted in certain situations. The video is looking like it will be about 10.5 minutes long, so am almost two thirds of the way done. Tomorrow I hope to be more efficient when I edit. The main problem I faced when I was working today was simply getting used to the Adobe Premier program. I had to figure out how to delete audio from the tracks, stabilize footage, and other things that turned out to be somewhat difficult with an unfamiliar program. I have three periods off tomorrow as well as time after school, so I am hoping to be able to have all the footage together by the end of the day so we can put the finishing touches on later in the week.

Monday April 20st Reflection

I'll admit- today I didn't get much done on our project. I was loaded down with makeup work for some of my AP classes so I was only able to work on the project for one hour. I finished getting the footage organized so that tomorrow I can start helping Ben edit. I also have started to think about what our presentation in front of the school will look like. Since the presentation is only 5 minutes long, we can't show the full video in assembly. I was thinking that I could make some sort of a trailer of the actual video filled with interesting footage from the trip. I was also thinking that we would have a powerpoint presentation with clips from the trip as well as photos from the documentary making process. Hopefully we will be completely done with the documentary on Wednesday so we can start planning our presentations in detail.

Friday April 17 and Sunday April 19

On Friday Ben and I made corrections on our script that we ran by Mr. Silverman. Luckily we did not have to change too much! It was such a relief to finally be done with the script- it now feels like we are making real headway. Mr. Silverman suggested that we take some time to read over and practice speaking the script so that when we recorded it we would sound our best. During my last period on Friday I rehearsed my lines a few times as well as this weekend. Today Ben and I finished recording our script! Mr. Silverman was nice enough to come in an help us get the camera and the lighting set up today. It took us a couple hours but we finally made it through. Next week we will cut and edit the film down to what we have been envisioning. I look forward to seeing what the finished product will look like!

April 16th Reflection

Yesterday I forgot to write my blog so I am doing so now. Yesterday we continued to crank out our script. Conveniently, we both had the last 3 periods of the day off so we were able to work very efficiently. Before the end of the day we had finished our script- 10 pages long including screen directions- and stopped by Mr Silverman's office to run it by him. He said he would take a look at it for us and send us a list of corrections that we should make. He sent us the corrections that we need to make last night and we will correct them today. It felt so good to have the majority of the work for the script behind us. After school, Ben came over to my house to help me wash the pots and pans from the trip and FINALLY finish getting our basement cleaned up. The only thing we have left to do in terms of finishing the trip is to make a few returns to REI and donate our extra canned food to a food bank.