Technical Tutorial Blog

For this blog post, I am supposed to teach something that I learned how to animate, without the help of Mr.Netterville. So I learned how to animate text in Adobe After effects. So basically it is a pretty simple process of steps.

1. So to start with, you want to get whatever background you want behind your words and import it into after effect
2. Then you go to the tools panel and select the Horizontal Type tool
3. Next, click anywhere in the Composition panel, and type whatever you want it to say and then press Enter on the keyboard to select the text layer in the Composition panel.
4. Now if you go in the Character panel, you can chose whichever font you want and set font size to whatever you want
5. So next you will want to go to the Paragraph panel, and click the Center Text button so it will align the text in the middle and be centered.
6. Once everything is how you want it to look, you're ready to animate your text! So now you want to make sure your text layer is selected and then in the Timeline panel, move the time button to 3:00 and press the S key for scale
7. Then you want to press the little stopwatch button and add a key frame
8. Then, Move the time indicator thing to a different time, for example 5:00, and then press the scale value and reduce it about 50% or however much you want it to shrink. So by animating your text this way, you can make it grow and shrink!

After you do all of that, you can use things that we have learned in the passed, like ease in and ease out for example, to make it look more clean, or you can change the color of the text or anything else. This is just one of the many ways you can animate text while using after effects, which I learned on my own.

Feature story #2

In video, we created a 2nd feature story. The concept for my feature story was The life of an ONW football player. So i really just got into what its like to be a football player, what the pros and cons are and how it affects his life.  The whole theme for this feature story, was to get a better understanding of what its like to be a football player at Olathe Northwest High School. I combined the narrative lead and nut graph into one statement, but it helped make my feature story better because it really started it off right and made everything else flow easier. I interviewed ONW football player Jon Bowman and his football coach, Coach Sherman. These two really complimented each other and i think just went perfectly. Jon shared how much football has impacted him and what he loved about it, and then his coach would share how Jon has impacted the team and what he was really good at and what his strong suits are. Im glad i chose Jon and coach Sherman because it really flowed nicely and went great. Throughout the filming process, i did run into a few bumps. For example, the camera had a blue tint to it when i tried to shoot and i asked how to fix it but we couldn't figure it out so it just had to stay like that. Also it was a little hard to come up with a good voice over and script but that is more so just something i have to learn to do better. Besides those things, both of my interviewees were super easy and fun to work with. When we watched my video in class, i didn't get too much feedback for things i needed to fix except to fix the blue tint. Overall it was a great video and experience.

What makes a good feature story?

    There are a lot of aspects that make up a good Feature Story. A good feature story should share a story with the audience that flows well and gets the point across and there are a ton of ways to do that. The winning video in e-Comm showed a lot of good qualities that should always be in a feature story.

     I saw a lot of things that i liked in the winning video. For example, there were really strong shots in her b-roll. I think its very important to have strong shots because thats what makes up basically the entire video. While the voiceover is going people need something to look at that also goes along with the voice over and really gets the whole point across. If you don't have good shots in a feature story then the whole video will be thrown off and won't flow. The 6 shot system is a great way to get all the good shots you need, and its pretty easy. 

    Another thing that i noticed in Lina's video, was that her voice over was strong. Having a strong voiceover is also extremely important in a feature story because just like shots and angles, it makes up a huge amount of the video. The audience needs to be able to understand what you're saying and have a clear idea of what the concept and main idea is. Also the voiceover can be what tells the story and so its important for it to be strong.

    In the voiceover and just audio in general, its very important for it to be balanced. If during different scenes the loudness changed dramatically, it can distract from what you or the subject is trying to say and the audience can get confused easily. So audio balance is another very important detail in a feature story. These are just a few things that make up a great feature story.

   

    

Feature story Experience

For video, we had to create a Feature Story. In this feature story, we interviewed 2 people, one of them being the main subject and the other being the backup subject. We did both a video feature story and a written feature story.

I will start by reviewing the video feature story. To start creating it, i had to decide who i wanted to interview, what the concept would be and what i wanted the theme to be. then i had to set up interview times for the subjects that worked for both of us. Next, after i had interviewed them, i had to create the voiceover/outline. After all of that, i import my footage and voice over, and start editing. I think for me writing the voiceover was the hardest part of the whole project, because in the voice over I'm not supposed to say things like "I" and "me" so i had to work around that which was a little difficult but after i got passed the begining of the voice over, the rest of it just came to me and was easier. I also had a few problems when filming the interview. I had filmed the whole thing and asked all the questions and the when i went to look over the footage, there was no sound at all. So i had to set up another time for the people i needed to interview and redo it. It was not too big of a deal and it was pretty easy to set up another interview but it defiantly set me back a little bit. Although i was upset that i had to redo it, i learned to always check to make sure the sound buttons were on the correct setting and to test to make sure the sound works before you do all the filming. I really love doing interveiws and I feel like it's something I'm good at and I I'll definitely continue to do.

We also did a written feature story. For the written feature story, you get to use a lot of material from the voiceover you already created for the video one so it was much easier than the video feature story although I liked the video one much better. All I had to do for the written one was create a captivating beginning to the story, which was slightly difficult. Really I didn't see much of a point or challenge to the written feature story and it was even kind of boring if I'm telling the truth. So overall I have loved this project especially the video feature story and I am excited to continue doing them

Personal Project Blog Post

 In Animation, we created an animated story that included scene changes, a walk cycle, and a beginning, middle, and end. For my story i had my character, Baymax, holding a balloon while walking down the sidewalk. Then, he accidentally let go of the balloon and the scene changed to the balloon flying through the air all alone and down the street, and then for the ending, he gets caught in a tree and is sad and scared, until a lady balloon gets caught in the tree too and they end up happy.

There was a lot of work put in to this video. For the preparation process, 1st i had to really think about how my story was going to work and how i was going to create my characters. After i decided on that, i had to draw my characters on paper and import them to my computer. Then, i created my backgrounds using Photoshop and finally when all of that was done, the real magic started. I imported everything the AfterEffects and started with my walk scene. After a couple weeks, working scene by scene, it was finally completed and done. I think if i would have had more time it would have had better quality, but i did what i could in the time being and i am satisfied with how it turned out.

Along the way, i learned how to better use both Photoshop and AfterEffects. I learned how to create different scenes and put them together like a movie. With Photoshop i got more experince with creating things, such as the backgrounds, and became more comfortable with photoshop. I did try hard to make the deadline and i think i did pretty well with my Project Management, although more time would have been good. I don't think i would change anything if i could redo it because I'm happy with how it turned out, but maybe i would have worked a little faster/harder. But overall, I'm happy with the result.

Organizing Clips

In this post i am going to explain how to organize clips using Premier Pro. In order to organize your clips you have to create a 'bin'. Bins can contain source files, sequences, and other bins. A bin is not a necessary in order to make a video but its a great way to stay organized and make your video easier. At the bottom of the project panel, you can press the "new bin" button to create a new bin. while working in a project, you might decide to change how you can view your bins. If you're in the standard layout, you can see the basis of your whole project. But, sometimes you can be able to focus on just particular clips in the bin by opening a bin in its own tab.

After you create a bin, drag your clips to the bin icon to put them in there. you can even move bins into other bins to hold them. Also, to display the contents from a bin, click the triangle besides the Bin icon to expand it. To show the contents of an enclosing bin when you're viewing only the contents of a nested bin, click the parent button in the project panel.And lastly, to open or close more than one bin at once, press Alt-click on multiple selected bins.

1 in 2000

In e-Comm, we had a project to make a video of us interviewing a classmate. The purpose of interviewing a classmate was to learn more about our them and their unique summer. I interviewed Grace Burton. I learned that over the summer grace did a lot, but one of her favorite things was going to San Fransisco. Grace went to San Fransisco with her grandparents to visit family and this was graces first trip traveling without her parents and/or her brother. While she was in San Fransisco, she learned that the people there are very unique and everyone seems to have there own sense of style. She also saw that the buildings and places there were very "artsy" and one of a kind.



During the process of making this video we had to create voiceovers to go in the video. I have never done a voiceover like this before so it was very different then i am used to. I think looking back, doing the voiceover was probably one of the easiest parts of this project. I didn't like having to go in the hallway and record myself talking because i just felt awkward, but it helped me break out of my shell and realize that if i want to make more videos like this and produce them, i am going to need to get used to doing those kind of things so it was a good thing.



In the filming process i ran into a few problems. I had filmed the entire interview and ill i had to do left was edit, so i put my SD card in the computer to watch the clips and there was no sound in any of them. We were not sure what the problem was that made it not have sound, so i just got a different camera and re-filmed everything in a different location. I made sure right away that these clips had sound and thankfully they did. After all that happened everything went pretty smoothly and i got all the shots i needed in time. Even though i had to re-film everything, I'm glad it happened because it taught me that in e-Comm not everything will always go perfectly and just how i want it, but i have to learn how to make the best of it and find a different way to do what i need to.



If i could change anything through this experience i think i would have taken more wide shots of different things to have to play while my voiceover was playing. But besides that one thing, i really like how the rest of my video turned out and wouldn't change much else. I don't think doing interview videos has been my favorite project so far but it was different and a bit more of a challenge which i really liked.