Assignment 5 - give me a break

In this project, we first brainstormed about the theme of the project. The group had fantastic ideas, but some of them were not as feasible. Finally, we settled on having a theme that would relate to university students. However, this video must also not be just about the boring and mundane university life. Who wants to watch a video like that?

We then moved on to brainstorm about what we would like to have or fantasize about university life. Among all the brilliant ideas, the super hero idea shone through. We felt that it would be fantastic to have a nerd transform in to a super hero and change university life.

We then disseminated the workload to our group mates, and followed up with our preproduction documents.

As we wanted to make the super hero part of the video extremely eye catching and different, we decided that we would have our character dress up as a super hero.

The music that we used for our video is a ‘Broadway’ style song. This was done deliberately to create a very dramatic effect. We also had our singer sing out-of-tune during certain segments of the song to portray how untalented and normal he is.

The scenes in our video were shot entirely in campus to enhance the realism of campus life. Some of the scenes were hard to do, especially the bus scenes as timing was crucial.

Although some of the scenes were over exposed and not perfectly timed, we used editing techniques to overcome these problems. For instance, we used the split screen technique during the stair-climbing scenes to show how similar they are.

In order to increase the mundane yet dramatic effect of our video, the first half of the video featuring the nerd has been tinted black and white, while the second half featuring the super hero has slightly more colors. The rational behind this is to tell our audiences that although the super hero has powers, he is very much similar to the nerd and hardly special at all.

I feel that our final product, albeit a little different from what we expected, is a great effort put in by our group, and we hope everyone enjoys it.

Assignment 4 - Survival Mahjong

Cheryl and I had a great time working on this project together. We in fact combined our ideas for this assignment. My initial idea was to create fighting scenes while for Cheryl, she thought of character with split personality and playing mahjong. So we developed our combined plot to flow from the playing of mahjong to end up with us fighting.

The filming process was tedious as we had to think of various angles to shoot the film to make it more action packed. So all the various camera techniques come into use. Our storyboard did quite follow our final product except for the various angles involved, which we did impromptu adjustment based on onset feasibility. For the fighting scenes, we made use of quite a lot of low angles to bring out the dramatic effect.

Before filming, we also planned out various effects to use and a challenge was to visualize the effects involved when filming. For instance, we had the ‘dragonball effect’, the super speed effect and some other effects which were done ‘manually’ and enhanced using premiere/after effects. A differentiating factor in our assignment also lies in the focus on film movement, transitions and cutting scenes. However, these film transitions were not planned beforehand. They were derived impromptu based on our raw footage. We believe that these transitions help to enhance the anxiety and fury theme.

Comments from the class were good. Dr Julian pointed out masking problems which we have to rectify in the first few scenes. In our final product, we also added more fighting scenes and enhanced the colorings to further enhance the mood of the film.