Midterm reflections

Starting Out
I had a fair amount of trouble with this midterm. First came the problems with doing Paranormal Cativity; I filmed 2 different key scenes, but while trying to edit in my ghost cat Combustion would repeatedly crash and I didn't know why. My other problem is more personal; my dog passed away and let me feeling really depressed. I decided to film a sort of memoir of him as an alternative to Paranormal Cativity because this was something that was really important to me and I couldn't stop thinking about it. My idea was to have a green screen behind me while I talked so I could insert photos and particle effects.

Working on it
I was able to get the equipment I needed, but couldn't get the camera to work. I had to use my point and shoot camera as a back-up. I wrote a script for what I wanted to say and set up a small mic and Audacity in case the camera didn't pick up any audio. Filming was not particularly difficult, just emotional.

I think I ran into the most trouble when I went to the lab. Combustion ran so slowly when I used particle effects and every time I wanted to preview my work I had to sit through a stuttering mess until it warmed up enough to show me the video. It also crashed a lot and I learned that using 40 seconds of particle effects is not highly recommended. Lack of transitions between backgrounds became another problem; I couldn't find a decent way to fade in between photos so things happen pretty suddenly. When I exported the video, the audio was missing but I decided to fix it later.

And that's where things went really wrong; I had saved my files to the sharedrive because my flashdrive said it didn't have enough room for everything, so I just kept a copy of the exported video. When I went back to the labs the next day, my folder was gone. All the Combustion files, pictures, and the original footage were missing. The next best idea I could come up with was to open it in Final Cut and add scrolling text to make subtitles.

Final Thoughts
I'm not particularly happy with this project for a number of reasons. I had to use sub-par equipment and I think the quality suffered for it; I wasn't sure how to do some of the things I originally planned to do in Combustion, so my vision doesn't match up with the execution; I felt rushed due to Paranormal Cativity falling through and finally, it's been a sad week for me. I don't think I will continue with this as the final project as I want to do something a little more light-hearted, I think.

Midtern abstract

I forgot to do the blog part until now. Anyway, due to technical difficulties I was unable to do my original idea Paranormal Cativity, so this is the abstract for the project I have done.

Jack: Memoirs of my dog, who passed away recently, with photos and footage greenscreened behind me, like a montage or a scrapbook.