Assignment #5

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I originally wanted to do an oil change, but when I started sketching out a storyboard, I decided that something my wife knew more about would be easier since I would be the one filming. So I ditched the oil change idea and went with baking. I chose a recipe that I make often so I knew what to do. Here are my storyboards and you can see that I have the shot angles listed as well as the scene contents.

After I made the storyboard, I recorded each of the videos and made the titles to insert. I uploaded all of them to my computer to one folder and then I was ready to start bringing them into shotcut.

Everything was going fairly smoothly in the beginning. I was dragging them in, joining them and making my transitions. Then I started adding the titles in another track.

I quickly realized that that was not the most useful way to do the kind of titles that I wanted. This created more of a watermark effect and since my shots were a variety of colours, I could see that a watermark was not going to work. So I decided to add the titles as images right in my current track instead. I left the first one as a watermark because at this point it didn’t matter as much as it did later on.

Then things started to take a turn downhill for me. My laptop is older and if I moved to quickly with my mouse clicks and dragging, the program bogged down and kept closing. Thankfully, it has a recover option and if I didn’t hit save, it wasn’t all lost. I did realize that it was important for me to hit save frequently since autosave doesn’t take you back to the exact last thing you did. Therefore I had a lot of practice with this program since I did many parts of my project two to three times over.

One of my clips was long and boring since it just showed the same action over and over. So I used the speed up feature which I think enhanced the video but kept clarity.

After all of my clips were in and the joins and transitions were completed, I went back to adjust the length of my transitions and looked around at the options other than just dissolve. I selected a few different styles for the last two transitions, but I left the remainder of the transitions as dissolve for two reasons:

1. I think the others are cheesy

2. I think it looks better to have the whole show have the same style and I preferred ‘dissolve’.

The audio was not too bad to do. I recorded the script in audacity.

After I finished that up, I dragged it into shotcut and started editing. I decided that some music would help to maintain interest during the parts of the movie where there was no talking.so I found a sound clip that I liked online. It wasn’t long enough so I had to cut and copy and paste pieces together. Then I added it to the movie and cut it up so I could adjust the volume in different places. 

I believe I have scored excellent. In cinematography I made sure that I made use of the different angles and screen shots that we were taught. During the lesson video I made notes for myself, and made sure to use all of the different angles and views. Given that I only had a cell phone to film with, I believe that I made excellent use of my camera on my phone.

 During pre-production I made sure to think about all of the steps of baking the biscuits. I first started by making a list and then as I moved the list over to the story board, I added more steps and thought about the camera angles. I feel my use of the program was also excellent. I toggled back and forth between the tutorial videos as needed and made use of many of the tools and filters. As I mentioned above, since my laptop continued to crash I often had to do many steps multiple times. I am very happy with my finished product, especially considering the entry level equipment I had at my disposal. 

I feel like I demonstrated an excellent understanding of the entire process. It is logical, well organized, cohesive, and appealing. Had my computer not constantly crashed, I would have taken the chance to import additional images or tried varying speeds more often, those two things seemed to consistently make my computer crash.