Makin' Movies

I got a new camera last Christmas and I told everyone I was going to start making movies with it as soon as I opened the box. Months later, I finally finished one with my fellow directors Tyeisha (http://priorcom336.blogspot.com/) and Tony (http://amconstantino.blogspot.com/).

Separation - Class Project from Katherine Guenther on Vimeo.
Going into this movie making experience I was really expecting a lot more 'technical difficulties' than what happened. Having been a die-hard PC user all my life I was really leery about using I-movie. Horrible flash backs of the Mac computers in high school with their virus infected hard drives and lack of memory filled my mind as I started the editing process. However, I found I-movie to be a really simple and glitch-less program. The set-up of the time line was a little different than what I was used to but for all my complaining I felt I-movie really had my back during this project. The transitions were easy to instal and the few special effects we used were really easy to find and use.

In fact the only really technical difficulty we had was on my part. I never realized my camera was set to HD record so it took a little under an hour to import my footage into I-movie. At first I was extremely annoyed but after I realized what happened I'm just glad it imported them at all!

The filming process was a little hard at first but it got better when I began filming with my group. I struggled with some of the self-portrait filming because it was hard to film and act at the same time. I ended up doing a lot more, “stuff in static” than I originally hoped for. However, all my “stuff in static” actually helped me to establish a theme. The objects and personal effects that represented me stayed stationary as I rushed through life separated from the outside world.

I know you said in class not to sound fake by saying your group worked perfectly, but I don't know what to tell you. We really got along great. We agreed to meet outside of class to film together, we all equally contributed to the editing process and we came up with great ideas. In fact, if my group were to have one problem it is that we had too many ideas and not enough ways to work them all in. One of the ideas we came up with was to tone the color scheme down to a gray-ish tan color and make certain colors pop out to sort of enforce the separation theme color wise as well. However, it turned out there wasn't a really effective way of doing this in I-movie so we ended up scrapping the idea.

One of the themes we came up with that I felt really worked was the idea of video games separating us, but being the common thread bringing us all together. Over the course of working together we found out we really do have a lot in common and although we are separated from each other by our different paths we still have something other than this class to bring us together.

On the subject of Vimeo and YouTube I find myself more attracted to Vimeo over Youtube. People hardly ever say anything nice over the internet so the less places people have to complain and the less people to complain, the better. Also, Vimeo had less advertisements plastered all over the place to I felt like it was a better medium for video sharing. I would much rather YouTube adopt this policy rather than have two minute long un-skipable Disney's “John Carter” trailers before everything. I am a little worried however that our video will be taken down for copyright infringement as it uses music from different bands we have no written consent from. Hopefully this link will work for grading purposes though:

http://vimeo.com/38385879

Overall, I had a lot of fun working on this project and I hope our ideas have come together to form a good group portrait of our separate lives.