Video and Sound Final

The past weeks we have been working on a video for a final presentation. The assignment was to create a short documentary, infomercial, commercial or portrait. We were assigned into groups that we would be working with for the next 3 weeks. Our assignment for the first week was to come up with an idea and create a storyboard. The second week we had to shoot our footage and create a rough cut and the final week we had to do the final edit and present our piece.

The idea: Coming up with the right idea was difficult. We all had many good thoughts and ideas so restricting ourselves to one of these was a difficult task. We decided to go for a short walk around Manhattan to see if anything would inspire us. Phone booths, human crowds and buildings were all considered. It was a warm day and we decided to include that as something in our video. We had previously seen a video of things melting with beautiful scenes and a nice fast forward effect. We were hoping we could somehow implement that too. We thought about creating a sun-screen commercial (one building had a picture of a baby that was hit by the sun, that we thought about including), but ended ud deciding that global warming would be a better theme. This way we could have things melting and other things being flooded. Our intentions were to create some great images and play with the contrast of something building up (the waterline) and something melting.  Our storyboard looked like this:

We wanted to create 2 scenes: one with a melting gummibear referring to the increasing temperatures and one with a flooded landscape referring to natural disasters. We wanted the setup to be clean and minimalistic with focus on the melting of the bear and the rising of the water. We decided to split between the two scenarios having two parallel stories running at the same time and having the damaging sequences appear slowly but steady. At the end of the clip everything was supposed to be destroyed.

Collecting material: For video collection we tried out different methods. We needed an oven that could heat the bear, but where we would still be able to get a clear view of what was happening. Same thing with the flooding. We needed to be able to record through glass without having light reflected and we needed to be able to see what was going on. Our first tests were not very succesfull.

What some of our first footage looked like :

We went over the footage in class and talked about the things that worked and the things that didn’t. We decided to try our footage again learning from our mistakes. Also, this time we gave ourselves a budget of 45$ (15$ each) to get a fish tank that would make our flooding scene look better.

Images from our 2nd setup.

Editing: Our second collection of footage was much better than the first. We all meet up to do the editing. We had to decide which clips were better and when to play with speeds and effects. First we had to come up with the music for the clip. At first we wanted something funny but when we heard “Grieg - In the hall of the mountain king” - we knew we wanted that for the piece! The collaboration between us worked really well. Although we sometimes had different opinions there was no hard feelings if something was changed or ideas were turned down. Our final infomercial looked like this.