This is a video tutorial for basic lighting techniques to turn a hard light in to a soft light for very little cost. It goes over the difference between a hard and soft light, showing and explaining examples, and gives 3 easy techniques to makes a light softer by using diffusion paper, foam core, or a diffusion panel.
And here is a link to a tutorial showcasing the good old cloning special effect. The video is part of a series of video tips and advice, it doesn't give a super detailed tutorial on the software techniques for masking, but it shows creative use of the cloning technique and tips about when to use a green screen vs masking for creating the effect. Youtube tutorials on Final Cut Pro masking are a dime a dozen, so I found this video a lot more worth watching than most video tutorials about cloning. The end of the video also goes over a bunch of camera angles for shooting video of actors.
This assignment was to find a movie and recreate the trailer using changes in audio - particularly the music track - and re-cutting to drastically change the mood of the trailer and the impression people get of the movie.
I chose to do my video on the movie Terminator 2: Judgement day. Terminator is a very famous action sci fi and I decided to change the mood of it in to a feel-good family movie through recutting, sound track changes, plot changes and changing the title. The biggest mood change was caused by replacing the sound track. The original was a fast and intense sounding track typical to an action movie trailer. I replaced it with the score "I Love My Dad" written by John Debney as part of the sound track to the movie Liar Liar and it completely changed the mood. I'm really happy with the way it went with the trailer in the end, a lot of scenes were timed really well with the music, especially at 1:15 when the music flutters as the sky lights up. I was limited in the amount of audio editing by the fact that iMovie HD can only have 2 extra layers but I think it still turned out how I wanted.
Another thing I changed was the plot and title by recutting it. The original movie's plot is described as this on imdb "The cyborg who once tried to kill Sarah Connor must now protect her teenage son, John Connor, from an even more powerful and advanced Terminator." I added word transitions and rearranged the scenes to make it look like a movie about a boy who gets a robot father from the future and they learn to love each other through the movie. I also added the title Robodad at the end which I think really made it work.
Here are the original and remade trailers, leave a comment and tell me what you think.
Our CyberARTS class recently went to the Art Gallery of Ontario on a field trip which tied in to our unit on art movements like baroque, renaissance and romanticism. A lot of the art was impressive, in the traditional and photography sections that we looked at. It was interesting how much religion was a part of art back then because churches were the main employers of artists. Ruben's "Massacre of the Innocents" was an impressive piece that we had explained to us by one of the AGO's experts. It depicts the biblical story of the Massacre of Innocents in Bethlehem where the king ordered the death of all infants in the city. The woman in the bottom right is actually the artists lover, who appears in many of his paintings. It is interesting how if you didn't know this, you wouldn't take much note of her indifferent expression in the violence and that she is staring right out from the painting at the viewer.
Another more modern piece that amazed me was Chuck Close's "Mark". It's hard to see on the computer, but in real life the portrait is huge and the details techniques are really impressive. It was done with oil paint and the thing that I liked most was how he painted it with blur to look like a photo taken with very small depth of field.
A lot of the art appealed to me, but some of it I found less artistic. The industrial photography section didn't blow me away, most of the photos were scenes or close ups of industrial items or areas, like factories or power lines. One piece I liked was a square collage of photos of a bridge that had an increasing angle, one so that at the top it's upside down and in the middle it's warped in to a sphere. Most of the photos, in my opinion, were based too much on the message and less on the actual composition. I was also not too inspired by the art piece that was really a sink installed on a painted black wall.
I chose this video because of the effectiveness of the techniques used; it's clean, creative and well done. This is a technical and artistic analysis of the kinetic typography that goes along with the poem/rap. The style of the video is very kinetic and constantly in motion, it focuses more on the delivery of written words rather than their design; a simple, clean font is used and no letters are redesigned individually, there is also no art outside of the text apart from a single scene of vector art of two people at 0:57, which in my opinion are detrimental to the poem's style. The interesting aspects of the video are the transitions, timing, colors and layout.
The frame is constantly rotating and resizing, with seamless transitions between phrases. Words fade in as they are used subtly and color is used in a very effective way that I didn't notice until watching this poem a few times, in the parts where words appear in black before changing color, the color change is timed to match the second syllable of the word. The appeal of this poem for me is the appropriate and well-done animation, all the words are timed perfectly and given weight with color and size based on their signifance in the phrase.
The layout of this poem seems well thought out and planned, much of the scenes are designed to mimic the words being spoken or simply just for creativity, this worked really well and appeared a lot throughout the video.
0:13 The word stream is blue and positioned to look like a stream of water coming out of the previous words and leading in to the next
0:15 The 'camera' goes straight through the letter o as a transition, transitions like this happen a lot hold the video together well, and words ever just fade out
0:18 He re-uses the words "gone is..." for every statement about pain, fear, grief and tears
0:28 The words form a circle when the speaker is talking about social circles and then another half circle with the words "and more"
0:32 - 0:37 It's just plain cool, great transition even though it isn't specific to the poem
0:58 The word "imagine" is used repeatedly just like the words "gone is" were earlier and text forms a circle again as well
1:34 the words form a golden spiral (see Fibonacci) that continuously rotates to keep words readable and aligned to the camera while others spiral off frame. This is the best example of the rotation and seamless transitions that make this poem good
1:57 and more, and more, and more, and more. Another cool positional transition
Most of these techniques are usable in any kinetic type video and are useful to take note of for modification and use of in future projects.
