Video Entertainment End of Year Reflection 2018-2019

The 5 Guarantees are Technical Skills, Communication, Collaboration, Leadership, and Project Management. For the first guarantee, technical skills, I believe that I have learned so much about Adobe Premiere and Adobe Photoshop over the past four years and especially in these last two. I believe it was important because, if I were to continue this path and create a career in the Entertainment industry, then I would need these skills and be able to work my way around Adobe products. I faced many challenges along the way with Technical skills due to issues in the program or in the files themselves. For Communication, I believe that I have changed quite a bit over the past four years, but not so much this year. I used to just let other people do what they wanted and did not try to change anything that I thought was wrong, but now I speak up and let the director or whoever is the department head my thoughts on that particular scene or footage. Communication, in my opinion, is the key to a successful collaboration with others.

Collaboration is hardwired into our brains when we are young so learning to collaborate was not hard at all. I believe it is important to collaborate because it is good to get others' opinion on certain subjects, especially since the person who created the script or treatment is biased to their idea. Leadership is something I've always struggled with because I am not confident in my work or my skills, but I believe it's important to be able to take control of a project and be able to effectively create something that the whole group is proud of. Project Management is something I've had trouble with in recent years due to my schedule being out of wack. I have a part-time job and since I usually only get two days off a week, it makes it a bit hard to get my schedule to align with my group.

I think my greatest strength is that I am willing to do any roles that are thrown my way and that I am able to, now, effectively communicate my ideas and thoughts about something to the leader of the project. I have improved a lot in these areas because of this class. In my freshman and sophomore year, I would let people do whatever they wanted and didn't try to stop them if I knew it wasn't going to look good as well as stick to just editing or doing storyboards. I believe that my greatest weakness is my project management, I don't really have the time to do much working on a video unless I am in class and working on it. I need to improve on this and use what days I have off to work on videos and certain aspects of entertainment.

I will most likely use what I have learned in college and everyday life. I believe that I will be able to use these skills in my future careers and such: communication, collaboration, leadership. I don't think I would be able to change anything about what I have learned, in all honesty. The problems I mostly have are with schedule alignment, which is something I can not fix. But if I could, I would do that. Overall, I believe that these skills have changed me as a person, especially since we were being graded on it and I had to force myself out of my comfort zone. I am sure that these guarantees will help me in future years and move me along on my career path.

Top 3 Projects

For my top 3 projects, my favorite project that we had to do was create a film reel. I have done several of these before but I was absolutely in love with this video and I am excited about how it turned out. I believe that it is a bit too long, but overall, I enjoy how I edited it. A lot of the shots are from one of my favorite cinematographers: Armin Dikic. But, some of them are from me. I edited this to a song I throughly enjoy titled "The Fly" by Cosmo Sheldrake and I believe that the beats were easy to be able to switch shots with. This project, overall, took maybe two days to create. I didn't really face a lot of challenges due to this being a film reel that is all my own style. I learned about how to transition effectively in these shots; for instance, you can't take a really dark shot and put it next to a bright shot and expect it to look nice. I believe for feedback, I was told to brighten it up a little bit and to shorten it. I agreed with both of these but haven't yet reedited it. I am extremely happy with how this video turned out and I hope that I make more film reels like this one. 

This is the second in my top 3 projects of this year. We were told that we had to create a music video, but we could do whatever we wanted other than that. My group and I chose to do the song "Connection" by One Republic. This project took about a week and a half to make with all the shots we needed as well as editing. The only challenges we faced were trying to get the locations to let us film along with getting that hallway shot, people kept looking at the camera. I didn't learn much with the project since we have done music videos in the past, but it was a fun experience. I don't recall what feedback we were given, but I believe that we did well with this video and I think everyone really enjoyed it. I believe that this video was one of our best this year and I really enjoyed creating it.

This is the third of my top 3 projects of this year. We made treatments for short films and from those, decided what we wanted to make with our group as well. We eventually used these scripts to decide on our feature film as well. I wrote this treatment and then the script, I believe this would be an enjoyable short story or book but not really eligible for a short or feature film. We filmed this in about two days and we decided we had to use folly sound when our audio came out funky, which didn't really work out for us. We couldn't really convey the whole video because we didn't have the materials, but it was such a fun process. We did not receive feedback because we turned it in late and we did not change much, but we want to reshoot it sometime in the future. The video doesn't show how much fun we had creating this video. I don't think I've ever had so much fun on set. The video is not my favorite but it is bumped to my top 3 just because of the experience. We got to film in a rundown, partially demolished, house and it was honestly a trip. We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into and we even had to wear masks because the air had so much debris and mold, it was amazing. I wouldn't trade that experience for anything.

Overall Experience

Outside of class, I believe I used what time I had efficiently when it came to filming or being on set for every project we had. Outside of class, my friend and I have decided that we want to create a podcast called SauceBox Podcast, which we have worked on and made a couple episodes for. The skills we have learned from this class have truly helped us work on our podcast and made it easier for us to understand the work that goes on behind the camera. I believe that being in Video Entertainment has helped me a lot when it comes to being patient and working through any technical issues I might have when working on projects because we've had so many problems with making these videos and I've learned to not freak out when my clips are not showing up or my video will not export correctly. I use this skill in my career as well when I am dealing with customers who are being difficult and I just try my best to stay calm and collected, which this class has helped me with due to problems on set or in the editing process. 

I believe I need improvement on my project management and procrastination. I tend to procrastinate a lot and have been trying to quit that habit, which has actually been working out for me recently. In our feature film, I was the storyboard artist. I was also the sketchbook artist because our character was an artist, I had to draw for him. I worked with the Director of Photography along with the Art Director to draw and understand the character with the best of my ability. For the first page in the sketchbook, I had called our DP and asked what he thought about the character because I wanted the first page to be something that the main character would identify with. He and I agreed that I should draw birds because he feels trapped and wants to fly away from this life and unreachable expectations of him. Every day, I was creating drawings and illustrations for the sketchbook as well as working with the DP to make storyboards that reflect his vision for each shot. 

Overall, I believe that my favorite part about this year was making the short films, it was so much fun and I couldn't have asked for a better crew and cast. It was one of the best set experiences of my life. I would try to stop the procrastination of my projects if I could, but I throughly enjoyed working on most of these projects. This year has been a rollercoaster of emotions creating each video and it really hasn't hit yet that this is my last time to be able to see all of these people and to make videos like this and be able to critique others in the way that we do. Outside of school, I would like to continue making videos. I have actually thought about making an art channel on YouTube and use the skills I've learned in this class to create high quality videos. I also want to make more film reels and music videos with my friends, those are my favorites to make with them because they're so expressive, especially the film reels. It more reflects a fun day with my friends and every time I watch them I can recall the exact moment I started filming it or when my friend filmed it and I love that feeling of remembering the jokes we made at that moment. I think these four years will stick with me throughout my whole life and I wouldn't trade it for anything.