What are feature stories? Well, a feature story could be a lot of things. It could be a story about how someone who was disabled completed 24k run or a teacher who left a lasting affect on their students. Did those capture your attention? That's the first part of a feature story, creating a concept that can grab an audience by the heartstrings. Strong concepts are what drives a video, but that's only the beginning of a video. There's so much more that you must do that can make a good feature story.
What else must you do you may ask? well there are many things but let's start with the basics.
Visuals
Visuals cover a wide variety of subjects in your video, including the rule of this and the six shot system. Don't be like me and get the two confused with each other. They may seem like the same thing but they only work if you use them in harmony. The six shot system ranges from the extreme wide shot to the even more extreme close-up. Wide shots can give you an environment and an idea of where you are. Medium shots can show off people and other objects in that environment that you've established. Close-ups can show your main topic and the focus of your person, place, or thing. The rule of thirds changes the way people pay attention keeping some one or something in the middle of the screen is boring and won't keep people interested. Keeping them more to the left or right of the screen can keep your audience engaged. With both of these kept in mind you can keep an audience engaged and interested in your video.
Audio
Having a good, clean sound is the next important piece in the puzzle of a video. When your interviewing some one you have to have natural sound in the background that is like the bass to your favorite song. You don't really notice it until you really listen but it's what can enhance and keep you engaged in the song. The same goes for your video. But when your listening to a song theres something else besides the guitars and the drums. There are the vocals. When you're interviewing someone you have to keep their voice in mind. If it's something their passionate about then they should have emotion and passion in their voice.
I recently did a feature story over a student known as Blake Weidenmeyer. He has an interesting hobby that involves the pixels that we see everyday on technology. Blake takes these pixels and turns them into all kinds of art. When I was writing the script for the interview I had a narrative lead that introduced the art that Blake makes and just a brief summary of what pixels really are. I think that changed how the video went overall because that's just what the interview was all about. I didn't just interview Blake though. I also brought in a friend of his, Alec Hite. They complimented each other by talking about how they both liked Blakes art and how it has really come along after all this time.
Creating my script became a problem as soon as I saw that what I was doing was the wrong thing. I had to re-write my script and improvise some parts for the interview. The voiceover wasn't a problem and I felt comftorable speaking through it. It stopped working after awhile bu that didn't slow it down too much. My experience shooting the video was not very good as it was my 4th backup plan for the project. There were many things that went wrong such as equipment issues and people backing out on me. I even had to use a junior level camera for some parts.
The thing that I liked about my video most was that I was actually surprised on how it turned out. It was a good quality video for being such last minute and I actually enjoyed watching it with the rest of the class to my surprise.
It was fun shooting the video but that wasn't the last time that I would be working on it. I had to go back and translate the video down onto paper. I had to write a narrative lead and rewrite the most of the interview. I included quotes from those I interviewed but luckily not their whole answer.
Overall it was cool writing the future since writing is one of my strong suits, however I liked filming the video and asking the questions my self better. The feature story felt like it didn't take a long time and I didn't have to put any effort into it. Shooting the video allows to create a better story and image in my eyes.
Blakes Interview
Written feature story
Pixels, they’re something that we see everyday on all of our devices. We see them in different colors producing an image that we couldn’t imagine 50 years ago. They’re the small squares that make every color, every word, and every image on your screen. Anything that’s displayed is because the pixels are allowing us to see it. Without these pixels we wouldn’t be able to see the art that they convey on our screens.
Some people don’t consider pixels art, but that’s only some people. Blake Weidenmeyer sees pixels as a way of expressing art. He’s a student from Olathe Northwest High School that possesses the special talent of creating art from the simple pixels that we see everyday. He got into this pixel art because of the old video game sprites that they used in video games. They were so interesting that he just had to make art like that.
Blake Weidenmeyer has being doing this for a very long time and has quite a bit of experience with it. “I just hit 200.” Weidenmeyer said. However that was only in his Marvel series. “I’ve done all kinds of stuff so I’ve definitely made more than 200.” he said.
He has a popular Instagram page where you can find all of the pixel art that he done. “On Instagram, i’m at @Kirbyzilla.” Weidenmeyer said.
Alec is one of Weidenmeyers friends and shared with us what he thought of Weidenmeyers art. “He’s going along pretty good” Alec said “It’s really helping him progress in different forms.”
Blake Weidenmeyer has done so much pixel art that it’s hard for him to keep count, and he’s not going to stop anytime soon. It’s a way for him to see his favorite characters to come to life through his favorite form of art. Blake has a passion for a simple form of art, which makes it so much more larger than what it is.
Organization is very important to keeping everything from getting out of hand and messy. That's why premiere pro has tools that can easily organize for you. These tools are known as bins and are very easy to use if you know how to use them. I will be showing you how to use them.
Here is an example of me using those bins for creating my video. You can create more bins than I did but I only really needed to do 2. The way you create bins is a little button that looks like a folder at the bottom of the project panel.
In order to open a bin, simply double click the bin file and it will open. If you want to delete a bin there is a second button that looks like a trash can that will delete any bin you have selected.
Something else that you may want to keep in mind is that you can rename certain clips. IN order to do this all you need to do is select the clip you want to rename in the project panel and choose Clip > rename, type in whatever you want to call it and press enter or return depending on what system you are using.
Now depending on what your preference is you may want to change the way you view your bins. there are a few different ways to do this one of them being that if you double click the bin it will open in it is own floating panel
If you want to open a bin in place, just click Ctrl-double-click or Command double click the bin.
Finally if you want to open a new tab with your bin just click Alt-Double-click or option-double-click.
So for the past few days i've been working on a project for my video class which is about using in your chairs which you can watch here:
My team and I came up with the idea when our assignment was to make something about ONW procedures and promoting a good behavior at Northwest. I've been noticing that a lot of people haven't been outing in their chairs so I thought I'd change that. We created the story board and I wanted some humor in our video so most of the humor is mine. During the actual filming we had troubles when George forgot the SD card but we made up for it. It didn't take us long to shoot as it was a very short video, about 30 seconds. We had Evan and I be the actors while George and Nick be cameramen making sure everything was filming ok. Even though I didn't do a lot of the filming I still got to learn more about how to film better. After filming was wrapped we had to edit our videos separately and we all had to make it a little differently. I thought that editing would be harder but it was actually very easy to do and didn't take that long. However it took about 3 hours to edit an video that was only 30 seconds long.
I leaned a few things about the equipment while we were shooting. One thing I learned is that putting the camera on the tripod is pretty annoying when the camera doesn't want to go onto the tripod. I also learned how to zoom in while filming the video. Another thing that I learned about filming is how professional filming can be. Sure we messed around but the only thing it did was prolong the process of filming our video. The deadline was also hard to meet for me because there was more I wanted to do but there was no one to help me to do it since other kids were having trouble and I was the one who didn't get help. I'm not blaming the teacher i'm blaming the other students for not knowing wants going on. There aren't a lot of things i'd do differently other than spending more time on filming and making sure everything looks good and consistent. The only thing i'd really change is being able to add more of my own flavor to the video which I sort of did with the humor in the video. Overall the video looks good so thats why I wouldn't change as much. However there aren't a lot of things i'd do the same either. Other than doing the six shot system there's not a whole lot to do.
Wednesday, December 16, 2015
This is a my name being written in a gif. In order to make this I had to use the erase tool and frame timeline. When i used the erase tool I had to work backwards in order to create the writing look of the gif. then in the frame timeline I reversed it to make it actually write my name.
This is a project I made using photoshop. It's 10 words that describe me as of now. I used the transform tool along with the video timeline tool so that i could create multiple frames to make the video to make the words zoom in to the picture.
This here is a house that I created. I used a few new tools her such as shadows and the scenes tool. To make it spin is how i created the 3D movement of the entire house. I encountered a few problems when making the house such as the components not wanting to cooperate me but I eventually figured it all out.
