Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Surprise honey, you just looked like an douche in front of your co-workers.

First and foremost, I'd like to thank the greatest TA ( cough cough) Janie (cough cough), for allowing our class to only make one short. Not only did that convenience all of us more, but we have fortunately been able to enjoy this rare sunny weather in Athens this past week that I'm sure many of the other labs have not. You rock! Okay, enough of being precious and onto my reflection. 
With saying that we only had to do one short, we really have no way to compare or contrast our different approaches, however I will discuss how we did approach it based off of the script that we chose and compare it to other projects. The joke we chose was Joke 5 (to understand this blog more, you may want to read more on our joke). Kamerynn Harrah is the genius behind our short. He used a lot of the plot from the original script, which all of us did minus Gabe, but also incorporated a lot of his own sense of humor and spin on it which makes it more original. This is the exact reason why we decided to use his script. While filming it we really focused specific shots that made it look like we used a variety of different shots because we weren't allowed to move the camera or zoom in/out. We made sure to use two exterior shots to specify the two locations that we focused on as well as close ups to enforce the tension building in each scene. Other major factors that we incorporated in this short were rule of thirds and both rule of 30's. Every scene we shot we made especially sure that we were not violating any of these. In between breaks of shooting we would make sure that we were establishing a line between the characters. Although we hadn't put this into consideration before, shape was incorporated. Kam had more of a square face, which makes him seem stronger and more dominant, where as Amanda (the wife) had a more round face that made her seem more approachable. Finally, we used a lot of both object movement and camera movement. Someone/something was always moving in the frame and the camera consistently was leading the viewers eye to focus on something if need be. 
Our video was similar to the others in my group primarily by using a very similar plot the jokes, as oppose to creating a completely different plot and only incorporating the joke. I think by using this approach it really made the jokes come a live and a lot easier to understand as oppose to only doing the punch line, it just would have looked awkward. It was obvious in most video who used a tripod or not, which ultimately made the video easier to watch because the camera work wasn't off balance or shaky unless done intentionally. Most of the videos used the audio that was caught from the camera, however there were two groups who took a different approach to it. One group used voice overs and another had no diagetic sound only non-diagetic and used subtitles. Angela Serano's group is the one who did a Silent Movie and I really think they did an exceptionally good job at it. It wasn't hard to follow by any means and And even by taking a completely different approach to it, it still worked out well. 

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