Good morning everyone. I spent this morning with your drafts. Those who have not yet submitted a draft in an acceptable format should do so immediately. While I will send individual comments out shortly (for those drafts we didn’t screen in class), I’d prefer to avoid redundancy so I’ll use this space to address some general issues.
Frame size. Make sure you dont have ’empty’ space in the frame unless it is for a clear purpose. If you are sampling youtube and still need to download some clips, check out ClipGrab. Remember to ask permission (these permission letters and release forms can go in an appendix to your reflection) and get citation information. This applies to still images as well. While it can definitely be effective in certain instances, a black border, especially if it is not uniform across a montage, tends to indicate a sloppy, quick production. Use panning and zooming, but use it sparingly.
Titles. The reason we spent some time with Illustrator is so that you could have some experience with graphic design. I hope to see some inventive, topical designs in title screens that can be translated into other promotional materials. I have seen some really interesting uses of title cards. Check your spelling. A general rule of thumb is to make sure that text remains on screen long enough so that you can read through it TWICE. Clearly this is most important with longer passages.
Audio. Make sure you consider the levels of your audio…explore filters and mixing. Abrupt sound changes are jarring so use them carefully. Fade in and out of interviews and music.
Color. If you shoot on different days in different locations at different times of day (even if it is the same camera) the ‘look’ will be very different. Use color filters in Premiere Pro to try and make a uniform visual style.
Resolution. I understand that in some of our exercises throughout the semester, I’ve encouraged you to just grab any image from a Google Image search and throw it into Premiere Pro. Generally speaking, the resolution of images is very small and when you adjust the size it becomes very pixilated. Poor resolution is OK for a draft, but you need to really do some work to find higher resolution images for your final project. There are several strategies to consider. First, take images yourself. Images from even a small, consumer digital camera will be higher quality than most online images. Go to the library, find images in books and scan them at an appropriate resolution. Standard frame size is 1280 x 720 (or 1920 x 1080) so your images need to be at least this big (unless you use multiple images simultaneously). If you plan to zoom into the image in any significant way, it needs to be proportionally bigger. You can limit your search size in Google Image to ‘large’ (I’d just avoid downloading any image that is small than 1000 pixels either way) and you can set most scanners to scan the size you want. Do some math, do some planning, try your best to avoid poor resolution. If you can’t, give some justification in your reflection.
Credits. Give credit to those who helped you. You might give a dedication, you might create a production company and logo and include a year…there are many possibilities, but you need to end somehow.
EXTRA
-For those interested in Object Oriented Philosophies, a new issue of Ozone just got released and has some downloadable material that might be useful. HERE is the link.
-An interesting example of the/an emerging twitter genre came across my radar over the holidays…HERE is “The Woman in #7A”.
-Check #harmon460 on twitter for extra credit opportunities. Those who have turning things in late or missed blog posts might consider boosting their ethos in this way.
English 460 advanced composition 