Over the semester I feel as though I have improved as a filmmaker. The key aspect I have improved upon this year is storytelling. Before I made a lot of “so what” films. They were films that lacked any conflict or struggle. I was even able to transfer this to my documentary work. This technique has help give my films structure and made them less like fluff pieces. Also I feel my skills with equipment has improved. I’ve started using equipment like lav mics and shotgun mic that I haven’t really used before. I’m still learning a lot through experience where what situations are the best for each piece of equipment. Lighting is another thing that I can’t say I’ve mastered this semester but I have definitely gone from placing lights around a subject at random to placing them in position to create the correct mood.
I shot a good portion of the film earlier this week and scheduled to do some re-shoots and shoot the end. So I started working on the After Effects side of the project where I spent a lot of time on Lynda.com and other tutorial sites to get myself familiar with the software. At the last minute my actor decide to go home leaving me without an ending to my film. So I had to right in a different ending where I bring in another character. Once I found the actress, I ran into lighting and audio problems with the D300. The first time I used the D300 I thought the reason for the pixilation on some of the shots was lack of light so I got a light kit in hopes to remedy that problem. The extra lighting had no effect on the pixilation and even when I blasted the actors with light it just became overexposed pixilation. What surprises me is the D300 works very well in sun and you don’t get this problem. A possible explanation for both of these problems could be my lack of experience with the camera. It may be something simple like I might have missed a setting or the D300 don’t work well indoors. After Effects hates me. I don’t know why. That was my biggest problem because there is a limited number of computers that have After Effects and my problem was most of them the program wasn’t working, it kept crashing. I also had a problem with my harddrive where it won’t save at times so I ended up losing hours of work. My timeline got messed up somehow from computer to computer so I had rematch the audio. Sometimes this weird thing would had where it would lock the audio with video but it would be a few seconds off and I couldn’t unlink or unlock. I ended up important new clips sometimes. This is the first project where I’ve spent hours of work on and not happy with my final results but I am glad to now have a base set of knowledge on After Effects.
I’m sorry the technology was working against you on this one.