Practice Projects

Before we "officialy" began the BTEC course, we spent a certain amount of time improving our technical skills

Project 1: Chase scene

One incredibly important thing i learned(apart from new cinematography skills) is that communication is incredibly important. For some reason, we decided to make our roles incredibly reliant on each other(e.g: he was writer and i was cinematographer, i had to wait for the basic ideas from him before choosing shots and angles (although throughout the second half, there are loads of unplanned angles and shots since when storyboarding i did not have the experience nessesscary to choose decent shots.

This slow process restricted us from doing our original idea, which was an incredibly ambitious piece (which we both did not have the skill to pull off lol)

This was the first time i worked with film as a visual medium. As such, the video is of incredibly low quality(from both a creative and technical standpoint).

I would say the part that killed this the most is how my partner and I managed our time. We waited till the last week before starting production so due to our time management, inexperience and lack of teamwork, this outcome was not the best.

I learned various things though, like how NOT to film a chase scene :>

I'd say by the second half things would start getting better as i learned from the shots in the first half (interesting angles, more experimentation and variety in the shots used, etc.

Story of me project

This project was quite fun to make, although it took a fairly large amount of time.

During this period, we had to do online learning a lot, meaning that working in a group and filming each other would not be the best due to our limited in-person school time.

I filmed the footage while pretending someone was there.(according to storyboard). It was actually much more difficult than i had anticipated, as i had no idea where i would decide to draw in the "me". I also had a few other limitations like how i needed the "me" to interact with the environment. there are two scenes where this happenes. one is where it is a POV camera angle. For this scene i rotoscoped the arm.

For the other scene where "I" move aside a mosqioto net. The net was really droopy and i managed to move it aside by holding a corner of the cloth with my hand barely out of frame.

This video was recorded on a phone camera. In order to reduce the shaking that a normal handheld phone camera would have, i tied it to a long stick, holding the end of it. this way my shakiness would be somewhat dissapated due to the length between my hands and the camera

For this project, i wanted to make a visual representation of what was happening in my mind. Thus the strange elements that would not have existed in a real world setting.

For this project, due to my slow speed, my organization was an absolute mess. I storyboarded the first scene, and then began animating it before the storyboard was even complete.

For some of the scenes, my phone camera was too zoomed in, so i had to use a clip on wide angle lens i had from a long time ago. it made the circle and warping effect. however, this was fixed using Davinci-Resolve(the software).

After the footage was gathered (and some of it un-warped), i used Krita to animate the clips.

Since my computer has a small amount of ram (for animation and editing stnadards), i had to split the clips into 50 video frame segments. By limiting the number of frames needed to be in ram, i reduced lag and crashes.

(Btw by video frames i think the video frames had loads of color data, and so i couldnt load too many in at the same time. adding loads of layers and frames with single colors had a much smaller effect on the lag.)