Final Project Evaluation

After finishing the three parts of the first level project I have gone back over the work and evaluated it from a mix of reviews from my class mates and my own views.

First there was the creation of the logo for our multimedia company, here are the final designs:

In these designs I managed to make two different designs and tried these designs first in different colours, then in different sizes such as business card sizes. The logo managed to be scaled down to this size well. Also from these designs I tried a few different styles of design for the text and I liked how these turned out, such as using the o of rose and the I of media to make a rose.

Though there were some areas I think could be improved in the logo design. I think I could have done the overall design of the logo better, in hindsight and when transferring the logo into different mediums such as using it for the leaflet for example I have found I don't like the design. An idea might have been to make a range of logo styles, I went for a corporate style, but think I should have also tried styles such as more personal, fun or artistic. In designing the logo I got stuck in one vision for my design instead of considering more alternatives, but I can learn from this for next time.

Then there was the creation of the promotional leaflet for our multimedia company, here are the final designs:

I like how the final design ended up for my leaflet, I think I managed to produce a professional, clean cut design. The photos I had taken of Manchester worked well on there own and didn't need too many effects and changing to add to the overall effect and style. From previous work I tried applying alignment and on the leaflet used design rulers and spacing for best effect. This helped with a more professional look in the finished leaflet.

There are still some areas that I think can be improved on the leaflet though. The typography on the leaflet back gave me some problems and even after trying many type styles I didn't find one I was entirely happy with and still think it looks a little unprofessional. Also after learning from the logo work I wanted to try some of my different designs from the scamps I created in my sketch book and might go back and make some further designs. In the final design I also think some of the pictures of my work included ended up a little bit stretched to fit in the aligned design, I might make a second version with one picture per box instead of two. Finally as a cross over from the logo design, the logo I previously created I wasn't entirely happy with and I was reluctant to include it in this leaflet along  side the company name.

Finally there was the filming and editing of a promotional video for the media company, here is the final video:

After completing the videos for ourselves, we watched them back as a class and filled in some review sheets on each others video, marking them on things such as shots used, editing, effects, sound recorded, soundtrack and more. From the comments I got back from these sheets people liked the use of video effects, the soundtrack and the way I managed to incorporate my logo in the video. Myself I was pleased the video gave me the chance to use different shot types in the filming and some different effects in the editing and I think this comes across well in the video. From keeping to my original storyboards mainly the video kept a general flow to it. I am also pleased I managed to include some examples of my work so far in there.

Looking back on the finished video there's still definitely some changes I would have made. At some parts when the video switched from non dialogue to dialogue scenes the soundtrack is dropped to allow the talking to be heard, but this is done too suddenly and stand outs, more work with key frames would have improved this. In the dialogue sections I also wish I had made a script for it and practiced it, as I seem a little unsure in my words on film. In the section where it cuts to myself using different video equipment I wish I had used more of my filming crew for this, so it looked more like a media company than just an individual project with just me in all of the scenes. Finally I think the end screen though getting the information across of the name and contact details for the company looks a little unprofessional.

I am hoping to improve from the things we've done and learn for level 2.

Final Promo Video

After finally completing the edit of my video here is the final video exported in quicktime and uploaded to youtube:

Please watch it and give any comments on here of what you think, so I can improve for this and future videos.


The soundtrack is a track from the band the Go Team called, Feel Good By Numbers:

Editing Third Week

In this third week of editing I have been adding some examples of my work and then a sound track and effects to my video.

From my original pre-production I wanted to add some examples of my work into a scene where the camera zooms over my shoulder and then focuses on the screen. From this I wanted to make it look as if the images where actually being shown on the screen of the computer. After trying a few different ideas with this, such as resizing the images and changing the opacity of the top image to make it blend in to the screen I decided that the contrast between the original jpeg images and the video I am trying to blend them into was just too different and it couldn't be done well without major editing of the images before importing them. So as a new idea I cut from the video scene of the screen and then went to a slideshow of the images in a sequence, I then changed the opacity of the images a little to make them look less white and bright and go better in the sequence of the film. The files were originally brought into Final Cut Pro by saving them from Illustrator and Photoshop as jpeg files and them importing them in and finally placing them in the video timeline.

After that I wanted to add sound to the sections of my video without dialogue. Adding a music track for the non dialogue scenes and then sound effects to a scene in the video where I speed up my typing for comedy effect. The sound files I found as mp3 files from the internet, I then imported them into Final Cut Pro and placed them in a audio channel below the video, cutting the track where appropriate.

Editing

After getting back the raw footage from my video shoot, last week and this week I have been editing. I started off by receiving separate video files for each scene shot. To begin with these were all imported into Final Cut Pro the program we are using to edit our promo videos. From here I checked each of these videos one by one in the player to remind myself what the scenes comprised of. To help myself later when I wanted to make them into a time line and reorder the scenes to match my pre-production I then renamed all the separate scenes. Then I dragged them onto the timeline in Final Cut in the right order, the rest of my first week time was spent cutting the scenes, getting rid of any excess footage. There was extra filmed footage before and after some of the scenes where we were getting into position, checking the angle, checking the sound etc and some scenes were filmed that were not needed in the final timeline.

For the second week I focused on adding extra titles and effects. Starting off I took two of the separate video clips that were imported in to Final Cut and placed one above the other in the timeline. This allowed me to do a video in video effect that was planned in my timeline. I set some key frames at the start and end of the video in video so I could make the video zoom into a frame and at the end shrink away at the end. Then I added some text titles at the beginning of the video to introduce it. This is done in a similar way with text being placed above the video clip in the timeline. I experimented with some of the texts when adding, trying scrolling text and text in a typewriter style. Also I made a screen picture in Illustrator showing the company logo and some contact details to import and show at the end of the video.

There's still some effects id like to add, I want to add some music and sound effects to parts of the video and  I want to add some examples of media work I have done as embedded pictures in the video.

Here are some pictures of the video and timeline in Final Cut Pro.