Leo C: My Digital Filmmaking Experience

When I chose digital filmmaking as my spring phase project, i thought it was going to be easy and something I could sleep through. I even made clownish videos because i thought of this project as a joke. But after the first week, I realized i was totally wrong. This class required a lot of work. It's no joke and not like any other project. But it's still worth it because you learn a lot to work and edit videos in ways you thought you would never be able to do.
In our first video about Martin Luther King Jr, we walked down to NJPAC to do some filming. It was interesting to see all the different ways you could take a shot and how different things make your video look worse or better. The story line was not necessarily interesting, but editing it was fun. And then adding music into it was cool. It was fun to see that at the end of the day, what i thought did not look good, turned out very nicely because of all the editing that my team was able to do.
Our next story line was going to be fun because now, we needed to make up our own story and act it out. We made a story about a mafia scene. The script, i thought, was well put together. We went to Hoboken, NJ to film it. Noticing all the different places and different ways we could of shot was cool. The shots were nicely taken and put together. Although we are not finished with it, the video itself is coming out very well. Adding music and all the different effects are fun to play around with. I hope it comes out good.
Our next project to film a documentary film about a Spring Phase project was different because now we are all working alone. I chose Down Town Clowns. I figured that shooting cutaways was going to be easy, which it was. But doing the interview was not easy because thinking of questions was not easy and making sure the microphone was not in the video and making sure the sound was good. It took me two days to edit the film. It was not easy because i wanted to make sure it was perfect. It was a little short, but with all the editing skills i learned, it came out very good, to me.
Thinking now of the class, it was not bad choosing it. I learned a lot of things on ways videos can look differently and all the different editing skills that could done to a video, just to make it look good. I also realized why it takes years to finish a film. it took me two-three days to finish a three minute video.