#2: Editing Baby! February 5th 2009

Today we were supposed to spend the entire lesson editing our footage that we took last lesson of the different Cinematography scenes and techniques that we were supposed to achieve in our footage. However, I totally forgot to bring my tape to school unfortunately. This mistake will never occur again. Thus, because of this unfortunate incident, my group and I had to redo the entire task sheet. Contrary to assumption, this was not a very hard task to fulfill, since we have already done it before, so we all knew what we needed to do. It took us 20 minutes to film everything, 25 minutes less than last lesson. After filming all the footage, we imported it all to Final Cut Pro, cut out all the useless takes, added in Video Effects like Color Changer and Text. We ended up finishing our final product by the end of class :D

I felt very guilty at the beginning of the lesson because I ended up letting my entire group down by forgetting to bring the tape in. I repeat, this mistake will never happen again, not as long as I am doing Film at least. However, my group members and I bonded very well together through re-filming. I have never worked with some of my group members like Jerald and Marcus Yau so it was a really good chance for me to get to know them better. Not only that, I feel that we all work better under pressure. We did not waste time, we did not loiter about and cause a fuss, we all just concentrated on the task ahead and tried our best to make up for lost time. In the end, it turned out we did.

#1: Introduction to it all! February 2nd 2009

Today was the start of a new journey for me. I have never studied Film before in my life, however I have done some filming and editing before in CT. I am absolutely thrilled about exploring this topic and hopefully I will pick stuff up quickly and do good!

Film (movies and TV) represents a significant portion of my life. I watch more movies than any of my friends, movies that span all genres and times, from Citizen Kane and Gone With The Wind, to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Tropic Thunder. There is this magnetism about film that attracts you into a whole new dimension of perceptional awakening and stimulation. It is this quality that inspired me to do acting in theatre when I was 8, and I have been doing it ever since.

During today's lesson, we basically had an overall introduction as to what we, as a class, will be focusing on this year, which is Sound Design, and documentary writer/director Michael Moore (notable for his highly critical and controversial works on American politics and society such as Farenheit 9/11 and Sicko). From the start, I was already very intrigued about this topic and could not wait to get started since Michael Moore's works are very eye-popping and influential. After that, we had a review on the Do's and Don'ts of working in the Multimedia Room e.g. Do not walk or run around the Multimedia Lab; Always put your hand up and wait patiently for the teacher to come and answer your inquiry.

Afterwards, Ms. Wong then assigned us tasks to fulfill, which was a list of Cinematography techniques and scenes that we had to utilize and film. I have never done Film before so when I received the task sheet, there was some terminology that I did not understand like Rule of Thirds, Dream-Like Sequence and Two-Way 180 degree Dialogue etc. However, I got into a group of 4, of which 2 people did Film last year, so they taught me all that I needed to know and showed me all the techniques that were required. We filmed scenes like "Student walking up stairs, looks up and is surprised - Use COLOR to show Angry or Melancholy ; "Film 2 identical scenes: Use LIGHTING to show Happiness or Sadness" etc etc. Filming all the scenes

took up about 45-50 minutes of class time, and after that we returned all our equipment back to Mr Chiang and started editing our footage. I learnt quite a bit about Cinematography today. I learnt several different filming techniques and I believe that they will be vital later on this term. 

Today was not only fun but a very productive lesson. I learnt a lot, thus fulfilling my Human Ingenuity AOI. I absolutely cannot wait for the next lesson to come by!!!

Brought to you by: 

The Movie Enthusiast

Andrew Huang