Thrown Into Life (A Music Video)

These last two weeks I have been working on a music video that was supposed to mimic the stylistic choices of an already made music video. When I heard the prompt I was instantly thinking, what is my favorite music, and of course Hip-Hop was the one to come to mind. So the idea was to make a "tribute" to Hip-Hop throughout the years. So songs like "The Humpty Dance," "Walk This Way," and "Stan." Realizing an idea like this would not simply work, because I was working by myself, so I came up with the idea to mimic an Eminem song called "No Love." As I'm doing this and cleaning up the words and messages I realized, I could just write my own song. While I did that I came up with an idea to make the video about my friends not supporting my rapping and them ripping up pages in my notebook. So I filmed a lot of things within the last week, however all my footage was lost. So the last day before the project was due, I was listening to music thinking of something I can do and the song "Mockingbird" came on and I remembered the music video for that, and mimicked that.

As to what I have learned is always have a back up plan for your back up plan. It's as simple as that. What I really enjoyed about this was making the music and working with a friend and her to record the chorus part of the song.

North By Northwest

The movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock, North By Northwest, is about this man by the name of Roger O. Thornhill (played by Cary Grant) who is mistaken for George Kaplan, who is a CIA agent, but here is the kicker, Kaplan isn't a real person. Thornhill was out for his normal everyday life, when he gets kidnapped by two of Phillip Vandamm's (played by James Mason) goons. Vandamm is under the alias of Lester Townsend. This is when Thornhill is mistaken for Kaplan, and is imprisoned by these two guys until they get him drunk and is supposed to drive off a cliff but gets away, and gets arrested. He then tries to explain to the police that he was forcefully intoxicated and tries to imprison Vandamm, who he still believes is Townsend. A decoy of Townsend's wife is there to explain that he had too much to drink. Thornhill goes to the hotel where Kaplan is supposedly staying. Finds out that he isn't there but will pose as him to go confront "Townsend" and find out why he was doing this. Finds out Townsend isn't who he thinks he is and is actually an United Nations Ambassador (played by Philip Ober). While Thornhill is talking to Townsend, one of Vandamm's goons kills the Ambassador, and Thornhill is framed. Now on the run from the police, Thornhill goes and meets Eve Kendall (played by Eva Marie Saint) who helps him hid from the police and has a short romantic night with. Thornhill then goes to Chicago and almost gets killed by a plane. He then finds out that Kendall is in cahoots with Vandamm and gets himself arrested to protect him from getting killed. A CIA agent gets him out of jail and asks him to go to Mount Everest and save George Kaplan a.k.a. Eve Kendall, who was using her looks to get close to Vandamm and arrest him. Long story short he "gets killed" and then saves her, while getting Vandamm arrested. As far as we are aware at least.

Overall it was a great movie and lighting and sound was all very good for that time period, some shots were really dark, but the majority were really good. It is a must see for any aspiring film maker.

Last Phone Call

So I stayed true to my video, and I filmed it all the day I pitched the idea, and minus maybe the lighting, I came out with a great video. However, due to recent events, and the timing of the video, I will not be showing it. I was thinking of doing a whole new project, however I decided that since the filming was done, only two weeks left to plan, film, edit, and do my other projects, and go to my job, I decided against it. So I went to edit, with the okay with Mrs. Morris, we figured it out. I will be posting a link to the channel, however watch with your own risk.

I made this montage to make people feel something, I spent time to pick the perfect song, then I went back to edit the movie to the song. And I believe I did a great job. I went back and watched montages to see how they put emotion into it.

I hope you enjoy it...

Have you ever heard of these "codecs" before?

So I stumbled upon an article about the use of codecs and what they were and in all honesty, I have never heard of these things until just now. I guess I always just figured codecs were the files like .mov or like .m4p and all that, when in reality those are "containers". If you would like to give that article a read or if you would just like to watch the 43 minute video, I will put the link here for you guys to go see.

Basically codecs stands for compressor/decompressor. They are used when you're trying to export a file in a smaller or larger file form. At least that was my prediction. Codecs are not the same as a container, codecs are stuff such as h.264, PRO-RES, and DNxHD. While containers are things such as .mov or .m4p and that is the file form. Think of a container as a bucket and codecs as things, you put codecs (the things) into the container (bucket).

You would want to use these codecs when you are doing what I call the 4 step process which will be, capture (what your camera is recording), edit (use to edit), delivery (exporting and final product (file put online, client, or burn to dvd)), and archival (back up of final copy to make better quality). For when you are on the capture form, you're gonna want to use h.264 and a 4:4:4 chroma-sub-sampling. Edit, you will use a small form of DNxHD. When you go through the delivery process, you will use the highest for of h.264 and finally when you go to archive it, you will use a super high res form of DNxHD to get the really big file and make it easier to compress if you need it again.

Ah, now we're here to bit depth, and basically the deeper your bit depth, the less "bars" or "lines" of different color you will see, and it will just be one giant gradient. An 8-bit depth is a real world type of bit depth. Basically that is saying two to the eighth power, or 256, is made up of different values for R, G, and, B. so two to the tenth, 1,024, would be the amount of different values for a 10-bit depth. 8-bit is a perfectly fine and acceptable way to work with bit depth.

Chroma-sub-sampling is something that is a little more difficult to understand and I'm still not sure what it is, so I'll explain what I get. There are three different types of sub-sampling, and those are basically 4:4:4 (no sub-sampling), 4:2:2 (some sub-sampling), and, 4:2:0 (a lot of sub-sampling). So basically imagine 4 pixels two on top, two on bottom. for 4:2:0, 3/4 of the pixels lose their own color and use only the one's color that is left, all of them keep there color. 4:2:2 is basically two of the pixels lose the color, and take the colors from the one next to them and applies their brightness.

A visual diagram of Chroma-sub-sampling

Spatial Compression is simple and basically an image is cut into boxes and thinks "hey, these pixels are all the same color, we can save space by coping and pasting!" Those are the little boxes you see in images at some point.

Up to here all the other Codecs have been intra-frame compression.

Temporal Compression or Inter-frame, is a compression over time or a compression over multiple frames. This uses a technique that effects multiple frames at once. This is also pretty short and sweet to understand. Basically it will only cut out the different parts of an image, and keeps saving the rest over the frames of the shot. So if you have a shot of a head and a guy talking, the only difference in the frame would be a mouth moving slightly, the background should stay the same. So what it does is basically make a box and put it around the stuff that changes, and makes that the difference, it copies and pastes the rest, and makes then puts the difference on top, this just saves file room per shot.

Up to here we've been cutting up data, well with the Lossy codec, it basically makes a file larger, and you will need it probably less than 1/100th of a time.

A bit rate is simply how much data a codec uses. We measure bit rate as bits/second so stuff like kbps or Mbps. Now 1 Byte, is equal to eight bits. So if I have a bit rate of 8Mbps, and I want to know how many bytes I'll get in 5 minutes, you basically do:
-Take 8 Mbps divided by 8 and then you get 1 MBps (mega byte)
-Then take 1MBps times 60 and get 60 MBp Minute then 5 times 60 to get 300 MB in five minutes.
Basically the higher the bit rate, the better the quality. And you can't compare two different bit rates with different codecs.

RAW is just as it sounds, the original untouched footage.

And that wraps up my little clarification on how codecs work. 

What do Rocky, Forrest Gump, and Karate Kid have in common?

Whether it's Rocky's training, Forrest Gump's running cross country, or the Karate Kid's final tournament, there are many different ways of montage. Sergei Eisenstein, the father of montage, made a montage where people were running down steps and some soldiers where firing at them, well what should have been only a few minutes in real life, ended up being about seven minutes. Montage's should relate to emotion, the five senses, or either slow down or speed up time. I always thought a montage was a group of clips that didn't really tell a story, but have a certain theme to them, like Call of Duty montage of cool kills or anything like that. Those are more like collages in a way. In Rocky, or Forrest Gump, they are making the montage as a use to speed up time. Andre Bazin, said that lack of montage can actually benefit certain types of films. However without cutting and making time go by faster, can make movies both really long and drawn out, confusing because they may just cut a bit out all together, and make movies more boring to watch.

In my montage, I related with the more emotional side of things, and decided to relate to something very hard. I had a plan about a guy committing suicide, and it was really powerful. I almost decided not to do it due to some events that happened in my school. I worked really hard on it and I made up the story, filmed it, acted in it, and edited it. It was very hard and intense thing to get into and edit after a while, with conflicting opinions and a lot of advice, I came out with a pretty solid video. While I know I need to work on many things, like lighting and making sure both audio and video tell a story without needing each other, I believe this film was one of the best I have ever done, especially since I did it all on my own.

10 Shot Sequence

Many people know the basic camera shots like close up, medium, and wide, however a lot of people will recognize these ten shots, but won't even realize it's an actual shot.

1. Whip Pan Whip Cut
2. Whip Zoom
3. Search Up 
4. Back to Front 
5. Focus Out 
6. Focus Transition 
7. Overexposed Fade
8. Ceiling Twist
9. Shifting Angle
10. Sleep Over

When I started I had no idea what these shots were. I didn't even realize that I saw these before. For a specific example of whip pan I looked at a scene from Some Like it Hot. For whip zoom I looked at the example from an advertisement of Lightware Communications to show you what it looks like. I had a tough time getting what these shots exactly were at first and the description didn't help much. I had to use a friends' video example to see what the shots were. So after the struggle of finding out what these shots were, I grabbed a few of my friends and decided that we should get out their and practice the shots.

Now the Whip Pan shot is actually supposed to transition into another shot like in the example I gave you, however the other shots are pretty good examples.

I hope this clears up any shot you had a question about, and that you stick around for more upcoming posts!

Canon 60D DSLR Camera Working

I'm working with a Canon 60D DSLR camera and this is a spider found on the side of my house as I happened to have the camera with me. I tried the video but my hands were too shaky due to the fact that I was not using a tripod. I took a good minute or two lining up the shot after an hour of just looking into the details of the camera like the ISO and pretty much all the features of it. While I have had the chance to use the camera in school, I never really got the chance of just working with the camera. My next step is to work with Adobe Premiere Pro instead of using Final Cut Pro X.