Enjoy Your Life

I have finished making my first movie, and I am not sure if I feel good about it. To start on the good side, I think that the use of sound effect is pretty good, but I am not proud of the camerawork. The acting was fine for the most part, and the props were bearable, since we didn’t need a lot of them. I am still not sure if it is good enough to upload on Youtube.

For next time, I need to learn how to use the tripod properly, because the whole movie was very shaky and the camerawork had to improve. The lighting wasn’t too bad, because the classroom and hallway that we captured in were moderately bright. What I really like in my movie is the sound effects. Some of them are meant to be funny and ironic, and overall, I think it suits the purpose and concept of the movie. The visuals, such as the titles, are good enough because they have fonts that go along with the movie.

Most IMPORTANT, I have to use my storyboard. I worked really hard on it, and for some unknown reason it slipped out of my mind to actually use the storyboard when I was filming the film. Nice. There are some pictures of my storyboard, so check it out. (My fantastic artistic abilities..argh)

This is the movie, so please try to notice how the movie could have been much better if I used this storyboard.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://kr.youtube.com/v/oiD5HHRBwJQ" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]I uploaded the movie anyway, so please view this darn thing! I’m willing to make the next movie much better than this one, and if anyone would care to look at this movie and comment on it, it would be so much welcomed.

Any lessons learned? I definitely did.

This week I made the first movie, and I must say, it sucks. The acting was OK I guess, but there were some unnecessary sounds that I made by mistake, such as giggling or laughing because I was nervous, which sounded more like I was sniveling, if that’s what people call it. The tripod was stiff, and made small creaking sounds that went along with my giggles to interfere with the movie.

I thought the cool part in the movie was using a real knife and fake blood (which we also call ketchup) and no real blood actually came out (instead, I received some suspicious and disapproving looks from the cafeteria ladies when asked if I could borrow the ketchup).

Sometimes I zoomed in to the wrong direction and got only the nose instead of the whole face, and it was depressing, because for the ‘librarian scene’, I abandoned the tripod because I had to turn 180 degrees, and I was afraid the the stiff tripod would fall or won’t move, because it’s stiff. I’m hoping that the movie will come in a much better shape after I work on it in iMovie, as soon as I learn how to do it without breaking my computer.

Overall, I’m not sure if I can call this movie successful because I don’t think it came out very well. I will keep working on it because I tried.

Thanks to :
Ann, Eunice, Beatrice, Paul (for acting), cafeteria lady (for letting me borrow the ketchup, in spite of the suspicious glances), Mr. Bray (for letting Ann and Eunice get out of the classroom), Beatrice’s Chinese teacher (for letting Beatrice get out of the classroom, and for not being mad at me), librarian (even though she made walk up and down the stairs to retrieve a library pass), and Mr. Burell (for letting me use the camera and tripod).

Looking at the sites in www.alltop.com, the crime section, I have found some blog titles that look so boring I do not even want to even visit that blog, and some titles that look interesting and look like they have at least something to do with crime. The top three boring titles are : CNN.COM-LAW, MSNBC.COM: CRIME & COURTS, and NYDAILYNEWS.COM – NEW YORK CRIME HEADLINES AND ARTICLES – NY DAILY NEWS. These titles make me want to sleep. On the contrary, there are some interesting and hooking titles such as DUMB CRIMINALS, DUMB CROOKS, and STUPID CRIMINAL FILES. I picked the blogs that had the words ‘dumb’ and ’stupid’ because when someone says ‘crime’, we tend to mention sinister detectives running after an equally sinister, but more evil criminals. When the words ‘dumb’ and ’stupid’ come out on a crime blog title, it is ironic, so it catches one’s attention, and also, we may want to know the limits of one’s stupidity, which seems endless nowadays. When we go deeper into blogs, we find posts. I chose to go into the blogs which had funny and catching titles, to see whether they had similarly entertaining titles or if they had really boring titles which again would make me want to sleep. I just found a boring title ; A Kid is into Pot. Who cares about a kid in a pot? I am sure that there would be enough stupid kids in the world to try that, no matter whose child it is. The second title I chose was ‘Mary Ann From Gilligan’s Island Arrested On Marijuana-Related Charges‘. The reason for this is because there are too many bastards doing marijuana in the world to keep track of everyone (oops, in this case, not a bastard, because the name seems female). The very last title I think is not good is ‘Man Reported After Reporting Pot Theft’. Wow. I, and hopefully the readers of this post realized how boring a title can be. The world has certainly changed a lot.

Back to the bright side with lots of interesting crime and stupid detectives (that was definitely one of my cynical sarcasms), I will now present some super titles that instantly makes you want to read the post, for example, ‘Don’t go to Court when Wanted’. This is funny!! A even funnier one is ‘Man Eats Marijuana in Attempt to Hide it from Police‘. This is interesting because marijuana is not for your digestive system, it is for your lungs. I felt sorry for that man who would have had all that crap in his stomach. The third title I chose was ‘A Dork with a Spork‘. I didn’t know what a spork meant till I searched in the dictionary – ‘a spoon shaped eating utensil with short tines at the tip’. Then, I didn’t know what tine meant, so I went and searched my good friend dictionary once more – ‘a prong or sharp point, such as that on a fork or antler’. Then, I didn’t know what prong meant (thanks to my fantastic vocab skills), so I searched the dictionary again, hoping it would be the last time – ‘each of two or more projected parts at the end of a fork’. It was the last time. To explain for why I think this title is funny is because – it rhymes. I couldn’t care less about a man in Alaska with a spork in his hands, but the rhyming part was actually entertaining.

All in all, I think that the element of a good title is getting attention, and having some sort of humor in it. Thank you for reading this post.