Planning for the final video

This is the mind map i made for  my story. Instead of writing everything down i drew pictures to make it look attractive and understandable.

1. The teacher takes the attendance and at certain students’ names says "SHE IS NO MORE"and moves on to the next name

2. We see Celine Dion singing "My heart will go on" 

3.The teacher takes the attendance and that students name says "SHE IS NO MORE" and moves on to the next name

4. (Had to take opinion of my fellow class mates)??? Unclear?

5.The teacher takes the attendance and on that students name says "SHE IS NO MORE" and moves on to the next name

6. We show that Cinderella is being kidnapped by a certain someone.

7.The teacher takes the attendance and on a certain students name says "SHE IS NO MORE" and moves on to the next name

8. Harry Potter gets suspicious  PLEASE CHANGE ALL PROPER NAMES TO START WITH CAPS- Sama you better watch you capital letters.

9.Harry potter sees a murder in his magic ball of a boy X

10.The teacher takes the attendance and on that students name says "HE IS NO MORE"and moves on to the next name.

11.Ugly Betty is targeted                              

12. Harry potter reaches that place on time to save her.

Planning for the final video, Step 1

When our teacher told us we need to make opening titles this year, we started thinking about this project a great deal.

My friend Fatmah has been busy watching various opening titles on Youtube for ideas while i have been brainstorming content ideas with Arika. We jotted some rough points down so we do not forget what we came up with in our idea generation session.

Here’s what we have so far:

A zombie movie/ put titles on bandages\the incredible Hulk-enters stamping his feet- pause- name of actor playing Hulk please make all Hulk refs capital H as this is his name.

then the name of the cast as each in turn is beaten up by the Hulk

Hulk walks in, holds someone’s hair up, HAIR FONT ( persons name)

Ninja severely over acting , martial arts / facing ulk, hulk holds him upside down, zoom in hand-rotate, upright , screams his name ( comic show)

fairy hugging hulk from behind. -an aww scene *hearts*

diagogue-father daughter-

it from the adams family wife of hulk.

american solder- telling everyone to leave-hulk stapens door, dancing enters a class, students get crazy, scream, chairs fall etc CRAZY HILARIOUS

mping on soldier

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Spaceship lands in nisar shaheed park.night, caps on N and S please

extreme over acting

These were the rough points jotted down, The main idea behind these was that, in the start of the opening title we follow a zoom track of a bandage that zooms out to be shown hanging from the arm of a mummy. The bandage will have the name of the character on it. We see the mummy zoom out and fade away as the Hulk enters stamping his feet , shaking the ground , the scene pauses as the name of the hulk appears and then he walks towards the right and lifts a person up by his hair and we see the person’s name in a font made of hair. Then we see a Ninja performing stunts in front of the Hulk at which the Hulk gets angry and lifts him up in the air, in an upright position and the ninja screams his name which is shown in a comic view. Then we see a small fairy as she hugs the Hulk from behind and says "DADDY" and the dad lifts her up and kisses her. Then we hear a women screaming from behind who is a witch and supposedly the mother of the hulk. The Opening titles end when an American Soldier rudely tells all the other characters to end this and closes the door with a loud sound.

For the video I had in mind that we show a spaceship landing in a park and the lights go on and the audience get the impression that some aliens have landed. In the very next shot we will show that a teacher is teaching in a class where the children are sleeping and all these creatures enter the class. The children get crazy, pull their hair, demonstrate extreme over acting and run around like crazy, the teacher starts climbing tables and throwing the duster at the hulk which hits a kid, this will be a very funny shot.

and as the principal sees it, she faints !

This was the basic rough story about which Arika and I were very excited. We were about to start on our storyboard but we didn’t because our group member Arif who was away that week for a debate was not happy with the idea as he messaged that is : 

he is an equally important member of our group he had a right to be heard. The very next day we had a round table conference in which fellow group members Arif and Fatimah thought that this idea was too tough and too costly for us to deal with alone. There we reaslied that while Arika wanted to do a spoof, Fatmah wanted to do something which woulde educative for the audience and leave them with a message while Arif was interested in something that would fit in with the genre: suspense. I was a bit heart broken at that instant.

Arif suggested that we make a video on a day of a birthday child, and show his friends give him a surprise party. Arika wanted to try costumes etc.

After listening to this I combined all of those peoples’ interests and came up with a story idea where some very naughty children who when their grandfather comes to live with them, they scare him with a prank and as a result he gets a heart attack. This had enough breadth to fullfill everyone’s interests but did not have suspense so I rejected it again.

Today again Arif and Fatmah were absent from school. Arika and I started to use a chart paper to jot down our ideas. We came up with a suspense story  ( Arif’s desire) and a spoof ( we all wanted comedy). The story would have Celine Dion’s ( bad version) singing the song, Ugly Betty doing a fashion walk, Cinderella studying, Harry Potter studying etc. It is a story of a class where a teacher takes the attendance and consequently a child is missing on whose name the teacher says " is no more". At the end Harry Potter uses a magic ball to find out that the teacher is the murderer.

The poster for my preliminary video

I had to do a poster for class. The poster will advertise my prelim project. Since my prelim project is a comedy about a goofy lab assistant I looked at posters for films such as Patch Adams.  My target audience I think would be adolescents, so I chose the kind of colors adolescents might like- I looked at other media products this age group might like to get an idea about colors and fonts and the general feel of the poster. I felt the poster should look bright, cheerful and wacky- so I used the following elements:

I used Google images to download this 'notepad ' image:

In this the transparent effect I achieved by using Adobe Photoshop.

The original picture was

Then I messed around with it, used numerous effects, which are not really prominent but do contribute to the overall impact. It was a good, fun experience. This shot for this picture was my idea originally , I had thought of placing all the characters together. The type of picture I actually wanted to use was this:

This turned out to be a pretty good picture but I was lost deciding how to edit it so I decided to stick to the previous chosen one. Though that did not show my partner Arika Dodani with the camera as this one did.

Meanwhile I also thought about what posters are meant to do- they are meant to attract audiences and to set up audience expectations about the film such as expectations about genre or what kind of pleasure the movie will offer.

The poster I finally came up with was as follows:

Adding a Google Gadget to your blog

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This is a video I just came across in recommendations when searching Youtube. I hope it helps me make the perfect blog.

preliminary video crazy assistant

This is the video we have come up so far. My friend Arika did most of  the shooting. As Arika and my other group members are really satisfied with this, I didn’t feel like telling them that I felt it still has some problems we can fix.

I feel that at '0:24' the zoom should be faster so Abeera’s dialogue seems continuous. Following that the different shot during that duration seems distracting. As the Principal’s and Assistant’s dialogues were shot at different times, the light is very different and the shots are not matching very well.

I will try to convince my group to give me a chance to try out a few changes plus I have some more shots in my flash drive which were not included in this edit so I think I can definitely improve this video.

I will show this to my teacher tomorrow and ask her advice.

4 Tips Every Blogger Should Know

When Our teacher told us that our midterm marks will include the marks for our blogs. I realised I need to further improve my blog so it does not affect my over all result.

I went onto Youtube and spent hours watching numerous videos about better Blogging. Most of these were a complete waste of time as people had posted videos about their personal life experiences and kept speaking about stuff, which I felt was too personal.  

This is a fun clip i  came across . The music attracted me towards it even when that window was minimised. I enjoyed having a look at it and it gave me some very useful tips and I learned that I need to stick to my topic and should respond to people’s views and opinions regarding my blog.

Analysis of my favourite titles.

We were fully aware that we needed to make opening titles as a part of our OCR requirement. The first video that came to my mind when I thought of opening titles was this one.  I always press the forward button to skip ahead of opening titles whenever I am watching a movie on DVD at home. The only time I actually read each and every credit and enjoyed the sequence was when I watched the closing titles of this Bollywood movie "Main hoon na"

 

Although this clip shows closing titles, I feel that it is a good idea to do something like this for our own opening titles. It would create a very good impression of the movie even before the audience watched it.

The mise en scene of these credits is set in a carnival/playground kind of environment with rides and games and every body is busy having fun. The names do not appear as graphic text on the video as is usually the case with Opening/closing titles, instead each crew/cast member has his name handwritten somewhere on the set and each staffer is highlighted by the camera as we are introduced to their names. There is a pleasant song playing in the background which delivers the message of a happy environment.

I recommend everyone to at least have a look at this song and I am sure my other teammates will also lean toward doing our opening titles in a similar light, joyful mood . The English translation of the lyrics of this song is as follows: