blog 5. reflections on the product (part 2)

Today is April 7, which means it has been exactly 104 years since a woman named Eleanora Fagan was born in Philadelphia. You might know her better as Billie Holiday. Today also marks 155 years since the first camel race in Sacramento, California and 66 years since the unveiling of IBM's first commercial scientific computer. It's National Beer Day and National Girl, Me Too Day. Today we celebrate the birthdays of Russell Crowe and Jackie Chan, as well as Mr. W.K. Kellogg, without whom we would not have Poptarts, Froot Loops, or Rice Krispies.

Me contemplating life without Froot Loops (the best cereal)

Most importantly, however, April 7 means it has been exactly 53 days since the start of the Genius Project™. That's right; we've arrived. Fifty-three days ago, at the start of the project, I had very high hopes for the final product. I had this great vision of how it would turn out and the steps I'd take to get there. It turns out things don't always happen as smoothly as the way you planned (shocker, I know). Video-editing, for instance, was a lot harder than I anticipated, and I ran into a lot more difficulties. So instead of focusing on the final trailer as a whole, I decided to approach it from various smaller angles. For example, in order to measure my success, I set two criteria independent of each other: music and transitions. This was done in lieu of judging the trailer as one cohesive film because as you'll see, I wasn't very successful on that front. Basically, I'll just be reflecting on my ability to incorporate transitions and music separately.

I'm generously rating this a 4.7 / 10

Music

I used three different scores for this: music from the original trailer, music from the recut, and Best Horror Music Ever! Even though I tried my best to align climaxes in the music with certain critical scenes, it definitely still sounds choppy and abrupt at times. The hardest part was trying to navigate different parts of the music relative to jump cuts. I had to calculate it down to the hundredth of a second in order to make everything match up precisely. It's pretty rough towards the end. Also, since I failed to establish a story line, the entire video seems extremely random. It was hard to distinguish where the musical climaxes should line up.

Transitions

I aimed to incorporate two different types of transitions into the trailer, a jump cut and fade-to-black. They're both pretty aptly named; a jump cut is when one scene suddenly jumps to the next, and a fade-to-black is when one scene fades to black before the next one appears. I managed to include both, however rough it may have turned out. I used a lot more jump cuts than I probably should have, which contributed to the sporadic nature of this "trailer." In fact, I wouldn't even call it a trailer at this point; it's more like a compilation of various clips that I edited while only considering technical aspects. Fade-to-black transitions are commonly used to create mystery by showing glimpses of high-intensity scenes. You'll see that I've attempted to copy this technique at the very end.

P.S - pre-TED thoughts

This week, I found my motivation rising again with the prospect of the TED talk. I actually started writing my script the day it was assigned, which is how you know I'm motivated. I generally despise these sorts of presentations, but strangely enough, I had a lot of decent ideas on the direction I wanted to go in. I guess it was about time anyways. See you on Thursday!

Videos used in recut:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f516ZLyC6U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYKpIr1lSG0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycoY201RTRo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKPK6c0mKE0