EDITING and SPECIAL EFFECTS

The team originally wanted to submit just a plain video however from the beginning I knew that editing would play a major role in fine tuning our project. A lot of our footage was quite bare and I felt did not convey what we wanted to show as strongly as I would have wanted it to. I really wanted to learn after effects as I never had the opportunity before so I nominated myself the lead of effects. It was only at this time in the project that we began to go our separate ways and isolate our workload on different areas of the film. I felt as though I did my absolute best in after effects, spending almost every waking hour of the week and a half designing and animating interfaces, however I cant help but feel I could have done more than just motion track. If I had dedicated all my time over the semester to after effects I could have constructed a masterpiece instead of squabbling with the group pointlessly over concepts.

I had a rough idea of what I wanted to place over the top of the film from the very beginning of the project. I wanted to implement I kind of interface that followed the money around highlighting the emotions of the people who interacted with the money. Once again, I felt this was important due to the fact that our film did not do our concept justice. The problem was that I had a week and a half to learn to the program before the due date. I was sure that I could use a program called Boujou to motion track for me however the footage we took was far too shaky for this program. It was very precise for slow moving footage. Evidently this shattered my hopes however I worked around this problem by using the inbult adobe motion tracker instead. It was not perfect but it did the job just fine. And probably saved me a lot of time looking back. I started off making simple interfaces and slowly learnt how to animate them better over time.

I slowly worked out a workflow within the program and simply rinsed and repeated the same pattern over and over. I tried not to reuse anything from prior clips just to keep things interesting. However I got to the point where I needed to do further research to discover a new range of designs. Minority report was a perfect example where I took out elements and combined them with others. Originally I planned only to have the effects at the interactions where the money was transferred but I chose to challenge myself and try animate as many scenes as possible with the interface without taking the attention away from the footage itself.

The interface follows the money around from person to person highlighting emotions as it travels its journey. It shows that no matter where or who you are, emotional attachments to money will always exist. There is no escaping the system that you are trapped within. I wanted to show not only emotions but also other aspects of money such as the way that people view you in society based on your worth. For example when the drug addict is walking through the tunnel with strangers staring at him, I highlighted words such as 'ignore, shock, and disgust.' This was done so show how people may in fact view someone differently based on their place in society and ultimately this can be connected back to money. I also wanted to show how money has very different meanings to people. An example of this is the juxtaposition between for example the mugger and the mother. The mugger mugged someone for 'street cred' as shown in the interface where as the mother put all here hope into a lotto ticket to pay off her excessive bills in order to support her family.

I also played a major role in the editing of the film in regards to removing certain unwanted elements and also learning Boris FX to insert the animated transitions between videos within adobe premier.

Overall I feel that we as a group accomplished a lot in the past few weeks. All it took was a little bit of pressure to kick us into gear. If only we could have found this drive earlier in the semester.