Af106 Natural Wonders

So today we've been set a new brief which is to create an iBook for the iPad about a chosen topic of the Natural World. I got the topic of Oceans, personally i'm happy with this choice as there is a wide variety of different areas to discuss and to research which i find interesting.

I thought it would be good to research into Oceans first as a beginners guide to Oceans such as:

What the 5 main oceans are, the size of them, the depth of the ocean and go on to talk about other things such as the Dead Sea, the Black Sea and the Red Sea.

Another section I want to research is animal life is how different oceans have different animals and the climate they live in for example the larger animals such as whales live in colder areas and the smaller predators live in the warmer areas.

Final Review on Video

Here is my final Time Based Media, Short, Sharp, Shock video. As you have seen through my blog you have seen my process of how i created my video and my ideas leading up to my final idea.

So first of all i had to come up with my idea, i chose getting up for work. As a lot of events happen from getting out of bed to leaving the house i thought i had plenty of sequences i can film so i would hit the 30 edits mark that was need

Next i had to plan out how i was going to film it, personally i didn't want to film myself as it would be slightly complicated trying to achieve all the angles and shots i wanted without seeing the camera it self and what it was recording. I recorded all of my footage using my iPhone, so it was all recorded in 1080p and luckily it has the front facing camera so i could see when i was recorded myself eating toast or cleaning my teeth etc.

Overall i filmed 53 different edits, so i didn't use a lot of clips or used only specific parts of some videos to cut it down to 20 seconds.

To conclude i was happy with the final result and i enjoyed the process of filming it and creating it. This has been my favourite so far and hope to do video editing in the future.

Evaluation of my crit

Today i did my crit for my Short Sharp Shock video, overall i think it went well.

I was happy with the final result of my video and it got a few laughs when i played it to the class.

I got a lot of positive feedback from it and not much negative feedback which is good, even though some criticism would be helpful to see where i can improve on my video if any edits were too fast or colours were too dark etc.

Personally i think with my video it would be have been better with an improved ending. As i feel it ends on a cliffhanger and doesn't have a proper ending apart from opening the door to leave. 
Maybe if i timed my edits better and got more footage from outside the house i could have done the car journey to work in about 3 seconds or less to add more of a story to the video.

Editing the Video together

Shortly after creating my video i edited it together using Final Cut Pro. Since my media course i did last year i already had experience using Final Cut Pro, so editing the movie together was easy since we used the same techniques as before.


The techniques we used were In and Out tools, as well as using the razor tool. We also did some audio editing and i learned about transitions as well.

The first step was to import all of my clips. I filmed a few more sequences to get a sense of a beginning and an end so overall i had 53 clips. Few of these i did not use as they would take up too much time or did not seem necessary.

When i first started editing i soon realised how long a second really is when creating a video, so achieving 30 edits in 20 seconds would be achievable as i first worried that i would go over the 20 second limit that we had been set.

I found the editing process rather simple as all my clips i had filmed in chronological order so it was a simple case of dragging them and dropping them onto the timeline.

The version of Final Cut Pro i downloaded was FCP X which is a different version to the one i had originally learnt with so i had to adjust to the new interface.

Once i had edited all the video together i needed to edit in some sound effects, a lot of the audio was clear but i thought it would good to emphasise a lot of the actions to add some humour to it.

I went to FreeSFX.com and as it was a royalty free sound effects i could use any one of the effects.

Overall i downloaded 19 sound effects for my video. And using the same techniques as i did last year i simply dragged and dropped them into my timeline and cut them to a suitable length and made them sync with the video.

Principle Photography

So now that I had finished pre production of my video shoot, it was time to film the video itself. With my storyboards i had a rough picture of how i wanted to film it: e.g. camera angles, length of the shot, lighting. 
I started filming it on Saturday and finished in the same day. Overall it took about 2 hours worth of filming to get all of my content i needed, from getting out of bed to making breakfast and getting dressed etc. Personally i found it easy to film everything, most likely due to because i know what i wanted to create and it isn't a tricky video to shoot.

Overall i got 42 different videos that i can use as edits and will film more some more footage to have a beginning and end to my video. So far i am happy with the way that my video is turning out and that 30 edits in 20 seconds is a lot easier than i thought it would be. 

Personally this is my favourite assignment so far as i most enjoy creating videos and editing them as i feel i have more freedom with what i can create. 

Here are some screenshots of my videos that i have created, as you can see they are only a second long as this is essential for creating a quick edit video. Even in Final Cut Pro i can still edit them down to a shorter length of time which will give me more time to include more clips and make the story more interested and keep the fast pace of time.