Director's CUT!

Why am I up this early may you ask? Well, I never really went to bed. I had a nap at 10pm, then woke up at 1:30am for some reason. Ever since then I've been editing, working, and eating. And of course now I'm writing this blog post. Surprisingly, in general I'm also progressing...

The film/video project raised some underlying, and perhaps constant problems that we were having with the group as a whole. Essentially, some group members were ready to work, and some were not. I think it just sucked that we weren't all honest with each other from the start, with our priorities, ways of working, and approachability in general. I've worked in so many different groups, whether it's for school work or for event planning. If everyone has the same goals and can connect in some way, then it's easy to get stuff done. It's when group members are concentrating on other things when its crunch time. It also has to do with everyone's time management skills, and how individuals in the group use their time. Yes, working in a group can be really hard, but there are ways to make it easy and fun for everyone. Unfortunately this isn't how it worked out for this project in particular.

Anyways, Lisa, Adam, Katherine and I ended up making our own video. Since we still have other work to do for many other classes, we decided that we would make a music video. This could show our editing talents as well as script writing and continuity of a storyline. I'm glad the four of us were on the same page for this project because it made up for lost time! Basically we first chose a song. And I'm not kidding...

"How about 'Look At Me I'm A Winner?'"

"But don't we want something a little more jumpy and quirky? How about a song by Motion City Soundtrack..?"

"I love Motion City Soundtrack!"

"'The Future Freaks Me Out?'"

"Ahaha yes!"

"Okay, it's decided!"

It was literally that easy. After choosing the song, from the CD that I owned, we listened to it a few times to get an idea for the script. We quickly thought about how we could relate it to media somehow... so we incorporated oncoming, new, and an overload of technology as the theme of the video. We carefully planned out the scenes, did a bunch of takes, and then edited for a few hours. The editing was definitely the best part. Tedious and precise, it was pretty hard to match up the audio (I put the song as a separate track over the track of recording the visuals) to the video, but eventually it was done. We're pretty proud of it, it took a good amount of brainpower. Although it's obviously not the best editing job, or done with the best equipment, but I think its a realistic concept for a music video. I enjoyed working on this with the other three group members because we were able to get things done. We finished filming, the core of the operation, in a good hour. We got about 30 minutes of footage, and the rest was edited. It was a good experience, and I liked editing so much that I began editing other videos that I have from various other occasions. There is one that I have of the Executive of my Student Government group (The Eastern North Ontario Secondary School Students Association) doing a dance at a Leadership Conference that we planned, and I have to say that the editing, quite frankly, is amazing. I asked for everyone's permission in the group and uploaded it to YouTube. It's called Exec Dance @ MayCon. Man, it brings back good times. The group loved it and they can't wait until we all go back as a little 'reunion' to this year's Executive of the Association.

I'm really glad we decided to make this a fun video instead of an extremely serious one. I am so used to making everything serious, and with so much meaning, that I think it was, for lack of a better word, healthy to do something random and fun for once. I think that's another reason why I wanted to make a music video. And...



The music in this video is Motion City Soundtrack's 'The Future Freaks Me Out,' from the album 'I Am The Movie' released in 2003.

That's a Wrap!