Wild West Notts.

This is the product of a whole day's planning an filming (on a tight time constraint, otherwise we would've spent more time on the shooting stages)

I had the idea after watching the famous ending of 'The good, the bad, and the ugly' and thought it'd be interesting to put my own twist on it.
So, with that in mind, me and my Multimedia buddy Will set off on an epic film making journey to the Nottingham arboretum.

This is the result of that journey.

Our hour with the Panasonic camera yesterday!

This was Will's interpretation of our work, hopefully I can give editing a go once I've downloaded the software.. *Curse this sluggish studentcom connection :(

Moving image.

Will and I met up this weekend to have a go with the Panasonic film camera and other bits of kit, during our time with the camera we had a go at producing a day-to-night effect, a depth of field draw, an emotive zoom amongst others.

Rule of thirds

Here's a snap that I took on my Canon 400D, attempting to put the rule of thirds into practice.

Animations

Over the past couple of weeks I've been learning both photographic techniques (Tim Grey: Color confidence :the digital photographer's guide to color management) as well as introducing and expanding my knowledge of After effects in order to create some animations for my course.

I will be posting the videos to my Vimeo account, and will begin embedding the videos into this post once fully uploaded.

I also used only my own photography, and the music track was a free download, "Thievery Corporation: DC 3000."


The Boss from Joshua McBride on Vimeo.
'The Boss' is actually the second iteration of an earlier piece titled 'ninjas'. I felt that the piece progressed through introducing additional keyframes, along with experimenting with using HSL values on a black background. Through using a blank background, I felt that I could draw more focus to the characters and create video game arcade style. Possible future iterations could include a panning or even interactive background. 


Mountain Fighter from Joshua McBride on Vimeo.
'Mountain Fighter' feels like an evolution from 'The Boss' in that it maintains the wacky character style but adds greater depth in the background and mood of the work. I also put considerably more effort into adding denser keyframes to keep the paths and timing precisely controlled. Another touch was altering the beginning and end points for the music track, though I did find it hard to adjust the audio settings and the options offered here were, on the surface at least, inferior to some other video production software.



This was my second render of a similar animation, this time using an extra object and prolonguing the initial shot.

During my time with Adobe After Effects, I found a number of things that I did and didn't like.
I felt that for the most part that the program was intuitive, and most of the time I'd get the outcome that I was after.
However certain aspects of the production process were quite annoying, such as losing all keyframes if the timer icon was deselected.
Fortunately, many online tutorials are available, as well as literary aids from the library- I found that combining these resources with my own experimentation allowed me to produce interesting and varied outcomes which hopefully connect with the audience in some way.
Whilst rather tedious, I found it worth my time to look at the timeline on a microscopic timescale, as this allowed me to tweak any stray movement arcs in my sequences as well as get the exact end result that I wanted.
Overall I feel that my second 'Mountain Fighter' attempt has build a lot on from my initial 'The Boss' project, and hopefully I can continue to improve over future projects!