As an update on our in-class iMovie project, our individual portions are nearly completed. We will have completed portions done and submitted to our group leader, Adam, by Sunday. On Sunday Adam is combining our work on Sunday and adding the overarching background music.
Early on, we considered doing a movie relating to working at an office. I made the suggestion that it should be a 1950s style "How To" video. Since then we've changed our minds about the office environment and changed it to Driving. We decided to keep the 1950s instructional video feel.
Below are my individual contributions.
I was assigned the "Road Rage" segment. This was the only footage that was not filmed by the team. One of our group members was taking a weekend trip to Chicago with a significant other. The group member thought that to be the perfect opportunity to film heavy traffic and road rage gestures. (Whoever was in the passenger seat would be doing the filming). The Chicago plan seemed to have been scrapped by unknown and unforeseen circumstances.
I created my Road Rage footage based on the available footage I was given.
Keeping in mind the 1950s theme, we wanted to keep the video black and white. I had a bit of knowledge with film from my time working at a local movie theater (before the age of digital projectors). While I didn't work with the film directly, I knew how dust and scratches to the film would give the film a certain look. Individually, another group member and I discovered the "Silent Film Era" filter which the group decided to use for the entirety of the film.
For the transitions between shots I used the "Open Circle" transition because it was reminiscent of what was used during that time period. Adam had recorded the voice overs at home with his sound equipment and shared them with the group. I tried to line up the frames of the film with the audio to make it appear as though gestures were a direct response to the audio.
I had approached the group leader (and director), Adam, about an idea I had about creating a set of fake credits for the film before we showed the real credits. Adam really liked the idea and assigned the task of doing both the real and fake credits to me. At our last filming session, we decided to take a group photo of our team. Adam wanted this photo to be used as the backdrop of the real credits.
In addition to just using the still image, Adam wanted to photo to look like it had been thrown onto a flat surface like a table. I approached my instructor about how to do this in iMovie, but was told that was not within iMovie's capabilities. I wondered if it could be done in Adobe Animate and then imported to iMovie. My instructed said it could be done that way. Since the photo would be in motion, I didn't know what to do with the background. Originally, I thought we'd be using additional footage or "bloopers" behind the photo. I had the idea to make the stage (background color) of Adobe Animate the same color green used in green screens. iMovie would hopefully recognize that and remove it.
Admittedly, I struggled with smoothing out the forward movement and spinning motion of the photo. For some reason as I created the clockwise motion, it wanted to make quick counter-clockwise spins between my keyframes. I spent time removing the motion (I used the motion tween tool) and recreating the path and keyframe spin. Perhaps I should have used classic tween and focused more on frame by frame movement. While I'm not overly pleased with the result, it will work for the intended purposes.
I first created the fake credits and the real credits as two individual clips and then combined them. For the fake credits, I tried to find a title screen in iMovie and font that would fit the 1950s theme. I added some out of focus footage of the road that I thought would have been scrapped, but I found a use for it! The out of focus footage encourages the audience to focus on the in-focus text. I figured out on my own to have an iMovie title screen followed by another iMovie title screen to get the appearance of old fashioned credits. I wanted to play with the background music to the 50s style credits. My intention was to slow the music down for a faction of a second to mimic the effect of old film being stretched, warped or otherwise distorted (which happens over time to film). I was unable to add this effect since it would be Adam's job to add the background music to our film.
For the real credits, the green screen trick worked perfectly, although it did turn the green screen curtain in the background of our photo black (interesting...). I decided not to use footage in the background of the photo as it would probably be too busy and it would confuse the audience with too much information to focus on. I used a title screen with all text removed as the background to our photo. I predict that our audience will be focusing on the group photo during the credits rather than the text. The text for the "real" ending credits I used the "scrolling text" option form iMovie's selection of title screens. Additional lines in the title screen were used (and needed to make extra room) to give credit to the borrowed film footage.
I had suggested the "real" credits should be in color to help differentiate between the credits that went with the film and our credits. Adam decided that the film should be black and white all the way through for consistency. A few extra frames of black were added between the two sets of credits to help the audience see the separation between the credits by the imaginary people at Right Way Driving School (we created), and the credits for the film we created as students.
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