Portfolio Project Post #20

         This is my final reflection on my project. The pre-production phase was pretty straightforward. I was able to develop the story quickly and once I completed the storyboard I had a good perception of what my opening was going to look like. 

         When it came to production I had my brother film the scenes that I couldn't do on my own. Due to his tight schedule, my unhealthy habit of procrastination, and starting new anti-depressants that threw me through constant mood swings and made me vomit twice the filming was a bit rushed. Overall I think I got pretty good shots with some dynamic camera movements, but my acting was definitely worse than usual since my mood made it hard to commit to the role. I had a lot of difficulties when it came to lighting. Trying to find the right lights to have on and off was a bit of a struggle.

         Lastly is post-production. The editing took a total of nine and a half hours because I wanted to make up for the bad acting with better editing. At first, my plan was simple. I was only going to have a little onomatopoeia pop up on the screen, I didn't really plan out the sound design, I had no clue how I was going to animate the character or keep the pictures in place, and I was going to work a lot more with colors. When it was time to edit I decided to add much more onomatopoeia paired with an abundant amount of sound effects to make a well paced video. I ended up not working on colors as much as I planned to which might have been a mistake, but my poor planning didn't give me enough time and after editing for nearly ten hours I just couldn't keep going. Animating the character was surprisingly simple. I watched a few videos on tracking in after effects which I used on all my png drawings. After a few attempts, I synced the mouth movements pretty well to the voice-over.

          All in all, I wanted to display light comedy, suspense, and mystery to the viewers and I think the video was pretty successful in doing that. I'm not extremely proud of the final product and I think if I worked over spring break it definitely would have come out better, but I used this as a very important learning experience. I finally somewhat understand after-effects and seeing what I came up with in the end tells me that if I work harder on my presentation and writing I could probably make pretty good YouTube videos which is something I've wanted to do for a while. This could really motivate me to work on that over the summer or in my free time.