Video and Flash

As a film major, I found the video project a lot more entertaining and less demanding than the animation project. The video project went smoothly for the most part: preproduction was important in setting up the rest of the project. After Jake
(my partner) and I planned out the film, it was pretty much smooth sailing from there. All we had to do was find someone to act in the film (which one of Jake's friends did very well), shoot the project and finally edit it. Since the actual shoot was only about an hour and fifteen minutes long (which I initially thought was a ridiculously small amount of time to shoot a project in) we had to limit ourselves in terms of locations. But I think we did a good job with managing our time: in the end we were able to get the coverage we needed to in order to accurately cut all the shots together. We also got some very nice shots we had not originally thought up. After the shoot, the editing took a bit of time because we had a lot of material to work with. We actually ended up having to cut out a whole scene from our original plan because it didn't work in terms of continuity (screen direction) with the rest of the film. We also lost our audio- but we quickly fixed that by placing a soundtrack to fill in for the diegetic sounds we had recorded (which weren't essential to the story). Besides those two concerns, editing went over smoothly and we ended up with the film we had originally planned to shoot (more or less).

In order to get the animation project completed, I traveled a bumpier road. As a film major I initially thought the animation project was a waste of my time, but as I worked on it I realized it wasn't very different from the video project. Preparation was just as vital in the flash project as it was in the video project. Before actually jumping into the project, I had to carefully consider what I was capable of doing and how I would go about it. I also noticed some similarities between Flash and Final Cut, such as the use of time lines and key frames in the editing process. The one thing I found much harder was the fact that I was not merely capturing staged action anymore, but was forced to actually create and manipulate staged action. Though Flash jargon makes it seem like a more stifling medium (especially when it comes to actionscript), both film making and creating animation demand a lot of authorial creativity. Actionscript was tough, I'm not going to lie. Most of what I heard in class was forgotten the second I sat down to complete my interactivity project-- or perhaps I never fully digested it. It's difficult to teach something that's not as theoretical as it is practical and that's why I think I couldn't retain a lot of the material covered in the Flash lectures. When you're sitting in a lecture hall trying to take notes on how to work in Flash it's not as useful as sitting in front of the computer and actually working on Flash. It took some messing around with Flash and actionscript until I kind of figured things out (enough to finish my project), but I think it was time well spent.

By the end of both projects I was able to more fully appreciate both the work that goes into making a film and the work that goes into creating an animation. My interest in Flash has actually been whetted by the animation project. As both a film and English major, I appreciate cinema and literature as the outstanding mediums of storytelling that they are. In literature I see the predominant storytelling medium of the past. In cinema I see the predominant storytelling medium of the present. And in computer driven mediums like Flash I see a chance of becoming the predominant storytelling medium of the future. It's a simple rational behind why these mediums progress in such a manner, because each one has something to offer which its predecessor does not. Film has the visual element which lacks in literature and computer driven mediums have the interactivity which film lacks. I'm not saying that cinema will one day become obsolete, just as literature enjoys the same popularity as it has in years past, but new interactive mediums have the potential to revolutionize a dimension of storytelling which film lacks: user participation.