Introduction: As part of Visual Story at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center we created a 3-4 minute video with a given main character and conflict. We created For Rent, choosing a mysterious stranger and don’t touch anything.
Time: 48 hours | Roles: Director – Writer – Producer| Team Size: 5
Introduction: The Chain was our final music video coursework assignment for Visual Story at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center. Our film won a Bronze Telly Award in the student category.
Our final video was a highly streamlined effort. We first conceptualized an idea based on Ingrid Michaelson’s song The Chain. Our artist then created storyboards, and using those boards we created a rough ‘film storyboard’ with music.
Next we faced location scouting, in this regard the issue we encountered was not having a pure white background as per our storyboard. We adapted to this by finding a suitable ‘black out room’ to provide an all black background. Meanwhile we made a shot list from the rough storyboard that we had created.
With a shotlist, and locations to shoot we purchased necessary props, and went about filming on thanks giving.
As usual on set we changed the storyboard in various ways such as:
Thematic use of red
Inclusion of shots such as limited space, panning techniques
Use of props such as the teddy bear
Lighting e.g. using a sparkly dress to attract attention
After fifteen hours of filming, several hours of editing, the film was complete. It was well received by our peers and professors.
Finally we submitted The Chain to the student category of the Telly Awards.
Introduction: Missed Connection is our virtual reality team coursework assignment for Visual Story at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center.
A special thanks to the folks over at Carnegie Library for letting us film there + being awesome!
Time: 1 Week | Team Size: 5 | Role: Producer – Director
My Contributions: I was involved in various aspects of the project, primarily:
Location scouting.
Arranging equipment, props, and conducting team meetings.
Building our second Lego storyboard.
Directing our final film.
Development
Learning from our last assignment we went into this project prepared to plan properly. We began with an idea of a love story in the library. Following this we created a Lego storyboard, and script.
As part of our Visual Story course at Carnegie Mellon’sEntertainment Technology Center we were split into a number of semester long teams. Our first task was to come up with a name for our studio, and then to create a short animated studio logo.
Development
In considering our studio name we brainstormed a number of ideas:
Funk films.
Pumpkin Productions.
Sleepless Studios.
Overdrive Productions.
Overclocked Studios.
Overworked Studios.
We settled on Pumpkin Productions for two reasons:
It was the easiest concept to visualize.
As Halloween was approaching our team liked the idea of an evil pumpkin.
At this point our team started on concept designs. With our first concept we had two considerations. Firstly was that of color, which given the subject matter was a pumpkin, we felt orange would be appropriate. Secondly was that of shape, which we based off how a pumpkin looks like.