Lord David Putnam

In march I had the opportunity to attend a talk hosted by Lord David Putnam at college. This was a very informative talk in which he discussed his life both on and off screen. He talked about his role as producer in the Hollywood Blockbuster film Chariots of Fire as well as producing Bugsy Malone and Midnight Express. He was CEO of Columbia Pictures from 1987 to 1988, and after this went back to producing films with Enigma Productions. In 1998 he retired from film production to concentrate more on his work in education and the environment.

I found this talk very informative and interesting as has had an illustrious career in Hollywood and talked about what it was like to work with certain actor in the films and thought he was very inspiring to me and the rest of the people that were present.

Intro to Factual

I have recently finished my Intro to Factual module and found it to be very interesting. I found it interesting as I like filming real people not characters and covering true stories. This is what I am looking to choose on level 5 and beyond as a career.

I was happy with the way that the product turned out as there were a few problems. There are a number of things that I would change if I was to do this production again.
Firstly I would film more cutaways as the ones that we have didn't seem to be very relevant to what Paul was talking about in the video. This would have allowed us to include more relevant footage in the edit and make it a better production.
Secondly I would have shortened some of the Interview as the video does become boring in places as Paul talks for too long and starts to go off topic. Also we had run out of cutaways to use at this point and this meant that we had to leave the interview on screen for long periods of time. If we had changed these point it would have made it a better production as we would have been able to disguise the cuts more in the edit and cut down on the time Paul was onscreen.
Lastly I would have spent more time on the sound. The sound that we had captured was not the best as we did not record any sound externally on the other shoots which meant that we could only include the sound from the interview as well as an ambient track to disguise the cuts in the audio. However we could not have captured sound on the penshaw location as it was far too windy.

The finished Product can be found on my YouTube channel.

Intro to Factual Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H49gc0vPERU

Digital Skills Task 3

I have just completed my final Digital Skills task. This task involved creating a video using the technique of the Parallax Effect. To achieve this effect I first had to take a number of photographs of people/objects and a few that would be good backgrounds. I then took the images of the people into Photoshop and Cut around them. This left me with just the people in a PNG image. I then imported these files into After effects and layered them on top of the background, scaled them to the appropriate size and then added movement.

I found this task very interesting as I had never used After Effects or Photoshop before this task. I have now learned how to use this software and I can now use it in future projects. I feel that this Task has benefited me immensely as I now have more knowledge and understanding of the uses and how to use these two pieces of software.

Task 3 - http://youtu.be/2v5nIq0455I