Visual Literacy Final Project

Artist's Statement:

PRE-PRODUCTION:
This concept came from two places.  It came from a general dislike of smoking, mostly due to the effect of the smoke, and a need to fulfill this assignment.  Once it was decided that a PSA would be done, other PSAs were looked at to try to mimic the same style.  They used a lot of different angles and usually had very dulled lighting which was how this project was pictured.  There was no formal story board to this, but with a friend, a script was laid out and the location of the track was decided to go along with the script.  The main difficulty here was finding people to act in it on such short notice, but once that was done production flowed fine.

PRODUCTION:
The product of this project can be broken down into two parts.  First, the filming of the project took about an hour or so, and the editing took about 3 hours.  One major problem that was run into was that my initial filming of this project, either the camera was left running with realization or the record button was hit by accident because for that last 3 shots of the film, the recording was off so the footage was missing.  It wasn't until the editing phase of this first filming that it was realized that these shots were missing.  As such, because of scheduling conflicts with the first two actors, two new actors needed to be found.  Luckily they were able to on even shorter notice than the first two.  The talent that was eventually ended up on were Dana Al Ghusain and Samantha Raphelson.  As stated above the filming of this project took place on the track on campus and filming began at around 5PM or so, so the sun actually began to set before filming was completed.  This project was filmed on a digital Flip camera and the editing was done in Final cut.  As for the filming itself the scenes were filmed in order, because it was just easier that way for everyone.  To help it flow better, each shot ended with the line from the next shot so the dialogue wouldn't seem too choppy.  It worked out fairly well in that regard.

POST-PRODUCTION:
The final project was pretty close to how I imagined it, but due to a miscommunication about the length of the film, on my part, it ended up being longer than the syllabus said a PSA should be.  The initial footage was also lost and because the final project had music playing in it the entire time, it wasn't possible to edit it down to fit the time.  Also because the sun went down, and color correction was used on the last shot to make it match the rest of the film, the final shot of the film in much grainier than the rest of the PSA.  If time had permitted, I would have liked to redo one of the shots in the PSA entirely. The shot id awkward because the two people I was able to get for the project weren't exactly comfortable in front of the camera.  They tried to fill in intentional pauses in the script with dialogue, and even though it was able to be muted out, the shot still seems off.  However overall the project is nice, and while parts if it sometimes move slower than necessary, it doesn't hinder the final product too much.  Right now what's next is up in the air, we'll see where my filming things like this ends up.