Reflective Journal / Evaluation

Reflective Journal/Evaluation  

For this project, I set out to expand upon the short ‘re-dubs’ of the videos I created last term, however this time I would create a video from similar videos which I worked with last term such as I ‘re-dubbed’ the sound to the trailer of ‘Plan 9 From Outer Space’ and for this project I used the film as one of the two videos I would mash up to create a different film, with ‘Teenagers From Space’. For the video, I wanted a main character to follow on his adventure in which I chose one of the bad guys from ‘Teenagers From Space’ and decided based of this character to make my main character a bad guy as well, as a contrast to the usual films which its main character is a force of good.

For research, I looked at a range of artists who have worked with pre-existing films and footage such as ‘Cassette Boy’ who takes news and political debate footage and mashes it up to create a parody of the original footage twisting it into something completely different. These videos were a key inspiration for the tone of my video. I also looked at Jamie Shovlin and his film ‘Hiker Meat’ which was made to resemble the Italian ‘Giallo’ Films which were usually gore filled slasher films. Correspondents by Fiona Chambers was also interesting to look at due to it highlighting awkward moments during the news which is the opposite of what I wanted to do with my video by showing the fun and exciting side of b-movie/low budget films. ­

For my video, I intended it to have more scenes but scenes featuring my character were mostly used up while I could have reused previous footage with the character to add to the low budget feel, but the situations I put the character in would have then been repeated.

The video also took me longer to do than anticipated due to other projects going on as I indented for the video to be finished early Easter break so I then would have time to polish and refine the video and possibly add more to it if necessary, but this didn’t happen. I also didn’t know how to end the video so I had Rob create a large explosion with his gun as throughout the film I had its effects be inconsistent which made the explosion in the logic of the film more plausible. But if there were more scenes that I was able to use the ending would have been a lot different.

However, the video turned out similar to how I envisioned/wanted it, but due to the number of scenes that were available for me to use I was unable to add characters and flesh out existing ones, for example I wanted to give the General more scenes as well as better dialogue so Rob’s goal to find him would have some backstory and weight to it such as a scene where the General is fighting an alien rather than the little it did (when the General says about firing upon a flying saucer). However, this does have some unintended meaning to it as it could hint at Rob being an alien, or at least linked to the saucers which I had appear in some scenes.

If I were to do this project again I would add in a third or more films to my video in order to make it longer as well as to introduce more characters and themes which will flesh out the video and possibly make it more interesting and engaging. I would also have managed my time better as I felt the video could have had more polish, I would have also liked to put the film on a VHS tape as well as create its own sleeve to go in.

In conclusion, I think the project went fairly well however I feel the final video could have been more, the reason this didn’t happen was due to poor scheduling of my time as well as having other project to do which limited the time I could work on the video.