Digital Workflow.

When I was a kid, I always got excited about the first day of school. New binders, blank covers for my textbooks that will ultimately get graffiti'ed on within the first 2 weeks, and seeing my friends again. I think I lost that excitement for the first day of school when I got into high school. Last night was the start of the fall semester, and I have to say that I'm feeling that same excitement. Going to school for personal enrichment is like going to school as a kid. I am taking Evan Donn's Digital Workflow class, and I'm really excited about it. I realized after my Edinburgh Festival Fringe excursion that my film making skills absolutely suck. My goal in this class is to learn a thing or two about camera angles, lighting, and audio. I cannot depend solely on my editing skills anymore. I really need to know how to film! Hopefully, I will be able to pick up these skills after this class is done. The semester long project? Voila:

"Your primary project this semester will be to produce your own video series. For this series you can choose any topic, style and genre you wish; it can be fiction or non-fiction but it must have a consistent topic or theme which carries across all episodes. You will need to produce 5 episodes this semester (one every 3 weeks), and each episode should be no shorter than 2 minutes and no longer than 3. You must have the rights to all materials used in your videos for this class. This means that any video, photographic or music elements must either be original or used with permission. We will discuss creative commons licensing in class and I will provide a variety of links to cc licensed material online which you may be able to use in your projects."

Five 3 minute videos, every three weeks? Boy oh boy. For my semester long project, I am going to make five 3-minute 48 hour film projects. I'll have the class pick the character, prop, line of dialogue, and genre, and every three weeks I will produce my 3-minute film. I will do my best to step out my comfort zone and experiment with new camera angles and lighting. I guess I should probably invest in some good microphones as well. I am going to take this class seriously because I really want to do things right. Like I said, I cannot depend solely on my FCP skills anymore. I really need to become the film jack of all trades.