June 8, 2008

Kevin Alfred was leaving the TACF offices in favour of education, so I wanted to get him in the announcements. We also had the Trumpet Call conference at TACF that week, so there was a series of tents set up in the parking lot for an installation. It all fit together to make this video.

Kevin really got into this, and went home to pick up those clothes, all of which were already in his wardrobe. This is the first time that people seemed to notice how contrived my efforts were becoming in getting the announcements to fit my plot.

The 'lullaby' at the end of this video is The Sprout and the Bean by Joanna Newsom.

June 1, 2008

I think I ended up getting in a little over my head with this one. I wanted to make a mock movie trailer for the sci-fi genre, and I allowed Ben to persuade me to rip-off the Matrix trailer. I took some scenes from the movie, and some sequences from the trailer itself. I even used the Crystal Method track that the trailer used. Most of the time it all works quite well, but in places I sacrificed my style for making it more like the original, and I rather wish that I hadn't done that.

I used green screen again for the scene where B.K jumps the buildings, but this time I filmed him running on the screen, and I was in a crane shooting down on him. Shame I didn't light the screen properly again...

Some of the dialogue in this is quite clever, but lost in the sense of the thing. Didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped, but it was rather ambitious to try to copy a movie with ground breaking special effects.

May 18, 2008

This one went down very well indeed.
I did quite a bit of research before I made this, trying to get the feel of the thing just right. My final port of call for this was to contact my good friend James, who is an expert in film, cinematography, and particularly early film. I was very pleased to read his response to my question of conventions for silent film, because I had fulfilled all but one of them.

The music plays a big part here. It's amazing how much atmosphere it adds. When we showed this at the North York congregation, the sound didn't work, and I found it rather dull.

Yawan really got into this one, and I think that all three main characters will reprise their roles at some point in the near future; I don't know how I'll top the pie in the face at the end though...

May 11, 2008

Simple idea here - the announcements are all given by mothers at TACF in honour of Mothers' Day.
See if you can spot the continuity error in Vero's announcement.

Note: the song at the start of the video is performed by a comic duo that I found online. The song gets very silly after the cut I performed on here...

April 6, 2008

I rather like this one. I think it's a little more subtle than some of the others, and I'm sure that only Vero, Amanda and myself get some of the jokes. I especially like the scene in the baptistry.

I was thinking more about the music that I was using for the announcements by this point, and chose my favourite track from Jon Patell's debut album http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif. The track is called The Sea.

I cut a shot from the end of this video. Originally, when Amanda prays for Vero, Vero starts manifesting, and falls over, but I took it out in favour of their excitement at Vero getting the interpretation for the tongues.