Summary of AF105

Overall I really enjoyed this project, having not worked with much video before. Learning all the software from scratch was a bit of a challenge but I feel that I adapted enough that my final product didn't suffer as a result. I felt that my storyboard wasn't that much help to me because I ended up changing most of what I planned during the editing process. I feel that my final clip satisfies the brief and provides a flavour of what the time period and circumstances of the speech were.

Final Changes

Before final hand-in I made some changes based on feedback from my classmates after showing them my rough version. The main things I changed were the timings of the kinetic text to improve accuracy and pace, as well as the font in the kinetic text being changed from Myriad Pro Bold to Myriad Pro Bold Condensed.

 

Filming

Even though in the brief it says we dont need to do any of our own filming, I thought it would be a much better experience if I included some footage that I shot myself. For this I went up to the Chattri war memorial and filmed a variety of clips that I could use in my final sequence. 

 

Premiere Pro and Motion

For this project, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and Apple Motion 5 have been the software programs I've used for all my editing.

For all visual effects, motion graphics and kinetic text I've used Motion, making extensive use of the masking function for most of my text and video effects

 
For the general assembly of the clips and transitions, I used Premiere Pro CS5 to organise the clips I'd made using Motion. I also used MPEGStreamClip to cut up pieces of documentary film quickly and then export them into Premiere Pro using a lossless format.
 

 

Kinetic Type

For my kinetic type I've decided to use a much more simple approach than traditional kinetic text. A god example of what I want to achieve are the text effects used in the series Wonders of Life. I particularly like their use of motion tracking to anchor the text to the contents of the film and intend to replicate this in my final clip. I will still have the words coming up in time to the speech to qualify them as kinetic text.

Typography Research

For my kinetic text I decided to do some research into British fonts of the 1940s to ensure I capture the look and feel of the time period accurately. Most of the good examples I found are all hand drawn, one off fonts which makes it very difficult to find the exact font. I wanted to use a bold sans serif font to give a certain amount of impact, seeing as the kinetic type needs to emphasise the important parts of the speech and found these 'Dig for Victory' posters:

I decided that Myriad Pro Bold and Myriad Pro Bold Condensed would be a good enough approximation:

 

About Winston Churchill

For our research task we put together a short presentation about Churchill and his speech. In our presentation we included some facts about Churchill, the speech and the era, plus a mood board of the war and 40s culture. As part of my more personal research I decided to watch 3 documentaries about Winston Churchill and his role in the war effort.