Documenting things because reasons

Well I was going to do a blog post about nebulae (plural form of nebula) but seeing as that would involve a lot of research and image citing and all that and its late, instead I shall shamelessly promote Connor, Sam, Max's documentary.  Huzzah?



Honestly, this documentary depressed me.  C'mon America, be smarter.   The writing on the white board to clarify ideas was actually really good, but it also made me sad because whoever was writing has way better handwriting than I do.  Am I allowed to blame American schools?   But it was good because it was clear, it didn't go too fast, and it gave real solutions to the problems.  And cinematographically, rack focus is just generally awesome and there was great typography.  So generally, this was a good documentary.   Hopefully it will win the CSPAN thing.
(For obvious reasons however, my groups documentary about Europa will be far superior, because we went to Europa to get footage.  It was only like 433 million miles away )

Ok I lied about there being no nebula stuff.
Nebulas are beauteous clouds of gas and space dust and what not.  It's where stars are born.  And they are cool because no one really knows how exactly stars form, though we have a general idea.   But since I will be writing a much longer blog post next week about it, I will just leave this as a wonderful little taste of their epicness.
But it would be mean to just end this blog post without any sort of nebula picture, so here is a wonderful picture of the Orion Nebula.

 

 

This is why Nasa and Hubble are awesome.  So beautiful.

Image Credit

Robot love seems to be a concerning theme in pd. 4

So for this assignment we took a break from well, everything to do a fun super short project with the awesome kids from England.  So we had to make a 60 second movie using a random prop.  We got a big box filled with two clock timer things, tubing, fairy wands, something called a film cleaner, random bits of metal and a broken plastic beaker.   We knew we wanted to do something sort of sci-fi esc.  Eventually we came up with the idea of a mad scientist who creates an android and falls in love with her.  But alas, the robot cannot feel love.  So the scientist discovers a code to make the robot fall in love (and therefore more human).  But then the robot falls for another.   We were able to write the script (it was easy since there were no words) and a story board on the first day, film on the second, and edit on the third.  We stayed after school to finish it. 
The overall making of this was actually pretty smooth, there weren't any major roadblocks.  Time was a bit of a constraint, but since we came in after school two days, we managed to get it done.  Another problem was that we had a piece of music that we wanted to use, but it was download only (you couldn't modify/create derivative works) so we had to find another song.  Searching through Free Music Archives takes a loooonggggg time.  Ruth found a really great song though.
This experience helped us to understand how to tell a story with as few shots as possible.  The CAP Hollywood movies will not be that long (only like 2 minutes as I understand it, though I think it should be more like 5) so it will be important to know how to use a few significant shots rather than a ton of unnecessary ones.   I also learned a bit more about editing.  I had a lot of fun color correcting.   I will definitely use color correction to give my CAP Hollywood film the right mood.
On a slightly related note, the short stories are coming along great.  It took me a long time to think of an idea.   I generally don't enjoy reading realistic fiction, so coming up with an original idea was challenging.  Fortunately, late at night before the first part was due, I was able to find a loophole.  My story is about a girl who is bored and starts daydreaming that she and those around her are in a fantasy world.  Ah loopholes.  I really really want this to made into one of the films.  If it doesn't get picked, I'll just make it myself, because I have a clear image of what it should look like.