Advancing forward in Capstone

As my Capstone project progresses, I find myself learning more and more each time I look at the content. Discovering how the art of reenactments romanticize nostalgia, glorify wartime, and  improve our understanding of their world has been a very interesting task in itself. So far I have some clips that I really believe fit the theme. This past week, my director Jason and I discussed creating an outline as opposed to only an AV script to aid me in my research. We also discussed what Motion Graphics could do for me in using a specific civil war themed font in order to fit the atmosphere of the film.

My director encouraged me to keep with the documentary idea instead of switching to a trailer. The film may not be as long as I originally intended it to, but I believe that I will still be able to produce something great (even if it is only 5 or 10 minutes long). Creating an outline makes the process a lot more manageable and understandable as I will have a beginning, middle, and end theme to work around. Among the raw sound bytes that I have from recording the event, I have also discovered some free Civil War music to use as background. Having an outline in mind really helps my artistic vision of where this film will go and the journey it may take the viewer on. I'm really excited about putting everything together and running through a few decent cuts of the film once I finish my editing process.

Though it has been a challenging journey so far, I am very proud of what this project is becoming. I never thought I'd be able to bring across communication theory as effective as I plan to. Even through just scrubbing through the footage that I have, I found so many ideas that I can stream off of and use in the actual video. I've been learning a lot just by fooling around with Final Cut Pro a little bit more. I feel that a consistent use of cross dissolves in between sequences will make a difference. Although it may not be a 20 minute film, I believe that this project will be very informative as well as unique in context.