*NOTE* I originally made this page on October 28th 2015, but I decided to reformat it so it would properly fit on the upper page bar and not be a part of the category section like it was years ago.
GRADE 10
These photos were part of an assignment I did where I had pictures of myself taken in front of a green screen located in the Comm Tech room of RND Notre Dame and then I had a special background digitally added in via Photoshop. The “Environmental” photograph has me in a chair reading “Top 10 Hottest Hollywood Cars” in front of the school’s library shelves while the “Traditional” one has me standing inside a tank full of tropical fish at Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada.
GRADE 11
This is what I made and handed in on PowerPoint for an assignment where we had to make our movie screenplay. I decided to do a werewolf movie which was based off the 1981 film An American Werewolf in London where I mostly used stock images to show the scenery.I admit I did tweak around the original story a little and it’s not like this will ever be a real movie but I had fun making each slide as well as the choice of imagery I used to tell the scene.
Newscast
Here are two clips that I created for my newscast assignment:
The first clip is a compilation I made out of clips from the 1998 Godzilla movie to look like a newsreel that would be displayed during a news broadcast and the second one was a faux interview about the two giant panda cubs being born in the Toronto Zoo with my teacher, Mr. MacDonald playing the role as the zoo’s CEO John Tracogna. For the actual assignment, I had to stand in front of a green screen where there was a teleprompter. The teleprompter had a script I wrote that was in cap locks and had symbols that were used as cues for the clips. There was also a pedal in front of me that can make the words scroll down and go up in reverse. For anchoring, I channeled an impression of Alan Carter who hosts Global News in Ontario and I “signed off” with a line straight out of Bruce Almighty. It took a long time to get to, but it was all fun in the end. To see some other documents that did not make it on either one of these videos, be sure to follow these links:
Movie recreation
I made this video for the recreation assignment in Comm Tech. For this video, I decided to choose to recreate the pre-show film for The Twilight Zone: Tower of Terror ride that is at Disney Hollywood Studios, California Adventure, and Walt Disney Studios Parc. The source of the video was from SuperHotLarry on YouTube and the picture that I used for the Hollywood Tower Hotel was a snapshot of the ride exterior I took during my trip to Paris last summer. I made the thunder and starfield effects with Adobe After Effects. It took weeks to film on scene and get edited on time, but in the end, it turned out quite well.
Suspense movie
Movie poster practice
11 x 17
Photoshop
When we were done wrapping up our suspense film, we then had to create a Photoshop poster advertising the movie. Even though at least me and some students already knew how to use the software, we had to make a demo for a faux movie called “The Plane” which showed a man standing on a harbour as a plane is about to crash in the water. Three layers were needed as well as blending modes and gradients. Title fonts were also necessary.
Playing the Game – Poster
Photoshop
11 x 17
After the tutorial was finished, we then moved on to our own movie poster. I had to take at least 3 photographs with a DSLR camera of my brother, the Godzilla prop and an equipment box. I did it in a photo studio with a green screen and lights to brighten the quality of the pictures. I got my brother in the poster and erased away all the green screen surrounding him. I did the same with Godzilla who I then put in the box to make it look he was inside opening the lid. Then, I put a gradient around the bottom where my title was put in. I picked the best font and color that would make it look true to the original film. I had lots of fun making the poster, although not as much as making the actual film.
Playing the Game
Directed by Colin Clark
Here it is. The suspense movie that I handed in for my culminating. This entire film was shot at home with the help of my family including my brother, the main star. I wasn’t happy with the first draft of my rough film so I completely scratched it and started over with a new concept. The scenes I had the most fun filming and editing were the living room, bathroom, car crash, the basement and the ending as well as finding all sorts of sound effects and music for the movie. Making the Godzilla toy move via puppetry and frame-by-frame was also fun and my dog did a good job in this movie. The only issue I had making this movie is that the shots are all shaky since I forgot the stabilizer base for the tripod and it was hard getting the camera to stay still while levering the tripod up and down so I had to hold it with one hand. Other than that, I really enjoyed making this movie.
GRADE 12
Work-safety PSA
For out first assignment in Grade 12, we had to make a work safety video to submit to a contest from the Ontario safety government. I decided to make my video about a worker in a wood factory who is cutting wood and thinks about using googles for the job, but then decides not to thinking it will only take a second. As you would expect, this does not end well as John pays the ultimate price for not taking caution. For this project, I did not use Final Cut Pro but rather another software. This commercial was inspired off a series of work safety adverts aired in Australia where workers are asked to take on a tough task, but they are too shy to speak up about how uncertain they are for the job and try to do the job by taking matters in their own hands which ends up in gory, graphic fates. The video was filmed in the woodshop class around the school. I casted two students from woodshop class to be in my movie which they agreed to do. The planks of wood, the googles and the buzzsaw were all from the workshop. My friend, Elgin, provided John’s inner dialogue in a recording studio. The hysterical screaming sound at the end came from this YouTube video in the URL link below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XbttBH6Ip4 I had a lot of fun making this video, although I wish I had started production more earlier and I could have used fake blood effects for when the splinter hits John’s eye.
Audio Foley Assignment
Our next assignment in Grade 12 was about audio where we had to take a music video and remove all the music leaving nothing but sound effects recreated by the user. The other option was to take a movie clip and remove the original audio, recreating the sound effects by scratch. I choose the latter and decided to redo a scene from Lord of the Rings: Return of the King where the Witch King and his Nazguls on mounted Fell-beasts raid Minas Tirith and its army. For this assignment, I worked on the software program Adobe Audition where I had to recreate the scene with sound effects from scratch. Many of the sounds from this video such as the Nazgul’s screeching, dragon roars, men and Orc screams came from videos off YouTube including the movie clip itself. Some of the other sound effects such as the catapults wooden frames breaking, the motion “whoosh” transitions of the Fell-beasts flying and piling into the Gondorian soldiers (which is actually the sound of a computer breaking) were pulled from Final Cut Pro. The Gandalf voiceover was done by me. When the entire project was done, I converted the audio into an mp3 and then laid the audio over the original movie clip in Premiere Pro where it was then converted into a QuickTime file. I had lots of fun making this video. Some challenges I had were matching the sound files with the exact time they were played at. I really had fun playing around with the scream sound effects and the Nazgul screeches.
Splinky's Art Gallery 