Projects For The Beginning Film Maker. One of the skills you need to develop to create professional-quality videos is the ability to think visually. Instead of words, you communicate using pictures. What visual cues can you as the film director give the viewer so he or she “gets” it? You have to first think of […]
An Introduction to Documentary Filmmaking
Documentary filmmaking is a subcategory of film and video production where the production crew creates a work of journalism rather than a fictional movie. Instead of making up fictional characters and creating a world of make-believe, the documentary filmmaker’s job is to document real life and real people by accurately and fairly telling their stories. Journalism […]
Character Marketing: Why So Many Advertisements Feature Branding Characters
Take a look at these eight marketing characters used to advertise national brands. How many of them do you recognize? Do you know what product they represent? Every single time I showed pictures of marketing characters like this to my media students, they instantly knew almost every single character They knew both the character name […]
Let’s Make a TV Commercial!
Now that you have studied character marketing, it is time to come up with a product, a character and a commercial! Guidelines for your TV Commercial Project Your assignment is to create and produce a TV commercial using at least one character. Your commercial will promote a product using your character. Remember, your character should […]
Video Editing: Historical Perspective on Linear and Nonlinear Video Editing
Computers completely revolutionized video editing. Before computers, video editing was more expensive and slow. It took tons of expensive equipment, a whole roomful if you got into big-budget production. The skills and techniques used were completely different from modern computer editing. For the most part, video editing on these old systems was only done by […]
How to Create Original Characters for Your Movie
BUILDING CHARACTERS FOR A MOVIE When creating characters for a movie, consider the many different ways people behave, look and speak. Do you know anyone like this in real life? It always helps to follow the writer’s adage: “write what you know.” You can learn by imitating what has been done to create popular characters […]
Thoughts on Fixing the News Media
WHY IS THE NEWS MEDIA SO DESTRUCTIVE AND HOW CAN WE FIX IT? When I contemplate the full repercussions of the 24-hour, anything-in-the-world-goes information cycle, it scares me a bit. In my observation, as well as shown scientifically, humans are alarmingly susceptible to succumbing their will to authoritarian information and directives. It seems to be […]
Anatomy of a Video: Analyzing Well-Made Videos
One of the best ways to learn how to make video yourself is to study videos other people have already made. No need to reinvent the wheel! Watching carefully and dissecting anything you watch is a great habit to get into. I recommend it to all my students. Practice analyzing videos even as you just […]
How to Operate a Video Camera
Tips on how to handle a video camera like an expert.