Summer

I thought that seeing as this is the first post on my blog for the second year of university, I should start with an update. Filling the void if you will, telling anyone and everyone who is interested, what I have been up to throughout the summer. Some things relevant to my personal and professional development in regards of media production, and some things that are more things that I have been up too.

Pokémon Center

The first and probably most dominant thing I have been up to is updating my YouTube channel, it’s dedicated to videos of gameplay from various games in the Pokémon series. Pokémon Red version is the first game I ever owned and I still play the game now, it’s become a massive part of my life and a lot of my spare time get’s pumped into it. To say I have been completely obsessed with Pokémon for a long time probably isn’t too far from the mark. At one point, any time spent not playing Pokémon was spent doing something else Pokémon related, a lot of the time was watching people on YouTube play Pokémon. For a long time I had been subscribed to a lot of different people on YouTube who do a lot of different things such as open packs of Pokémon cards and review them, battles on various different games or play through different game versions.

I soon figured that if there was this many people I would put my time into watching on YouTube, people would put their time into me too. I have combined my two loves, playing Pokémon and producing media content. This has allowed me to make something out of what would previously be time spent by myself with no outcome.

This is a video from one of the series I have produced:

Making my Pokémon channel has taught me a few things about having a media output on a site such as YouTube. I have had to put some effort into creating a good-looking homepage to attract the right audience and to give the a sense of professionalism. My videos get a modest following which I am happy with, I update regularly and gain a new addition to my following often. I am quite happy with my channel as I do not need to put a huge amount of effort into it to keep it alive and I enjoy the content I am making for it.

Short Films: Scripts and Screenplays

This Summer I have wanted to make some films, I always have the passion and urge to make films, but this summer has been increasingly bad, I feel like a junkie whose supply has been taken away from him. Making a film would have been easy, but a few things stopped me. The media loan shop at uni is closed to us throughout the summer, and not available to us again until the day we start back, which is fair, they have lives too, why should they have to go out of their way to allow us to take out equipment and then have the stressful ordeal of following up missing equipment on students who aren’t even in term for another 3 months. I understand the closure completely, but to someone who is itching to make a film; not good. I have my small camera. It shoots in HD, sound qualities a little crappy, but doesn’t mean I can’t make a film right? Wrong. The sound quality used to be a little crappy, and it hasn’t aged well, now it’s hella’ crappy. A film could not be shot on that with the awful and inconsistent audio. There’s no point.

So what is the only thing I could do to ventilate my undying urge of film making? I wrote scripts mainly. Some ambitious scripts that aren’t plausible for me to create, not yet anyway. And some scripts which I plan on making before the end of the year.

To be honest I never thought myself as much of a writer, but my writing has definitely developed over the summer, I have given myself a style in which I find it easy to quickly produce a quality script including all the other documents that come with it, including the pitch and treatment.

Writing scripts started at the beginning of summer, when I went to see The Raid. After walking out of the cinema completely blown away at what I will always describe as the best action film that has ever been made, I wanted to make something similar, so I started writing. The product is something I’m extremely satisfied with, and have spent a long time putting in a lot of effort into the script. I am going to edit and adopt this script further, but I am not going to make it as of yet as I do not feel I am technically capable of it yet, and the film will cost a lot of money to make, but generally I am impressed with myself and what I have written. The next step of this short film is to improve myself technically by learning a lot of VFX in Adobe After Effects, and learning how to do a lot of practical FX by means of creating several test films throughout the year. If I am satisfied that the film can be made to a high enough standard that I am satisfied, I am going to create this film for my final media project at the end of third year.

For now, here is the final draft of the script for my short action film; Milk.
‘Milk’

Short Film Society

The last thing I have been organising starting at the beginning of summer and has been developing and processing throughout, is a new society for the university, the ‘Short Film Society’. After discussing it over with a few friends, we decided that there wasn’t a society really geared towards us film heads. There is Source TV which is great for producing things such as event coverage or promotional work, but there isn’t much opportunity for creating something with a narrative. I set out to change this by creating the Short Film Society. The objective of the society is to give people a competitive yet friendly environment where people can make films and receive constructive criticism, as well as attending various film festivals around the country and hopefully the world.

I tried to get involved in a few society’s in the first year, but as I said before none really peaked my interest at all so my involvement with any society’s I did help were purely favours for friends who were already in society’s. In creating the Short Film Society I am not just creating something for myself, but I am creating something for other people to join, enjoy and better themselves, and I’m pretty proud of that. A lot of the time I have found myself wanting to make a film, but have either fallen foul of no motivation, no crew, no equipment or just low morale, and in creating the society I have eradicated this problem for myself and hopefully a lot of others who are stuck in the same position that I am in.

I am really looking forward to getting involved and getting other involved in the society, and it should make the second year a lot more enjoyable and worthwhile than the first.

 

 

Oh yeah, I also went camping for a week and had the most miserable holiday of my life. But I managed salvage some of the god awful video footage from my god awful camera to create this montage:

Holiday Film