not so final final project

but this should give you a pretty good idea. im going to spend a little more time on getting more structure, and syncing it better with the audio...
any other suggestions are welcome, as always.
not sure what went wrong with the last bit of text, but no time now to re-export.

Final Project Pitch

I spent a good part of this summer traveling and working in North-East India. Politically, this is a region that has been neglected for many years now. Geographically too, it is secluded (read as breathtakingly beautiful- untouched by industrialization - there are actually still many pristine forests, gorgeous rivers etc). The culture, the people, the food, the economics, the landscape... just about everything about this place is unique!
Right now, there is much political unrest in this region - they want their independence from India. The North East consists of seven states, Assam being the most famous one (for those of you who drink tea, Im sure this place sounds familiar!). So tea is one of the main sources of revenue/ employment/ (exploitation). For the most part, the rest of the North East is populated by small and large tribes, who have their own skills, trading practices etc.
I am working on a series of short documentary films about this region, and the people who live there. In most of the film, the focus is on their occupation - traditional handicrafts like cloth and basket weaving.
For my final project, I want to put together a series of stills along with audio that I recorded on location from these places (they have a rich tradition of music and dance) as an introduction to the short films. The media storm piece on Cuba really made an impact on me, and I want to use a similar style, but with a little more written/spoken information.
So I would use stills and animated masks/mattes for majority of the project. There will also be some time remapping (Im thinking of using some stop-motion sequences). My challenge in this will be to creatively use text within the project, and to make it look different from the media storm piece - more documentary than music video.

Particles

So, I tried to create a rain effect.
The whole thing is divided into three parts - the gray is a frontal view; the black is if you were looking up at the rain, and the brown is if you are looking down at the rain (maybe from a boat or standing on water, because the rain is falling on a very 'liquidy' surface).
the last effect was created by mixing together the cc drizzle and the particle world effects. if anyone has better/easier suggestion, do let me know.

Green Screen

this project did take a while to complete. so i shot Zach in front of a green screen. playing an imaginary guitar. then i shot the guitar in just one place. i used a strobe filter effect to get that flashing-blink effect. at this point, i added a cream colored concrete image behind the entire composition so that the blinking was not as jarring as it was earlier.
then i thought it would be amusing to reverse worlds and have a human being turned in a flip book by a paper hand. this part really took much longer than i expected, but i like how it turned out. a little bit warped and strange - just the way i had imagined :)

3D project

i pulled a few pictures that we took during our summer trip to India. cutting out the parts took the longest time, and you can tell that i got lazy about this. the one image that i did do my best on is the last one with joey and the yellow wall - i thought this came out pretty well...
other than that, it was just a series of animated masks and using a camera in 3D. i really enjoyed doing this, and im hoping to perfect my photoshop cut-out skills/be better with backgrounds.

text

i created this with the idea of using it in a website as an intro screen. i imagine that it would reveal as a series of photos appear, and i tried to time and space the alphabets in a way that i can coordinate it with the appearance of the pictures.

masks and mattes

story book

Assignment 2

I dont think Im happy with this project yet. There are a few things that I would like to do, but have run out of time (I ended up going to Galveston this weekend to shoot the aftermath of the hurricane.) Looking forward to comments/ suggestions as to how I can make it better.

assignment 1