Category: Joey Robertson

The Making of the Horror short:

By: Joey Robertson

I had the idea for a spooky horror short since the beginning of the year. In fact, I want to do a skit for every holiday probably (with the exception of a few here and there), so expect one for Thanksgiving and Christmas as well. Getting back to it, the general idea for this one was to be short and sweet, but kind of suspenseful. Just a nice little film really.

The biggest problem I faced was when I could film, since I needed the school empty, quiet, and dark. The only time this would be much later after school, when almost all of the staff was gone. This was complicated more so by the presence of Cinderella rehearsal everyday after school. This was solved however since I had Tabletop club Thursday, and Cinderella practice would be over by 4pm. This was also better, since the actor I used, Cliff Bath, would also be present for then. As of writing this, the skit has yet to be filmed, so there may be some inaccuracies in this blog, and I do apologize for that.

One unfortunate thing about the film was the appearance of the figure, played by Torien Byrd, who was meant to have a mask and hood. However I left them at home and its not like I can just drive back home to grab it since:

  1.  I don’t drive
  2.  I lived 15+ minutes away from Wilson hall and its just not convenient at that point

Now after filming I can reflect on some things: there wasn’t supposed to be as much comedy as there was, but honestly I’m pretty happy with it. Also the blooper reel at the end was definitely a good idea.

The timeline of the video

The Second Blog

By: Joey Robertson

Monday:

I started off the day by brainstorming ideas for the next video I could make, until I eventually landed on a campus tour/review. I had never seen an actual campus tour for Wilson Hall, and I thought it would be useful to have one for students coming to wilson hall, who haven’t been on campus before. So I started planning what and where I would want to show, and writing a few critiques I had about the layout/design.

Tuesday:

Continued work on the script, and decided how I would film everything and the route the tour would take: through the upper school building, up into the middle school, across to the Nash building, then the engineering hallway and chapel, return to the lower school, before ending at the Track/Football field (though im now realizing I forgot the Kindergarten/Pre-k area). 

Wednesday:

Got right to filming the B-roll, since I wouldn’t have enough time to film me actually giving the tour, and I was correct. Thankfully the B-roll didn’t take very long and I was able to get photos and footage of all the places around the school I needed. Afterwards I worked on uploading it all to the google drive and organizing it. 

Thursday:

I knew the tour would take all of the period to film, so I got into it as quickly as I could. I was able to film both the opening and closing by myself, but I got help from my other team members, Thomas and Hannah, for filming the actual tour, since I couldn’t film, talk, and give the tour all at the same time. I finished just barely in time for 5th period. Later that night I painstakingly had to convert all 35 files to MP4’s, before importing them to my editing software.

A Week in Digital Media with Joey R

By: Joey Robertson

The Actual First Blog (guess I wasn’t supposed to do the one last week)

Anyways…

Tuesday: 

Started off by filming some footage of the cafeteria as B-roll footage, getting shots from all angles, inside and outside, and with and without students eating inside. Filming was quick and smooth. It probably only took about 15 minutes, maybe 20 at most. Afterwards, I returned to the classroom and began uploading all of the footage to my Google drive, which had some technical issues of its own. While that was finalizing, I worked on organizing the google drive into a series of folders so everything wasn’t everywhere, and I would be able to find what I needed later.

Wednesday:

I was at camp Bob Cooper with all the other seniors, so I wasn’t able to get any other work done unfortunately. But I did check to make sure the editing software on my computer still worked.

Thursday:

Once I got into class, I immediately got to filming the A-roll footage, although maybe I shouldn’t have been so quick and unobservant. I decided to film all the footage outside on one of the tables with the phone recording propped up against the laptop I would be reading off of. That’s when the trouble started unfortunately. I ended up going through 3 different microphones, wasting about 10-15 minutes, before deciding i had had enough, and just used the built in microphone to finish. There were still more accidents and errors unfortunately, like having to stop a take midway on account of people walking by, or me accidentally deleting a video here and there. After everything was finished, I quickly uploaded it all. Later when I got home, I got straight to work editing the video on my own computer, using all kinds of fancy music and tricks and the like. After about 30 minutes of that, it was all finished