Portfolio Website.

I wanted to update my portfolio website because I think its good to keep it fresh and up to date. Below are some screen shots of what my website used to look like. Though i still like this and it does work really well I think it was time for an update. 

Since updating my website I think its improved immensely, I personally think it looks much more professional and would be taken more seriously than my old style. 

this theme allows me to have social media icons and when you hover over them the colour swaps to the branded colour. I also have videos and projects as a redirect link. I am pleased with how this has come out and I will be uploading a lot more of my work onto my portfolio page. I can upload videos and pictures. This theme enables you to be able to click on an image then it will come up bigger with a caption next to it so i get a chance to explain what its about to whoever is looking. 

Career Pathways

When I apply for a job I'm unsure of where I am going to apply for a job, at the end of the day I want to do something with film, for a while I've wanted to edit movie trailers but that's probably quite hard to get into. I will list the skills I am confident that i would be able to do in a work place. 

Photoshop: I have been using photoshop for years now, I am pretty good at editing photographs people often comment on how well i can do this, to which i thought i could apply for some magazine jobs, Some of the pictures you see on the front cover of magazines are dreadful and i personally think i could do a little better. 

Indesign: A software I am also familiar with since before university, in college I actually made a magazine which I created within indesign. 

Illustrator: I had never used this software before university, in school we got taught how to use Adobe Flash though a lot of people slate it I really enjoyed it, but since using illustrator I couldn't imagine going back. I am not an amazing drawer but I can make simple designs and also trace. 

After Effects: I learnt how to use this software in class and it's probably my favourite one. I use AE all the time for my youtube intros and other effects and love continuing to learn different things it can do. 

Final Cut Pro: I have been using final cut pro for a while now and it will always be my favourite film editing software, i think its one of the easiest to use with great effects. I think i would be confident in having a job where i could use this software.

IMovie: though iMovie isn't exactly a professional editing software, it's still great for simple and fast editing, I know the ins and outs of iMovie and could create a really nice piece just using this. 

Premire Pro: I have only recently started using premiere pro but I really enjoy using it, there are lots of cool effects and i like playing around with it, at the moment id say I'm not fully okay with having a job that surrounded this software but i think i could learn in no time. 

Searching For Jobs

Recently I have been searching and applying for jobs, here are a few that I have applied for: 

I was reading through a blog of a man who used to edited together movie trailers, which is exactly what I've always wanted to do, at the end of his blog he left a link to a website with lots of trailer house companies: http://www.goldentrailer.com/trailerhouse.php though they all seem to be in America that doesn't exactly bother me, i would love to look more into this and see where it could take me. 

Other Jobs:

ASOS

ITV

Self Promoting.

Since studying digital media at university i have become more and more into video and film editing, uploading videos to youtube gives me a chance to stay creative and learn new things along the way. 

For about a year now I have been promoting myself on social media, because I make weekly youtube videos people all over the world watch and then get in contact with me through social networking, telling me how much they like my videos and how I should do more. Since uploading I have gained over 1000 subscribers, which I'm proud of because its very hard to get noticed when you're just starting out.

I think its good to keep up to date with the new social media trends, especially being in the digital industry you need to stay relevant and I think being involved with several communities helps do this. Since promoting myself on twitter I have gone from 800 to over 8000 followers, having a big following on twitter means everything I upload gets noticed by more people. 

I have only recently made a Facebook page because I never felt the need to make one in the past, I didn't quite realise how much a Facebook page would benefit me, under all the posts you upload it says underneath how many people it has reached. Its also a great way of promoting yourself. 

I have the following set up: 

YouTube

Twitter 

Facebook

Instagram

Tumblr

Blogger

Vine

Snapchat. 

Creating My Brand.

For a while now I have been forming my online persona into a brand, making myself into a brand looks professional and helps people find my social media sites quicker. I have made myself a logo and use the same fonts and colours for everything I do. I am happy with what I have come up with and i think it works well for me. Everything i have created will appear on all my websites and social media, this way everything stays linked together. 

I use the same fonts and colours at all times.

Fonts: Billabong, Cubano and Simplicity 

Here is what I have created: 

The Logo: I have created two in different colours because I wanted options, my main colour that i will always use is blue but pink works for other things such as my blog which is the same pink colour. The reason for GXA is because it's my initials Gina Xanthe Allen. 

This is my intro, this goes before any video that I create and upload. 

Professional Practice - The Brief

You are to design and build a portfolio of your work for the End of Year show and in order for you to begin looking for employment. The site must be responsive and MUST BE ONLINE by deadline day so you will have to sort out hosting and uploading as part of this brief. You can use HTML, CSS, etc. or you can use a Wordpress template if you prefer.

Responsive portfolio website

Career Pathways – A short study of the different career pathways within the design industry with a focused emphasis on your chosen specialty – (this will be in the form of blog posts)

Self Promotion - A detailed list of companies that you will promote your Portfolio to and invite to the End of Year Show. Each entry must have a short paragraph justifying why you have chosen them and a link to their website.  

Portfolio Research - A study of the professional portfolios of a series of practitioners that have inspired you personally – this is evidenced in your blog and must contain analysis of visual language, composition and the use of social media.

Evaluation

During this project I have learnt a lot about film making and myself, I will take away more skills than I had before i started and put them to use in the future. When I started out I was really unsure of what storyline I wanted to do, I wanted to do something I was really passionate about this way I wouldn't loose interest as it's such a long project. 

In my spare time I make YouTube videos, I enjoy this a lot and since I've been uploading other people enjoy my videos too. One afternoon my cousin comes up to me and says she too wants to start uploading videos to YouTube, I thought it was great she wanted to do something like that but at the same time, my cousin is 10 years old. I told her to wait until she's older because I don't think it's safe to be online that young. This got me thinking about my project and how I could do a video on the darker side of the Internet, nothing too sinster but just to show awareness that it's not good all the time. 

When it came to story boarding I had a few visions on how I wanted the film to look like, a vlogging style of film was defiantly one of them. The audience I want to attract would be used to a vlogging style because they watch videos like this already but I wanted to show that I could do normal shots too so in the last scene I changed it completely, though this was a lot harder than I first thought (I speak about this in a previous post.) 

There was a few technical difficulties I came across when it came to exporting. My file sizes where much to big and it was causing my laptop to become full very quickly, when I realised this I had to play around with the settings and save it as a lower resolution. I also bought a 4 terabyte external hard drive which then allowed me to move files onto that. Though this was such a pain I figured a way around this and learnt a lot about file sizes. 

Now I am at the end of the project I have come to the conclusion that 1) I am not an actress, its very hard watching the film back because I cringe a lot at how bad my acting is and 2) I have realised that i don't mind editing film (when I'm not acting in it) but i really like playing around in After Effects for intros etc. I also realised that I would much rather film and edit some adventure / traveling videos once I finish university I am thinking of taking a gap and hopefully I'm going to be able to achieve this.

Trailer and Film

Here are videos of both my final pieces. 

A couple of blogposts ago I mentioned that I placed a colour overlay on the whole video but sadly after I tried to export this on After Effects the video kept glitching and the sound was completely off, i thought  about trying again but it began to be more trouble that it was worth so I made the final decision to leave the colour over lay but still include the black lines. 

Though my film doesn't look like a high movie production I'm still happy with how it came out.

Trailer 

Film 

Problems Exporting - Not Enough Space

I had a lot of trouble when it came to exporting things, i think the file size of the videos are so big they're taking up the majority of space on my laptop, i have a feeling its something in the in camera settings that I've done wrong because i don't know what else would cause it. I have been going through my computer for hours deleting / moving files onto an external hard drive and I've managed to save some room.

A big problem which i was having was exporting the whole movie in after effects, i had to do this to get the colour overlay. The first time i tried to do this the file was 50GB - hense why there was so storage space left but after going through the settings i managed to render the movie and save a lot more space though i think the quality may have suffered a little. 

this is a screen shot after deleting and moving files.

Instagram Effects - After Effects.

I was searching online on how to get a cinematic colour overlay for my film because it seemed too raw. I came across this video on vimeo > https://vimeo.com/36622942

The person who created thought it would be a cool idea to bring instagram filters to video. He gave a link to the files and made a tutorial on how to use it. I used this in After Effects and I chose Branan i thought it was the most subtle yet gives a cold feeling to the film. 

Im so pleased i found this plugin because I really like how it looks with the filter - below you can see the difference. 

Black Cinematic Lines.

Coming to the end of editing I thought it would be cool to have some cinematic black lines in my video. It was pretty easy to create this in photoshop then scale it to the right fit within After Effects. I think it makes the film look more professional and wide screen. 

Editing Together Last Scene

When editing the last Scene I did with Aimee I came across a few problems first being that the wind and background noise was so loud! When filming it didn't occur to me that the microphone in my camera would pick up the noises so much. The wind didn't seem that loud when we was outside filming nor the background noise such as cars and birds. Another thing I didn't realise when filming was my script was clearly in shot there is sadly absolutely nothing I can do about this but take it as a learning curve. 

Filming With Aimee

In my film so far has been myself and Jade but for the final scene I thought it would be really cool to replace jade with her twin sister Aimee, Aimee recently cut her hair short and dyed it blonde, I thought it would be cool to add this into the storyline as jade is supposed to be in hiding.

When I imaged this scene I straight away knew it had to be filmed outside. I wanted the last scene to be different from the rest of the film because throughout the whole thing it had been in a vlogging style of filming, so for the last scene i did with amy we shot it normally, though this was a lot harder than i thought it would be because when we was acting we couldn't look at the camera, and we had to make sure that there was different camera angles and make sure everything continuity was okay. 

I enjoyed filming with Aimee and I think the scene will work out well. 

Cinematic Footage (small update)

I wanted to film some artsy, cinematic footage for the film to show more of my skill set, Within editing I have put a slow motion effect on some of it which looks good. I will put this in the beginning at maybe at the end of the film too. I went out on both a rainy and sunny day to get some different types of feeling. What i mean by this is that when its sunny i feel like its showing off a good vibe whereas when its grey and rainy outside you automatically get that feeling of sadness. I think by doing this i have set the scene to how the audience should be feeling. 

Numbes Progress

I have finished my numbers for the intro and i really like how it looks, at first i wanted it to zoom into the numbers but after doing this i preferred how it looked without and instead i added a mouse to be circling near the numbers.

in order to create this i had to screen shot youtube then go from there in photoshop, because the video you see playing wasn't originally up on youtube and I had to make it look as if it was. I photoshopped the adverts at the side out and moved everything to the middle. I then went into after effects where I made the mouse move, the numbers rise and added the sound effects, by doing this it makes the video look more realistic.  

Editing Progress

I have been putting all the footage together and so far so good, the sound effects make it look and sound great! I'm pleased with my progress. The only thing I'm worried about is because the majority of it is vlogging style it looks pretty amateur, i knew going into this it would not come out looking like a full feature film but i hope the audience understands why it's not very clean cut. Having said this i made the choice to do a vlog style film and i stick by the reasons and i do think it works. 

At the moment i have only got about 6 minutes worth of film when i said there would be 10 i still have the intro to film and hopefully i can get Jade again to help finish it but if not I'm stuck on what to do because where the film finishes now i could leave it and it would be fine but i want it to be great not just fine. 

Once I have finished with all of it I will then start editing together my trailer, which shouldn't take too long, i think the trailer itself will be about 1 minute long. 

Filming

Myself and Jade Leonard are playing the two characters in my film but using our own names because i didn't see a problem with this and it makes it a little more realistic. For the first scene i had Jade vlog on my phone and have myself on the main camera. I wanted to get two different angles without looking staged and i think i succeeded in this. 

I dont want to post too much of what we filmed because i dont want to spoil or give anything away from the storyline. 

Voice Over (update)

I have done a voice over for the intro to my film, the voice over really sets the scene and tone of the film and I'm pleased with how it looks and sounds. I recorded my voice over the iPhone but i didn't like how it sounded so instead i spoke into my camera microphone, this sounds a lot more professional in comparison to the iPhone.

Script Update

Today I finished writing my script and I'm happy with the outcome, I've never written a script before but I think it works well. I don't know how much we'll stick to it when it comes to filming because we might think of something better to say on the spot also I want it to look real not as if its been read of a script so i think its a good idea to do a little improv now and again. 

I have printed off 3 scripts one for myself, Jade and Amy. 

Amy is Jades twin sister they look alike but Amy has completely different hair to jade and it thought it would be a good idea to have amy act as Jade's character in the last scene because i thought i could include the different hair into the film. 

Testing The Number Counter.

I wanted to have a quick go at creating the numbers, I searched on youtube a tutorial and it only took about 5 minutes to make, so I'm happy with how easy it was and i think it will look good on my video. Though I'm going to have too play around with zooming into the numbers on the actual video but I'm sure ill find away around this. 

Intro To Film Idea

I have this idea for my intro that i want to create. I want it to start off with with a clip from the middle of the film kind of like a preview into whats going to happen but the audience won't know this at the time. After that i want the screen to be a computer monitor with youtube videos playing showing viral videos that most people would have seen this will be relatable for the audience and get the interested in watching more, when this is happening there will be a voice over of someone setting the scene, giving facts about youtube then once that is over the film will properly start with one of the main girls on youtube and you'll see her views rise. 

Here are a few examples to what I'm talking about:

Music / Sound Effects

There won't be much music throughout the film because I want it to seem a real as possible, because it's vlogging style i want the audience to believe what is happening in the film is real life all caught on tape. I have been searching for music for intro, background, outro and sound effects, here is what i have sourced and will use in my film:

INTRO: - skip to 1 minute: 

Background: 

Sound Effects: 

Man Whispering: 

Man Breathing: 

IPhone Text Tone: 

IPhone Ring Tone: 

Video Overlay.

I have been searching online for some free plugins that would benefit my film, I came across this website: motion mile and found exactly what I was looking for. 

http://www.motionmile.com/after-effects-templates/video-camera-rec-overlay/

This is a video overlay that can be used in After Effects, I really like this and i think it could come in useful. Because my film is based around videos i want the audience to be able to differentiate between when someone is recording them and when its normal footage. I think this overlay will improve the quality of my work.