Our experience for this assignment was definitely the most challenging.  We set up our plan early on and found a good subject to interview.  We shot all of our footage a few days early so that we would have enough time to edit our interview.   But on Sunday afternoon when we went to work on the project, we realized that all of our footage was out of focus.  It turns out that our lens was filthy, so the camera was focusing on what was on the lens instead of our subjects.  This was extremely disappointing, seeing as we had to quickly find a camera, reshoot the footage, and edit our interview all in the span of a few hours.  It was upsetting knowing that we had to use such poor footage, when all of our original footage was so much better.  If I could I would re-do this project with the old footage in focus.

Directing our actor, Hunter, for this assignment was actually a pretty easy job.  He was very cooperative and took direction very well.  He tried to be as helpful as possible with setting up different scenes as well.  But the one thing that was hard was having him execute scenes in the exact way I was thinking.  There were so many times when I wanted to hop into the scene myself and act them out, but instead had to try to get our actor to do them in that way.  However, it was nice working with a friend and with someone who had a lot of patience with the whole process.

For our music video we didn’t use any filters.  Though we tried some out in our project, we felt that they cheapened our footage.  They didn’t really fit in with the whole feel of the rest of the video.  From some of the filters that we tried out though, my favorite would have to have been Fisheye.  I think it makes everything look like it’s in a parallel universe and gives it a retro feel.  But in our video we did use transitions.  Because my partner and I both decided that we thought simple transitions made the video look more professional, we stuck with Dissolve Transitions the whole way through.  The one that we used most often was the Cross Dissolve.  I think it linked all of our different shots together in a cohesive way.

For this assignment, I got a lot more practice using Photoshop.  There were some tools that I used more than others.  First off I used the text tool to ad the text into my ad.  I also figured out a way to distort the top portion of my text so that it looked inflated compared to all the rest.  I thought that this helped make the bottom text of the ad really pop out.  Next, I used the magnetic lasso tool to cut out the shamrock for the new Irish Spring logo.  I found a shamrock on the internet and was able to cut out its outline so that it looked like it was pasted behind the text.  I also used the lasso tool to clean up and messy edges.  The third tool that I used most  in this project was the patch tool.  I used this to clean up the edges of my bar of soap.  There were some pieces of the soap that looked scratched up so I was able to fix those by patching them up.