Comtemporary Media & Practical Skills

Humble Lessons: Experimenting with PS4's SHAREfactory

During my spare time at home, I decided to record gameplay footage off my PS4 and use the editing software 'SHAREfactory' to edit the video's I produced.

Using this video editing software helped me to gain a brief understanding of what it takes to edit. I am not a very good editor by the way, but I would like to hone my skills in editing to become even better.

However in this software I earned the importance of cutting down time, and learning how to trim out important parts of the video very carefully. I also learned how to use special effects and transitions when it's appropriate.

By learning some of the features in SHAREfactory it has allowed me to think deeper about what special effects and transitions can I add when I start making the music video. This software has made me question myself about how can I be more creative in my thinking, and how can my creavity and imagination impact on making the real music video that I will soon produce.

Rising To A New Challenge... :Learning With Sony Vegas Pro 13 (Update 28/10/14)

So I decided to download a copy Sony Vegas Pro 13. I want to get to grips with it because its very powerful in the features and effects it has to offer for the user. Instead of using SHAREfactory to edit my gameplay video's, I thought it will be a good idea to expand my knowledge even further  and enhance my editing skills to be better. Am going to make a montage of FIFA 15 online goals which involved a classmate of mine in my media class where we played together in the game.

Here's a quick snapshot of my progress editing the videos in Sony Vegas Pro 13:

The Final Edit:

After a couple of hours learning Sony Vegas Pro 13 I finally managed to finish off the montage video. Here is a picture of the finished editing in Vegas Pro

I managed to upload the finished montage on YouTube. The video is fully rendered at 1080p 60 frames per second and there is no interlacing throughout the video. Here's the video below:

 Review of The Montage: 

This video links to the theorists important people in the media history, Dziga Vertov and

Einstein. These two theorists discovered the potentials of making a video montage and also learned the importance of how to cut down time to get everything they wished to show in a film in a matter of a few minutes. This includes fast snippets of short video footages, usually to tell a story of progress. A montage is a great editing technique to give the target audience a break and help speed up the process of parts audience don't like to see very often.

In this case, my video montage of FIFA 15 was to show the goals scored against online players done alongside another media student who played with me. Within the first 10-15 seconds of the video, I show little snippets of trying to beat the opposition's defence with skill moves, which represents the idea of the progress of how we try to score goals. After the snippets of skill moves are shown, the rest of the video tells the story of the progress of scoring goals with good team play. When a goal is scored I used transitions (mainly cross fade) to move onto the next scene quickly to show continuity of the video.

Because I've been able to show montage through practicing it with a video game, am considering my music video to have a short 1-2 min montage telling a story of progress of making money, then showing the good/bad sides of money. This will be beneficial to the music video because it will consist of transitions and special effects used, such as slow motion etc. Our music video is based on Stan Smith Money on my mind.

My Contemporary Media (Video Games):

This is my little spider diagram that I did in my own time where I researched regulation in video games. This is an area in my media studies which I genuinely love and enjoy, so researching this area of the media was really fun. I managed to explore a wide range of information regarding audiences, the history, the economical side, and most importantly the differences of physical and digital video games and how it can have an impact on the audience in terms of age ratings.

Video Game Regulator: PEGI

 

PEGI stands for 'Pan European Game Information' and they are a company that regulate the age ratings for video games that are released. PEGI age ratings are put on video games to show the age requirement for a game and most importantly, to show the parent/carer and see if they should buy the game for their child to play or not. 

The parent for instance, can turn to the back of the video game case to see specifically what the game has inside of it. This gives the parent a broad idea of what is expected in the video game if bought. For example, an 18 rated game will have bad language, sex, violence, drugs, and discrimination. In the modern world today, most parents dont really take age ratings into consideration and just buy the game for their child. But there are some parents that are concerned about the content in games and take age ratings seriously, therefore they are unlikely to buy the video game. The regulation of PEGI age ratings say that no one under age of any age rating (3,7,12,16,18) must not be sold to them if they dont meet the age requirements.

Perfecting and Practising With Slow/Fast Motion (Sony Vegas Pro 13) : Update (19/12/14)

So i got a little bit more advanced with Sony Vegas Pro and felt more confident in my ability to be more creative. So i decided to make a Battlefield 4 Montage that focuses mainly on slow and fast motion effects. I wanted to see how well I can use slow/fast motion effectivetely at the right moments. Here is the video of the montage:

My Comtemporary Media: (Films)

This is my little mindmap I made about film regulation in the media. This mindmap outlines breifly of the pros and cons of the film regulation in the media.
I chose film regulation because video games and film regulation both link together very well, as they are very similar to each other as such.