Congratulations! Your Prize for Finishing Is.... More Writing!

Hello! After a few days spent trying to blur a video (I told you I was hopeless at editing), I finally added the extra bits that I wanted to complete the image I had for the opening. So the good news is: Editing is over! No more torture!

    The blurring of the walking video was a nightmare. I tried fiddling with settings and effects on Openshot to see if I could have the video gradually blur, to show Martin getting unconcentrated, but no matter what I did, the blurring on Openshot was not easy to work with. Either the blurring took too long to get put into effect, or the image wasn't blurry enough, it eventually got to the point where I would save a "blurry" version of the video then run it through Openshot again in an attempt to double-blur it. 

    These efforts were in vain however, and it left me stumped for the better part of Monday. In order to distract myself from this failure, I added the nighttime ambient sounds and the internal ringtone, which made me feel better about how the opening was tied together, albeit somewhat haphazardly.

The preview for my OUTLINE of the CCR script.

    On Tuesday, I looked at a few video tutorials on my phone about how to get the level of blur I wanted, but nearly all of them involved reshooting the scene again, which wasn't an option for me since Danny's actor had since shaved, and would ruin what little continuity I still had. So instead, I tried animating the title card. Note for future reference: Not a good animator. I ended up making a animated title sequence on PowerPoint of all things, which will now haunt me forever.

    I also started some work on my CCR on Tuesday, since I figured I was pretty much done with the brunt of the workload for this project and could relax a little bit with some light script writing. I was very much mistaken. When I laid out the list of all topics I wanted to touch upon in my CCR video, it dawned on me that this would not be a walk in the park. Merely listing the topics had taken up a whole page of paper, which set up how daunting the task was. I ended up writing a rough draft for about half of all of the topics last night, and I plan on finishing writing my first draft tonight. No spoilers on the script though!

WHAT DOES ANY OF THIS MEAN???

    Today, after I got home from school, I decided it was time to stop dragging this on and finally blur out the video. But how? I was forced to use an old enemy of mine, something I swore never to touch again... Adobe Premiere. Even after spending 30 minutes exploring the settings and effects on Adobe, I refused to ask my peers for help out of stubbornness, but miraculously found a setting on Adobe to reduce sharpness and make everything blurrier.

    However, this STILL wasn't blurry enough, even after running it through the old double-blur method, so I figured I'd try to illustrate this "out of focus" experience in a different way, which ended up being messing with the coloring of the video as well as adding a vignette around the edges of the frame to make it feel like he's zeroing in on his target. This ended up being satisfactory enough, but I still have no idea how to use Adobe.

    As I write this blog, I'm uploading what I have for the opening onto a private youtube channel to send to a few friends for some peer review. I'll most likely use their criticisms for a blog post, and to fix any mistakes that have slipped past my very tired eyes. Until then, however, I need to go take a nap.