1st Preliminary Task- Mary Worth

Evaluation

The task was to produce a video of a comic strip to prepare for coursework. First of all I had to pick a comic to work with, I choose Mary Worth because we decided to play on the parody. The target audience for this video would range between early teens to young adults because of the song lyrics and it would be of mixed gender. I used seven pictures and changed the words in the speech bubbles to the lyrics of Katy Perry’s California Girls. I then had to film each picture individually for a few seconds depending on how long the speech bubbles were. Doing this enabled me to add a dialogue on top of the video. Filming each slide individually meant that the camera shot was kept at a fixed medium shot. In terms of the framing of the images, a two person shot is used in slide 3, an asymmetrical shot is used in slide 6 and a close up shot is used in slides 7 and 8 which brings us closer to the characters. I added a sound theme to slides one and two and during editing I applied a ‘fade out' which fit with the transition from slide two to three.

This was the first time I had used ‘Adobe Premiere elements 8.0’ and I learnt how to upload a video file and extract the audio and then upload another video file and keep only the audio from it and merge it together, this avoided the sound of background noise. I also learnt how to apply slide transitions to each slide which made the video look more effective and professional. I learnt how to use youtube as i made an account and uploaded this video, later using the URL address to paste onto my blog. If I was to complete this task again I’d make quite a few improvements. First would be including more camera motion in the filming of this comic strip. I’d mainly include ECU’s and CU’s and the use of panning and zoom. I’d also think more about the narrative, therefore making sure it had a clearer storyline and id consider more the overall representation of the piece.