For those of you traveling this year: Each presentation team creates film of up to 2 minutes. These films are submitted well before the conference starts by the end of February. All films be posted on the website and will be shown during our conference in March. How to Submit Your Film DUE: February 10th, 2014 1. Create and edit your video according to the film fest guidelines. 2. Create a YouTube account and channel for your GIN team. 3. Upload your video BEFORE October 11. This can be a file uploaded on your YouTube channel or shared with movie making software like iMovie. 4. Be sure your uploaded video is listed as public. 5. Copy the url address, example:youtube/watch?v=jMX521Uw13E and email it to: [email protected] 6. Your video will then be added to our 2013GIN Playlist. Film Festival Ideas A Public Service Announcement (or PSA) is a short commercial that informs about issues and inspires action. A typical PSA is about 90 seconds long. A Documentary is a film that documents real life. For our festival, your documentary should be about an activity that your school or organization within your school has done to raise awareness or work towards solving a global problem. These documentaries should be no longer than 2 minutes. A Narrative Film. Your narrative should tell a story that is based around solving a social or environmental issue. This can be handled in any way that you’d like – the more creative the better. However, the final product should be no more than 2 minutes. Pre-Production Phase Choose a topic: This can be anything that we are identifying as Global Issue. If you are looking to align your project with GIN you can start by researching the topics that are listed in Rischard’s High Noon: 20 Global Issues, 20 Years to Solve Them and pairing that with what your local partners believe are the issues that need to be addressed. Narrow your idea down: Creating a well-crafted PSA is different than creating a well-crafted essay or position paper. The goal of a PSA is to inform. Plan your attack: Decide what aspect of your issue is the most meaningful. What are the most troubling or surprising facts? Script: Write or transcribe the script for your PSA. This includes any written or spoken dialogue or narrative, as well as a description of the images that will accompany the words. Storyboard: A storyboard is a visual representation of your script that helps visualize the final product. Plan to have different camera angles in order to emphasize your points and pay attention to the lengths of the frames. Filming Tips Close Ups are used to show reaction or emotion on a person’s face, or highlight the significance of a particular object. Medium Shots usually show people from the waist or chest up. They are used to create a conversational tone and represent people from a comfortable distance. Long Shots are taken from far away and are important for establishing location or showing action. Bird’s Eye Views tilt the camera down on your subject. This can be used for a variety of reasons, but is commonly used to represent something or someone as less powerful (the audience is literally looking down on them). Worm’s Eye Views can also be used for a variety of reasons, but are especially effective at making someone or something look more powerful (the audience is literally looking up at at/to them Production Phase Post-Production Phase Import your movie into your editing program on the computer. Cut the clips in the bin (the window that they appear in) before moving them into the timeline (the window, usually at the bottom, in which you will construct your movie). Place clips in the order that they should appear in the movie. Cut on the action. This is an important editing convention. It means that whenever you cut from one shot to another, something should be happening on screen. For example, if a character walks off screen, don’t wait until they are completely off the screen to cut to the next shot. This will make your video much smoother. Add sound. Think about what sort of music or sound effects can be used in the background to compliment your message. Imovie comes with a sound library that you can use. You can also search the internet for sounds on sites like findsounds. Add Effects. Maybe. Don’t go crazy with the effects that come with your video editing program. Its one thing to choose to make your video black and white if you think it will make it more ‘serious’, or alter the saturation and noise to give it a ‘retro’ look. Its another thing to put ‘fairy dust’ into every clip because its cute. Its not. Don’t let any shot last a single frame too long. Look at every shot and think about whether it goes on too long or not. Sometimes even cutting a fraction of a second can make a video flow much better. Export. Different programs have different options for exporting your project. If you are using a mac, export your project as a .MOV file (in imovie you’ll find these options in the “Share” menu). On a PC, if you can’t export as a .mov, then export as a .AVI file. Please do not send any .WMV files. These will not be accepted. One of the first mistakes that people make in filming is to start filming when you want the shot to begin. It is better to let the camera roll for a few seconds before you call ‘action’! Use a tripod. A shaky camera works sometimes but more often it just looks messy- you’re not filming the Blair Witch Project. Get your finger off the zoom. If you want to get closer to your subject, physically move the camera closer. If you want to zoom in closer (and don’t have wheels) sit your camera man (or woman) on a rolling chair and push them in the direction you want your camera to go. We only use the zoom when we can’t get the camera physically closer to the subject. Make sure that you’re using good light. If you’ve got a lamp – even a desk lamp, use that instead of relying on the sort of overhead fluorescent lights that you probably have in your school. Overhead fluorescents tend to make people look flat, and light from above isn’t flattering. Lighting from the side makes people look more three-dimensional because it accentuates the attached shadows on the body and face. All films to be shown at the conference will be uploaded to our GIN Youtube Channel. Once a film is completed the GIN adviser for the submitting school will contact Joshua Knudson to request the username and password of the GIN YouTube page. The GIN adviser from each school will then be able to upload the film directly to YouTube. The YouTube title provided when uploading the video should include the name of the film and the name of the school (e.g. The Elimination of Disposable Plastic at Graded: Graded School) Here are some ideas for creating your film brought to you by the team who ran the first GIN Conference of the Americas last year in Lima, Peru: In the guidelines below, we will provide some ideas for creating a video for the GIN Film Festival using a PSA format as an example. “Pre-Production” refers to the planning phase. In order to create a good PSA, pre-production will involve a well planned out concept, interesting visuals, and a well researched idea. There are a couple of key points to remember for the production, or filming phase of your project. It would be impossible to cover all the important points in this guide, but here are some tips that will help you out: Our post-production phase will be mostly about editing. Here there are no specific guidelines because different schools will have access to different editing software. If you are new to editing, we recommend starting with iMovie HD that comes installed on every Macintosh computer. That’s it. You’re done. Now submit it to the festival, and good luck!
Posted on: Tue, 28 Jan 2014 13:48:52 +0000