things i think i think

I thought I’d take a minute to write about one of the more unique courses I’ve taken during my time as a Radio/Television/Film student here at Northwestern University — that would be Special Effects Cinematography, this past Spring Quarter.

As a class we worked to assemble a full-fledged space craft, decorate it, light it and shoot an approximately ten-minute short film about it and its two passengers (a man and a woman.) In addition to many non-SFX shots, we dealt with a handful of special effects scenarios (e.g. creating a floating hologram using a piece of plexiglass and a projector, double-exposure, etc) without the use of CGI or (hardly) any post-production work or effects. Think ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind.’

Anyway, I recently re-discovered our classes’ shutterfly page which contains more than a handful of production photos for those interested in how it all went down. It’s hard to believe how much we accomplished in just a matter of ten weeks — and only 6-9 hrs a week!

Let me know if you have any questions about what we did (or how we did it) and hopefully, come September, I will be able to post some scenes from the film for viewing.

So, I’ve realized that this blog has become, as of late, more of a collection of random videos/links/blurbs (etc) and I wanted to bring it a little bit closer to home with a bit of information on the courses I’m taking this quarter. This is part one.

Read the rest of this entry »