Patrick's DAT Capstone Blog

As the documentary is wrapping up, we have been asking ourselves...what after? We'll obviously be presenting our film to a board and audience, but after that there's the possibility of submitting to a film festival. I found an article that serves as a guide to such festivals, a post by Danny Greer of Premium Beat . Such festivals can lead to monetary rewards and getting the film out there. There are few other ways to become known, but there are strategies you have to follow if you want to succeed.  One of the tips is to make sure the film fits the festival you're researching. These festivals are not free; if you know you don't have a good shot at winning a festival you're wasting your money by entering. This means do your homework before choosing one: some are specific to very particular genres, and if yours fits one of these, it's probably a good idea to enter it. This way, at least yours will be seen in front of an audience and not get lost in a crowd of gener...

I recently watched the film Rust Creek, a film about a girl who gets lost in rural Kentucky and is stranded in the woods after accidentally getting involved with a local crime syndicate. Before I watched it, I had no idea this would be inspiring to my completely unrelated documentary. The aspects of the film I enjoyed the most were the audio and cinematography aspects, which translate well to documentaries no matter what the subject matter is.  Relating to the blog post on audio I read a couple weeks ago, audio was a very important part of the tension in this movie. Not only did the music push the film in this direction, but the soundscape made anxiety levels rise for me. As I said then, our documentary certainly won't rely on building tension, but this does serve as an example of how sound can be the most important factor in building a mood. If I watched the movie on mute, it would be a completely different experience. This lets me know that while sound may not be the biggest fact...

I recently read an article about documentaries in 2020, specifically about gaming. They talk about several different ones, and how important these are to video game culture. Reading this both helped me understand what aspects of the documentary are important and helped me feel good about the theme of the film. It was encouraging to read about successful and "feel-good" documentaries and imagining that ours can be in that group of being beneficial to video game culture. One of the things that stuck out to me in this article was the discussion about timing. This is timing not in the sense of documentary length, but timing in the real world. A lot of projects don't get off the ground because they're about things audiences wouldn't care about decades later, which means the relevance of a subject is important. This made me feel a lot better about ours, because it's not only about a specific game that's still relevant, but also gaming culture in general, which w...

Today I read a blog entry on sound design in documentary. Sound is always something I've been fond of working with, and so it's something I recognize the importance of. However, sound design in documentary is not something I've ever been super familiar with so I wanted to do some research. The post goes into detail about the documentary Bethany Hamilton: Unstoppable  and the sound design that went into that. It talked about the importance of sound in capturing mood in the shark attack sequence. This is an aspect of film I've always admired; the subtle bits of audio that are used to create tension. This isn't necessarily anything Ross and I will need to worry about in our documentary, but using sound and music to create a mood is exactly what we will need to do in our documentary. Instead of building tension, we'll need to consider other sounds that will help create a light, playful mood.  The post also mentions music. This will be a big part of our audio track, ...

 These are vocab terms 1-20: Additive Color: A color created by mixing lighter colors, mainly red, green, and blue (see RBG color); other colors are added to black to become more white Subtractive Color: A color created by wavelengths being absorbed or reflected (see CMYK color); added to white do become more black Color Wheel: A circular visual representation of (usually) 12 main colors, used to show relationships between colors Complementary Colors: Opposite hues on the color wheel that usually work well together Analogous Colors: Hues sitting next to each other on the color wheel, usually fit into a visually similar group  Triadic Colors: Three hues spaced evenly apart in a triangle pattern on the color wheel that work well together CMYK Color: Colors made up of varying amounts of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black; used for printing color pieces RBG Color: Colors made up of varying amounts of red, green, and blue; values of each fall between 0 and 255; used more for digital ...

Last night I watched another documentary called "Minecraft: The Story of Minecraft." Aside from the first impression that the title is very uncreative, the first thing I noticed about this documentary is that unlike the previous one I watched, 90% of the footage was taken in the real world. A lot of the b-roll in the film is taken from people's videos, but none of it looks like it was original footage within the game. Overall, the documentary was about how the game has changed the online world and how YouTube is integrated into that notion. The film as a whole seemed like it didn't have a super high budget. A lot of the b-roll they used from the real world seemed unprofessionally shot; some of the angles didn't look great and it was often shaky. There were also a lot of jump cuts and b-roll was often repeated. Some of the subject matter was interesting, but these technical errors were distracting an took away from some of the content. I let this film serve as a le...