All pre-production planning items that we covered in the first semester are required for advanced projects. Plot structure may be replaced with a narrative description for documentary, newscast, sportscast, museum display, advertisements, and other information based video projects. You may still want to do a story arc for some of these so that you can engage your audience. Almost all video is storytelling. Using story structure helps your topic make sense to an audience.
Instructional Video – Create some kind of tutorial that teaches a process of creation, repair, or other task that has several steps.
Stop Motion Animation – Use still pictures and clay, legos, action figures, puppets, white board drawings or any medium of your choice. Make it last at least one minute and add voice over, sound effect, background music and other audio to support your story.
Rotoscoping with Flash – film yourself doing a high-motion activity and then trace your outline and keyframe using Adobe Animate. Then remove the original video leaving only the animation behind. Rotoscoping has been a common technique in animation for over 70 years.
Travelogue Tour – Take us through a location and highlight all of its bright points. Narrate both with voice over and on-scene audio.
Sportscast/Newscast/Weather- Add graphics and clips to your video to give it pizzazz. Use of green screen recommended. This project is great for practicing your editing techniques in FCPX.
Music Video – Tell a story with your music video. This project is similar to the silent movie project. Are you capturing the mood of the music itself, jumping off with the music as an inspiration, following a story implied in the lyrics, or doing more of an accompanied art piece?
Advertisement – How do you film an ad to entice buyers? What techniques are more important than others?
Public Service Announcement – Choose a topic and make a video to influence your audience, convincing them that you issue is important enough to take action.
Instructional Video – People learn from tutorials in the 21st century. What can you teach people in a video? Can you improve on a tutorial that already exists on YouTube?
Museum Display – Imagine your video production company is hired to make motion graphics for a kiosk at a museum. What is the best way to create an engaging video display?
Cartoon – A cartoon is an ambitious project and students choosing this route should plan on extra time on a laptop computer outside of class.
Independent Choice Project – Talk to me about your ideas. Many things are possible as long as we are working toward the learning targets of the class.