Day 7

At this point, I have all my clips collected from the interview. During the interviews, it seemed to me that the common reason why the students like Cleo is that they just like dogs, and having another dog on campus is relaxing because it kind of us a temporary escape from the stress of school.
For my birthday, I got a 1 TB external hardrive, so I will be re-formatting my computer so I can have access to my video editor (it was blocked before). My computer was also running slowly. I am moving all of my old photography collections to the hard drive, and I will finally be able to weed through all my clips and put them together. I also found one or two audio clips that I want to use.
Since I already have experience editing videos, I expect that this editing process shouldn't take a lot of time.

Day 6

Today, I asked the class if they had their life positively changed in their everyday life, and I got 2 people to schedule an interview for the video. They will just say a short description of how Cleo has made their life happier every day.
I also am in the process of moving all my video files into my movie editor (a different computer than my laptop) and finding more royalty free music. Since I was having a struggle, my teacher suggested Youtube Audio Library. It will be fairly easy to go through these because they are 100% legal to use and you can sort it by genre, mood, instrument, duration, and more. Once I download these, I am set and ready to go to start editing. In the next couple of days, I will add in the interviews of the 2 students where they fit. I see this project finally coming together, and the editing process will hopefully be a quick process.

Day 5

Today, I collected some shots of Ms. Sherry talking about PATH, how Cleo affects the students in PATH, Cleo's training, and how she is a part of the York community. These shots were in different places to change up the scenery a little bit so that it's not just in a boring chair (I chose two locations in her office) I also collected two additional short clips of her certificate and York ID.

I am (probably) officially done with collecting clips. I am going to start my editing process now. I have to find good background royalty free music that isn't too distracting, and that is going to be the most challenging part of the project because I can edit fairly quickly (I have made multiple videos before and found that I can edit videos quickly).

I have decided that the final project will be more of an explanation of who Cleo is and what she does (a more serious production), rather than a more comical "day in the life" video.

Day 4

I feel like I have achieved nothing in the past few days because I have collected a lot of footage, but I'm not sure how to use it. I was pretty sure I wanted to make a 'day in the life' video of Cleo, but with the footage I have, it's really hard to get in a lot of the things that she does every day. I realized that most of the time, she kind of just sits in Ms. Sherry's office. If I were to do a 'day in the life' video, I wouldn't be able to use a lot of the footage that I collected. I might end up making a little video montage with some background music. I'm really not sure what I want to do.

I was going to have Ms. Sherry do voice-overs, but I might end up having her narrate the whole thing and then have some shots with only her face (like an interview). It might end up being a more professionally set up video, like a documentary.

I guess my next step in this process is to find some music. I can either do that, or contact another music maker/composer for permission to use their music. As this project is falling to it's pitfall, I feel the need to save it from its misery.

Another thing I'm planning to do is to find someone that has had their life changed by Cleo.

Instead of making one final video, I might end up publishing this one early just to get it over with, then start up my own public Youtube channel.

Day 3

During Christmas, I got my own Canon 1100D (Rebel T3), which is an entry level DSLR. It has both auto and manual focus, which solves my main problem. Quality wise, even though the video is the "medium HD" quality level of the Fujifilm x10, it looks as though it were the "high HD" quality. It is in HD (720). Over the break, I tested out the camera in different light settings, both light and dark. I am extremely happy with the quality and compatibility. I hope there won't be an issue needing to use different lenses, but if I ever need to, I can use my mom's lenses, but I don't think that will be necessary, because my lens is 18-55mm, which is quite versatile for this project.

Today, during the shoot, I re-shot the office shots, and they turned out much better than the ones I had shot because I could transition slowly in focus. Overall, today's shot was quite productive.

I learned to take multiple takes on everything just in case one of them didn't turn out right.

For the near future, I am planning to start editing and finding free, royalty music to put in the background of some of the shots. I also have to start writing my voice-overs for Cleo, which will be voiced by Ms. Sherry.

Day 2

Today's theme of shooting was more of Cleo's life in the office. I shot short introduction clips of Ms. Sherry working in the office. I also shot more scenes of just Cleo playing with a toy and also with Ms. Kiest. These are the parts that will probably have a lot of narration, more towards the beginning of the video.

During the period of time between Day 1 and Day 2, I looked at the previous clips I had collected. I realized that I didn't achieve the high-quality clips that I had hoped for. I was originally shooting in medium HD, but today, I switched to full HD.

Another issue I ran into was focusing the camera. I was trying to do over-the-shoulder shots, with the shoulder in view and the background blurred, but about a second after I pressed 'record,' the camera would auto-focus would make the background clear. There might be a way to use manual/auto-focus on the camera and I would have to learn how to do that. A lot of the time, fast auto-focus is useful, but for more basic and still shots, it can be a burden.

Since I collected mostly video footage today, I only have one good picture:

Day 1

Up until now, I have taken some pictures of Cleo in Ms. Sherry's office and I took some more pictures and collected my first clips of footage of her. Ms. Sherry and I took Cleo up to the field and she ran around for a bit.

My next step in my plan is to collect more footage of Cleo in her everyday life.

Throughout the first day of filming, I came across some difficulties. Since Cleo likes to run around on the field, at first, it was really hard to stabilize the camera to capture the perfect moments. From this experience, I learned to keep the camera on most of the time, so I wouldn’t miss any vital shots. It was important to me to also keep the camera stabilized at all times. I found from filming that day, it was best to sit on the bench and pan the camera for the running shots, rather than running along with Cleo.

Overall, I am pleased with the images I have collected so far. Here are some of the pictures: