Our Tools

"We become what we behold. We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." - Marshall McLuhan

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Filter Project


Untitled from Antelmo Aguilar on Vimeo.


             This project was a learning experience for me.  For all the projects that we did before, I never used a single video effect except to change it to black and white.  So I did not know what most of the effects did since I do not know a lot about photo editing either.  I decided to use parts of different footage that I had in my camera.  The parts that I chose were 5 to 20 seconds long.  On each part I decided to use different kinds of effects to see how it would change the footage.  It took me some time to get started with the actual filtering because, as I had mentioned before, I did not know what the filters did.  At first I tried each one individually to have an idea on what they did alone.  Then I picked the ones I liked the most and used them to filter the footage.  In the beginning of my 2 minutes of video, I decided to see what the filters would do with a black video.  I was not able to get anything to happen in the beginning, but I was able to get something to appear on the screen after messing around for several minutes.  I then started filtering the parts I picked from the videos in my camera.  In some parts that I edited, the original footage was not recognizable, but I believe that I was able to get something interesting.
               The content of my footage was changed considerably by using filters.  The filters brought a different feel to the different parts because it let us see the footage in a different way.  For example, in one of the parts of the video, I am still able to see the real footage, but the filters made the real footage seem more mysterious.  Overall, the filters added new things visually, but removed things from the original footage.  So one got a different video image after the filters were applied.  Most of the filters added something of their own.  An example of a  group of filters where one can clearly see  that they add something of their own are the generate filters.  Those filters create different shapes on top of the video image such as lighting or ellipses.  Overall, I enjoyed everything I learned about filters through this project.  The only thing I did not like is how some filters took a VERY long time to render such as the generate filters.  Another thing that was kind of annoying was that I could not see correctly how the filters affected the footage until I rendered it.  So it would take a long time to render the footage and then I would not be happy with the overall result so I would have to change things on the filters again until I was happy with the effects.

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