Final Pieces

Below are my final pieces, with a brief description of the thought processes behind each one. (When we do the evaluation, I'll put it in here.)

Magazine

I'm overall fairly pleased with how this one turned out. I decided to use Helvetica for the main font, as it gives the retro-modern feel that I love so much. I chose to have the whole cover in monochrome with yellow accents, which helps the important text to catch the eye of the reader. I went with quite a minimalistic, upmarket, GQ-esque men's mag kind of look, purely and simply because I like the style. In keeping with this, I actually prefer the below version without cover lines:
...as I feel it looks much less cluttered and more focused. This would make sense for a special edition like my magazine is, and in fact has precedent when one interview is the absolute focus, but cover lines get me marks, so cover lines it is.

Spread

 

I'm relatively pleased with this one too. I decided to continue the modern theme, while bringing in the distinctive green grading from my A/V piece to aid convergence. The image was pieced together from various frames of video, as I completely forgot to take the picture on set. This isn't the main interview advertised on the cover, but rather a smaller side piece, with the director instead of the actor. I decided to write it in a casual, Guardian-esque Q&A style (hence the title), imagining that such a piece would be a weekly feature in Feature. I did have a few other elements, including small corner logos and web adresses, but I stripped them out as they detracted from the overall look of the magazine.

Audio/Visual

NOTE: Despite trying everything in the book to fix it, there are a few glitches in the final video that aren't there on my timeline. This appears to be a bug in CC 2019 (the very recently-released version I'm using at home). These glitches include the sudden flash of brightness during the match-dropping scene at 3:10, over-brightness of a few other scenes (mostly in the second half of the piece), and the whole video going haywire at 3:13 (this should be a scene of DS Sullivan looking through a window with a reflection of the fire in the glass). I have absolutely no clue what's causing this, and will try and work with Paul to resolve it before it's sent off for moderation (although, I'm actually undecided on the haywire thing - I almost kind of like it, although it would need some kind of audio cue).

Hosted here.

This is, in my opinion, the weakest of my three pieces. My camerawork wasn't great, and I didn't get as much coverage as I thought I'd done, forcing me to make slightly dodgy cuts when it came to editing. The soundscape I had in my mind didn't really pan out as, despite scouring the internet, I couldn't find the right audio, and I lacked both the skill and the resources to make music myself. As such, there isn't as much non-diegetic sound as I would like. In addition, the VFX could be better - I'm fairly happy with the gunshot blood splat and its continuity between shots, but the fire effects aren't as good as I wish they were. I actually fully motion tracked the fuel trail scene at 3:12 (which was originally going to be revisited more often) and created a virtual camera, allowing me to place objects in it with Cinema4D, but the simulated pyrotechnics I created with TurbulenceFD didn't play nicely with the scale of the scene, and I didn't have the TurbulenceFD knowledge to fix the problem nor the time left to learn how to. The explosion at the end was also going to be on screen, but I didn't leave myself enough time to create it to the standard I wanted and thus had to imply it with the sound. Finally, it is over the time limit by 19 seconds - not the end of the world, but I would have cut it down if I was able to without cutting out key scenes.