Capstone interview and final project

I decided to interview Justin Williams during the capstone presentations. He did all of the foley work for a small segement of the movie the hurt locker. He deleted all of the audio and did a remake. It was an incredible project. Knowing the amount of work that is required for foley making I was impressed with Justin’s project. His project was very good standard for my future capstone.

What has this week been like for you?

It has been super busy and I haven't spent as much time in a lab my entire school career combined than I have this week.  I was editing this morning and got the final tweaks done about 3 hours before the presentations began. This last week in particular was not so bad as two weeks ago. I would call this last week the week of limbo when I could not believe I was going to get to graduate.

If you could change anything in how you did your capstone, what would it be?

I would have taken the goals that I set for myself at the beginning of the semester and actually apply them to the project.  I found myself being a procrastinator especially towards the end of the project.  If I had followed my timeline I would have been done about a week early and would of had some buffer time to tweak things.

How close is the final outcome to what you originally thought it would be?

It was pretty close yet pretty far off at the same time.  I was really proud with how everything turned out, but I originally wanted to do the entire scene which was 13 minutes.  When I started to realize how much work was going into the project I had to scale things back quite a bit.

If you had one more month to work on the project what would you do?

I would continue to do complete the rest of the scene.  I was happy with how this turned out I just wish I could have gotten more done

What advice do you have for me about working on my capstone?

Make sure that you follow a timeline and set goals.  Also don't ignore the goals that you set.  You will find yourself in a bind real quick if you don't do this and most likely won't get as much done as you anticipated.

Address the efficacy of the approach we took in this class.

I think that the approach that we took for class was quite efficient for my case in particular. I took it as a class that engine and fueled ideas and energy for me to actually go and work on my capstone project. The good thing honestly is that it did not take away time from me to work on the project. On the contrary it forced me to put more time on the actual capstone. I liked the fact that most of the assignments were through a blog. This allowed me to work on them remotely and even while I was doing the capstone. It also gives me the chance to go back to some of the ideas that I previously had and review them.

Discuss whether or not the breakdown of the project development was advantageous.

Breaking down the project in the different assignments was very advantageous. I like to approach projects from the small steps perspective. The assignments did this for me, from creating the idea to organizing my time to actually producing the idea.

Discuss the advanges and/or disadvantages of the student guest speakers for forming your own approach to capstone.

The student guest speakers were overall very insightful for my own capstone. I think that hearing real life experiences from other students cleared my mind or even opened my mind to things that I had not even thought about before. It gave me many new ideas and it also gave me a huge reference frame of work. The only negative impact is this shut down ideas that I had had on my own. For example I was thinking of some video production ideas that the own speakers kind of said that they were too hard to do.

Were there any assignments that you thought were particularly helpful? Please elaborate.

The assignment that was most helpful to me was the progress report. It had been a long time before that one that nothing was assigned so I felt a little vague in where I stood in terms of work in my capstone. The progress report helped me realize again where exactly I was in terms of progress. It also told me what I had to do next…

Were there any assignments that you thought were particularly useless? Please elaborate.

In my personal case any assignments that dealt with my mentor were useless since I was not really assigned one. So in all honestly I kind of improvised on those assignments. The problem here is that I found out that I had to have a mentor for this class when the semester was already going so it was too late to find a mentor.

Progression in Capstone, blog, shooting and script!

Since I last submitted my timeline and proposal there has been a lot of progress with my capstone project. This is a blog that I started that covers a little about the filming part of our project.

http://unifiedbyclimbing.blogspot.com/

We have already shot most of the climbing portion of the documentary. This is huge because I had to use many techniques and unknown methods to be able to hang at heights of 100 feet upside down while shooting with a camera. I was dubious if I was going to have enough equipment to be able to do this. Not only did I already shoot most of the climbing portion but I also went ahead and did most of the editing work with it. I did this so Jacob who is working with me could go ahead and start creating the music that will accompany the climbing. That was done a couple of months ago and ever since I have been developing what I call the back bone structure of the documentary. I have created a very general and basic script for the documentary as well as possible interview questions. This is a copy of a very rough script that we came up with.

Muir Valley

Prologue:

The why of this video – Capstone

Why make a climbing video- Everything that involves, introduce the sport and the community?

What is the muir valley? A history animation of Muir Valley?

Interview of Jacob and I, the why of the muir valley…….. talk about the progress of our view of the muir valley. Because muir valley is a great example is a great example of how a climbing crag works. It’s a perfect example of a microcosms of all that a climbing involves including community, the physical place and the sport itself. By showing this to the viewer we allow them to have a say into the future of the muir and ultimately the sport of climbing.

 Title of a day in the Muir goes here

 How does the muir work, (montage of me and Jacob going around the muir in a day to climb) we have to sign waivers…. What is up with the waivers? (stop) why is there so much paperwork involved with climbing…

---- Interview with Rich Weber??? Ask him about all of the paperwork, about security, rules?!

After the paperwork we go ahead and start walking down the valley, we find the money boxes (donations)

DONATIONS INTERVIEW WITH ROGER VANDAM.

 How do the donations work? Whats the money for? What is the status as far as people donating money?

 Getting to the crag we see environmental impact signs, carry your trash out signs.

 TRASH, SUSTAINABILITY INTERVIEW WITH LISS WEBER.

What are some of the signals of deteoraration that you are starting to see from climbers impact to the zone.

How much of this is it avoidable or not.

ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT WITH ANNE ALTOR

-Trash, where does all of the trash go?

-Are things like throwing apple cores ecologically friendly?

-Animals, exotic species and invasive species.

THE ROUTES IN THE MUIR VALLEY

The routes…… What is so special about the routes in the muir valley? What kind of rock? Moves? Bla blah.

INTERVIEW WITH DEVELOPERS OF THE MUIR – Porter Jerard,

Dave

Your first impression when you saw the Muir?

JJ: Your favorite route? History of a route or a crag?

FILMING:

Eric Yates found the midnight surf on one afternoon… interview with him of the story.

Inequity:

Cell Block Six: Drew climbing

Tape worm: d

Miguel casar : Shiva 5.13B, silence and profoundness with the route…I walked to the crag one day very early in the morning, it was silent, and the conditions were perfect.

7 OR 8 ROUTES WITH A HISTORY AND MOTIF…. Introducing the climber and the route..

 

 Now we have seen the history and the whereabouts of the muir valley and all its inclusions. The next for all of us is to ask about the future and our responsibility to the Muir and climbing. 

I think that this rough draft of the script has been a huge milestone that started me heading to the next step of my capstone documentary video which is developing the interviews. I have realized of the importance that interviews have in a documentary film. They are the ones that drive the plot and reflection of the documentary itself.

Jacob and I have been in contact with our mentor Thomas Lewis. He gave us a lot of ideas for how to shoot the climbing part of our video. He told us we should explore creative angles and shots. Instead of making it only the body of the climber going up he suggested getting close ups of their hands and feet. We have been talking to him a lot about the interviews themselves and he helped us come up with a great idea about how to shoot them. We will do them in a green screen and then applying an abstract climbing related background, or maybe even images of the muir valley on the background.

I think our timeline has changed a little bit specially because we did not account for the cold weather not permitting us to shoot any more climbing. Also we had to push some of the interviews back because our interviewees had to go out of the country for a couple of months. And lastly the audio equipment for rental has been booked for most of the year so we might just have to buy our own. All of these things have made us change our schedule slightly. This is just a creative exercise to adapt and do what we can with what we have. Clearly we have already actually started working on our capstone so needless to say we are ready for it. We know that many things will start coming up that require great portions of hard work. This is something very important we have to acknowledge and be prepared for so we don't despair. Honestly there have not been a lot of drastic changes that we've made to our project since we started. One thing that is up in the air at the moment is if we are doing all of our own original music or not. The plot of our documentary is still the same, the only thing we changed is how we are going to be telling the story.

Roc-to-beer-fest

So Jacob pretty much summarized our visit to the RRG during the Rocktoberfest. I think that that weekend in particular gave us a lot to think about the community of climbing in the RRG. A lot of different things happened, some were very wild and some were not. But the interesting part is how different people reacted to all of this different activities that happened during the festival. For me it was a realization in a way. Although I want to unite everyone with our climbing documentary that is going to be an impossible task. The fact is within the community of climbers there exists a very wide range of diversity. Maybe the documentary will not be able to unite all climbers together but at least I hope it creates a general sense of mutual understanding and peace. I.e, dirty smelly hippies and fraternity college students might not be the best fit for each but for purposes of the conservation and furthering of the sport of climbing in the RRG they must come together. One common goal, to keep enjoying what the world of the RRG offers for them.... A COMMUNITY OF CLIMBERS.   Enjoi it, protect it and share it.
cheers, ~

Project Timeline

Also create a blog entry that discusses your timeline. You can include the timeline if you want, but I am more interested in HOW you went about putting your timeline together. Briefly discuss how you assigned the benchmarks (major points in the project/timeline) and how you decided to chunk up the tasks on the timeline. Also discuss how you built flexibility into the timeline so that you can make adjustments as needed. Upload the URL to that blog entry here along with your PDF's.

The how of my timeline was actually fairly interesting. The first thing that I did was to find a project management software that I could use with Jacob so that we could work together on the project. The most important thing of the software was that it had to have an easy and interactive timeline where both him and I could easily set up shooting and working days. I found a software that is pretty easy to use and did all this functions, its called Wrike.

Assigning benchmarks was key because it made me think about the things that were essential for the success of the project. Since we are doing a documentary most of these benchmarks were particular shooting days with the right people and right place. It helped me a lot to identify this and write them clearly in a timeline/calendar. I chunked up most of our shooting and working on the weekends since Jacob and I are both taking a lot of other classes. From now on, we need to shoot a lot of stuff every weekend. Hopefully we are able to achieve this. Flexibility and being able to adapt to changes in the timeline is going to be key, that is why the program will be so helpful. Both Jacob and I can make changes to the timeline at any time and they will update right away and notify both of us of the changes. Creating the timeline also helped me foresee future spending and costs that I had not completely taken into account for the creation of the project. 

Project Development Issues.

I think that so far out of the different discussions that I have had with other students doing capstones the main thing so far have been around management issues. Time is one thing, with many other classes happening at the same time I have had a hard time trying to keep up with the classes and the project at the same time. Since my video will be shot mostly outside I have a limited amount of good weather time to shoot it. Another thing that I discussed with my fellow classmates is the problem with scope project management. It is hard for us to know exactly what is going to be the reach of the project and how much time should be investing in it this far ahead. With video related stuff we know that at the end we are going to need a lot of time for the post-production phase. This forces us to start very early with pre-production and production.

Interestingly enough I have found that just like myself many students do not have all the skills to complete the project. This is a basic challenge preparing us for future situations. We are not going to know everything but we have to act accordingly and learn to learn what we dont know. I have had to learn so much about extreme sports and adventures filming. I have had to learn things like how to create pulley systems to rig up my camera equipment 100 feet high in the air. Recently I have been learning a lot about videography equipment information. I have realized that I want to spend some money to buy the needed equipment. Although it is very expensive I am looking forward to using this opportunity as an investment and actually get some money back by producing better videos.

Since I will be doing my capstone project with Jacob Hyten team communication has been one of the most basic pillars. For this reason we have created a blog where we can write all kinds of things related to our project. It is like our daily journal about our movie. We have also created a website that has our information and portfolio. Jacob and I work very well together, we trust each other completely and get along fine. This has allowed for a non-stop traffic of information between each other. The idea has been developed slowly in conjunction which makes the whole process stronger and better.

Secondary mentor post

Personally I think the idea of a secondary mentor is very self assuring. Although the main mentor will be the person that will actually do most of the supervising the secondary mentor can serve as an bridge between the main mentor and myself. I think even in situations where there might be some friction between my main mentor and myself the secondary mentor could be an outlet to ease things out. Also there will be a lot of things that my main mentor might not know, if this happens then my secondary mentor might be able to help me with those. I think that a good idea would be to find a secondary mentor even outside of school. I have in mind already two people that do some new media prouctions proffesionally that could be of great help as secondary mentors. I think that someone that is not supportive would definetely NOT be a good candidate for this position. Also someone that is not very close to me would not make a good secondary mentor. I am looking for someone that I can trust and he can critique my work. I also need them to be there for me for support and whenever stress takes over. If they are not patient they would not be good candidates for this position. I have two very strong candidates that could be my secondary mentors. Both of them are very close to me.

                                                                     Miguel Casar

Area of expertise: He is a psychologist and a photographer. Knows a lot about action sports media productions.

What he expects from me: As my brother Miguel has probably the highest expectations of myself. He expects me to excel in whatever I set as my goals. He will push me to do so and give me full support.

His general availability for mentoring next semester: He is going to be travelling back and forth between Asia, Mexico and the USA so his availability will vary. I plan to use his mentoring a lot when he is around. Whenever he is travelling I am going to try to contact him through the web.

Projects that Thomas is not very interested in: Miguel is not very interested in projects that have any negative impact of society or on the sport of climbing. This is obviously something i am not interested in either so there will not be any problems in that regard.
His thoughts on a primary advisor: He was excited that I will be having a primary advisor that knows a lot more of the technical issues than he does. He will make sure to engine my thinking process so I can take my thoughts to my primary advisor and get the needed technical support.

                                                                       Tim Yates

Area of expertise: Visual arts and photography. He works for the medical department of IU at IUPUI.

What he expects from me: Tim is one of my close climbing friends. He has been producing New Media projects for IU for 10 years now. His experience with photography is very extensive. Time expects me to do something very cool, he is excited about my project. One thin that he told me that he is looking forward is for me to be brave and do something extremelly creative and new.
His general availability for mentoring next semester: Since he works at IUPUI he will be conveniently located close to me. He said his schedule next semester will be fairly open so I can stop by whenever i want. I climb with him very often too so we could discuss the project at those times too.

Projects that Tim is not very interested in: Tim has no preferences he did say he would not be able to help me a lot if my project had to do with fashion or any of the related fields. Again, not an issue, fashion will have no play in my project.
His thoughts on a primary advisor: He also supports the idea that I will having a primary mentor. He said we can form questions and ideas together that can be taken to my primary advisor. He is excited to learn from him too.

Mentor Profile Assignment

• State your capstone idea in 100 words or less.

My capstone is a full length documentary video that explores the meaning and world of a community of climbers in Kentucky. Through powerful visual shots I want to share with the world what the community of climbers is about. In particular a community that is very close and dear to me, the climbing community in the Muir Valley. It is going to be by far the most challenging video project that I have taken so far. My major goal with the capstone is to show my growth and progress as a person and as a videographer. I will be doing this project in conjunction with Jacob Hyten. It will be a great chance to work with someone else and develop communication and team skills. I know most people in the video production are constantly working together in teams.

• Identify and discuss 4 key components you are searching for in a mentor.

I have four very clear components that I would like to find in a mentor. Technical knowledge will be obviously     very important from the filmatographic point of view. The “how to’s” about the actual shooting of the film. Another important component that I am searching for is someone with a very powerful ability of critique. I want to hear insights of my project. Thirdly I would definitely seek for someone that believes and is motivated in what I am doing. If he or she is motivated then that will only get me more excited about the whole thing and my project will be better. Lastly and very importantly I would like to find someone that engines my creative powers. Someone that invites me to think out of the box...

• Identify 3 potential mentors from the MAS faculty you would like to approach to discuss your capstone. Make  sure one of them is someone from whom you have never taken a class.

My three potential candidates are Thomas Lewis, Joseph DeFazio and Edgar Huang.

• Explain what these faculty members coud bring to your capstone and why you are interested in working with them.

Very briefly I am very interested in these three particular professors because each one of them has a very specific area of expertise that will be very helpful for my project. Lewis’s input on everything that has to do with the filmatographic qualities of the project will be very helpful. Defazio will be of critical help in terms of dealing with project management and how to best “sell” my project. I have never had a class with professor Huang but I believe he is an extremely well prepared and smart person. His expertise in around video production and web related things will be greatly helpful.

•  Either via web research, email, phone, or in person interview, discuss the following topics about each faculty member you are interested in working with:

Thomas Lewis:

Area of expertise: Photography and cinematography.

Expectations of capstone students: He expects me to go very thoroughly across the process of film making. Stopping along every step in preproduction, production and post-production and gaining expertise on each every one of them. He expects me to be able to create a powerful piece that conveys a strong and clear message. He also expects me to communicate with him all along the process and keep updated to where I am in the project and my thoughts.

His general availability for mentoring next semester: Thomas said he will be having a lot of students and capstones to mentor next semester. Nonetheless he said we can definitely schedule times for us to meet and discuss the project. He is willing to meet outside of school and on his own free time.

Projects that Thomas is not very interested in: Thomas did mention that he prefers not to work with students creating music videos.

His thoughts on a secondary advisor: He approves of a secondary advisor as long as there is a consistency of communication all across the board. It is important for him that the student, the secondary advisor and him are on the same channel.

Joseph Defazio:

 Area of expertise:  New Media project development and management.

 Expectations of capstone students: Defazio excepts capstone students to be very professional and serious about their capstone projects. For him capstone projects are like any other project that can be assigned to a New Media professional that gets paid to do a project. He expects students to track control of their progress and use appropriate management tools. He also expects students to meet with him throughout the development of the capstone and present him with organized summaries and project updates.

 General availability for mentoring next semester: His schedule for the next semester is still pretty up in the air. He did mention he expects to have a lot of other capstone and graduate students as well.  He said that scheduling appointments should not be a problem as long as they are planned ahead of time.

 Defazio is a very multifaceted New Media professional so he is very interested in all sorts of different projects. He did not mention any particular project that he would not be interested at all to work with.

               

Edgar Huang:

Area of expertise: Video Production and Web Site Design.

Expectations of capstone: Professor Huang expects capstone students to excel in whatever project they decide to do. He expects ultimate dedication and hard working skills for completing the project. He also motivates students to investigate and further their technical and academic knowledge of the tools and themes that their projects brush upon. He expects capstone students to meet with him in a regular basis to discuss ideas and progress.

His general availability for mentoring next semester: He mentioned that he is planning to leave several open spots for capstone students. He will make sure to fit capstone students around his other tasks. Scheduling meetings should not be a problem. He also mentions that a lot of the communication can also be through emails and other online forms.

Projects that Huang is not very interested in: Professor Huang did not mention any projects that he will absolutely not work with. He said that his expertise of game creation and 2D graphics might be limited.