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Final Project

Project Proposal Revised Proposal New Project Proposal
For my final project, I would like to complete a video as a sort of advertisement for the borough of Mt. Oliver. This semester, I am in intern with the Hilltop Economic Development Corporation, which is a nonprofit that works hard to help improve the Mt. Oliver area. As their intern, I get to witness firsthand the huge improvements and strides they are making to the area. I want to use photos and possibly even videos, to track the area's development, so that I can eventually post it on the borough's website for everyone to see. Though I was not asked to complete such a project as part of my internship, I believe that the changes taking place are so exciting and deserved to be recgonized. Although I explained what I wanted to do with my original proposal and why, I did not give enough detail as to how I plan on accomplishing it. I want to incorporate videos from events the community partakes in, before and after photos of areas of development, music, and interviews with people. I want to combine all of these things into one video with music and text telling of Mt. Oliver's history serving as transitions. I plan to accomplish this using flash in particular, but also photoshop, soundbites, etc. I am not yet familiar with most of this stuff, so I cannot go into more specific detail about how I plan to accomplish this. Halfway through the semester, my previous final project is no longer feasible because I do not travel to Mt. Oliver anymore. Because of that, I started an entirely new project, one that interestes me just as much. Looking at the litter and deteriorating pictures I took of Mt. Oliver forced me to notice the debris I see all around the city. What I used to walk past without thinking twice about transformed into something I cannot stand looking at. Each piece of litter glares at me, so I want to create a final project that showcases this. To do so, I plan to use the images of the litter I took, which in themselves, are often strange. I also plan to use video, starting with a wide panoramic view that looks very pretty and inviting, but slowly zooming in on the litter that taints each picture. I want to include text and signs associated with no littering, and include fines and laws in the final project as well. Hopefully, my final project will illustrate how strange litter truly is when one stops and actually looks at it.

Final Revision for Project Proposal

Although my earlier proposals did not explicitly state the intended goal of my project, I definitely envision it as an activist piece. Litter turns up in the oddest places in the city, but because we are so used to seeing trash and garbage every single day, we rarely notice that it plagues our streets and gardens. We see that litter exists, but do not take the time to think about it, let alone the energy to do something about it. I want my video to actively critique litter and the impact it has on our streets and city.
In order to achieve this, I plan to use a variety of the programs we learned to work with this semester. For the audio, I will make a new mix in Adobe Audition. I am going to take non-copyrighted music and play it throughout the entire project. I am then going to lower the level of the music until it becomes background noise to other audio at key points, and then raise it back up again. The sound will be consistent, just the level will change in order to accomodate the other audio that I want to include. I am going to incorporate news broadcasts, speeches from politicians, activists, etc., as well as recordings of myself spouting off specific facts and figures and laws and fines. The way each transitions will vary on the nature of the clip. In general, speeches will build until the important part and trail off again, news reports will mimic how they are on television with appropriate sounds and cutoffs, and my recordings will just be steady, a sort of voice of reason hopefully. After I create this audio, I will import it to Adobe Premiere where I will compile the rest of my project.
I plan to only use photographs in my final project, but will create movement with Adobe Premiere. First, however, I plan to edit all of my pictures in Adobe Photoshop. I am going to take a lot of photos of the same thing, but vary the distance I am away from the object I am photographing. In photoshop, I want to adjust the colors of the litter, making them progressively brighter as I zoom in further and further on the trash. The plan is to take beautiful, panoramic shots and make them even prettier in photoshop, but then taint the pictures by highlighting the litter that plagues each. I also plan to take pictures of newspaper and magazine articles, headlines, graphs, statistics, etc. regarding litter and its impact on the environment. If these needed adjusted, I will use Photoshop to achieve that as well.
Finally, to assemble the entire project in Adobe Premiere, I will rely on a variety of techniques. I plan to use text and titles throughout, highlighting my points in a not so subtle way when needed. Particularly, to emphasize the laws and fines, I want to use text in addition to the audio. Even though I am using still images, I plan to create movement by panning and zooming across the photographs, as well as applying some cool transitions. For the headlines, magazines, etc. I want to pan across them in the same way that viewers would read them. The zooming will depend on each photograph, but for the most part, they will start far away and zoom in, rather than the opposite. I plan on making the audio first, and then timing the video to match. I think this will be easier because I will have more photographs and still images to work with, so subtracting or adding to the project want be as difficult as if I tried to do that with sound.
Hopefully all of this works according to the plan and I end up with an awesome piece that really discourages people from littering!
Flash Project Rough Draft Flash Project Final Product Final Project Rough Draft Final Project Final Product