The best advice we can get

Our AICE teacher, Mrs. Stoklosa, announced today that we would be gifted an additional six days before deadlines for this project. That takes it from the 12th to the 18th. Gianna and I came to the conclusion that this was due to the fact that an unfortunately high amount of students were not only behind on editing and finalizing their projects, but filming in the first place. We heard this information during breakout room discussions were we had little group talks, highlighting how everyone's projects were going along so far. By default, we were expected to film during last week, spring break. Not many people were prepared to take that initiative however and hadn't started shooting. 

Yikes.

We spoke to her earlier this week discussing critiques of our first video draft and what alterations we should make. She complimented our work for being high-quality and impressive. But besides that, she made plenty of notable points throughout the video. Here are some of my bullets.

• The opening wide two shot of the guitarist and bassist was ugly.
• More frequent cuts and fun edits needed to be done.
• More footage included of the band's solo performances, such as guitar and drums.
• Toss the end credits and keep it only as copyright info.
• Alter the opening credits to look less cinematic, and more like a traditional MTV style list of the band, song, director, and publishing group.
• The edit was dynamic and fun,  first shot made it boring.
• More diversity and use of content.

There's this phenomena called the Dunning-Kruger effect. The people who understand a field more are less likely to see themselves at their true value or intellect, and the more ignorant and flamboyant people, when it comes to their understanding of a topic field, know very little. They're the kids who think they ace a test, yet perform the worst. The opposite is also true, the kids who know the industry or topic under-credit themselves. 

Where are we on that scale? Somewhere, at any given time we have different magnitudes of this issue. To combat this, and to encourage growth and application of my education, I look for criticism from teachers when I can. What me and Gianna had created was great, but theres always room for better! 

I definitely learned a good lesson here. Gianna and I decided that due to the theme of the song, the pacing, length, and editing we have going on already, it is unwise to add additional cinematography to cut into the current timeline. It just doesn't pan out the way we want to, and would feel incredibly awkward.

Tomorrow we'll make some more posts and finalize the edit! We're taking this opportunity to really polish it out and get some feedback, and let the video evolve. I added some saturation to make it look less washed out too.

Night, Dean.