'The Virus'

Our very first group project for the Media Arts class was to create a silent film based on the originals from the early days of filmography. The only requirement was that we set the storyline around modern ideas, such as the computer, to create a sense of irony in the film. Sounds tough and boring, right? Wrong! It was a lot of fun, and after a few trial and error effects, the result was great! In My group was Dustin, Brent, Laura, and myself with the video featuring Brandon. The first thing we set out as a group to do was create a script- this was probably the hardest part because we had to create an entertaining yet easily conveyed storyline without much words or subtitles. After we fine tuned the script enough so that it was ready to be used, shooting the scenes was fairly easy- none of them had to look perfect because we were aiming for poor quality. After everything was shot, it was up to Windows Media Player to help us make the film look legit. We had to mute the volume on the videos because a. it was supposed to be silent and b. there was a lot of laughing in the background. When it was silent, we had to make the film look old. We used the 'film grain- older' and 'greyscale'. We could have just used 'film grain- oldest' for the black and white look, but we found that the 'oldest' effect was too bouncy and too hard to see what was happening. Once that was done we added subtitles where they needed to be for the story to make sense. The final step: finding appropriate music. This was probably the hardest part of the editing half of its creation but after much fiddling, we got a fairly decent and believable soundtrack to fit the story. The end result was better than we could of thought! The whole process was fun and it was a great project. Here is the video, judge the authenticity for yourself!