I love movies so much, that I wanted to do a movie review segment for Campus Closeup, the Madonna news show done for the BCA 3750 class; News Reporting. And, what better new movie to review than Tron Legacy. I knew from the start that I wanted to utilize the green screen that is available at Madonna, as well as borrow the Tron Legacy sweatshirt that a classmate of mine luckily had.
I needed to grab Tron Legacy footage to display on the green scene, as well as B-Roll for cutaways. The Apple website had plenty of trailers and clips from the movie, so I grabbed every single on. I also grabbed footage from the original Tron movie from YouTube for the first segment of the movie review.
After I obtained all the footage I needed, I went ahead and wrote the script. Writing the script wasn't particularly difficult, although I wish I changed up some of the words I used. I compared the city in the Grid to a flying saucer, but I wish I had said spaceship, because the city doesn't fly, it's stationary, and spaceship just would have sounded better.
The day of filming was quite fun. I had the help of another Madonna student, and her and I basically ran everything between the studio and the control room. So, there was a lot of running around. I loaded all the Tron footage onto a server, and had it looping behind me on the green scene. I tried to talk about the subject matter while related footage was shown behind me on the green screen. It worked most of the time, but not completely. Unfortunately, one of the servers had an issue, and I had one clip that had audio out of sync with the video, but I was able to fix that in post. Filming took a little longer than expected, but I got everything I needed, and the audio was good, so I was happy with the day of filming.
I got home, and had a pretty easy time editing it together. Definitely editing a news piece is easier than editing a film piece. What I am most proud with the piece was the intro on the show. I spliced together a few movie trailers along with some rocking music from "Fight Club", and it really helped set up the pace for the review.
WATCH "BCA 3750 - NEWS - TRON LEGACY MOVIE REVIEW" ON YOUTUBE
After I completed the news piece, I put it on Facebook, and got some feedback. The best feedback I got was from a Madonna instructor that guided me on the road of redoing the green screen. In the original video, I used the control room to display the Tron footage on the green screen. The instructor helped me with adding in the Tron footage in Final Cut Pro instead. We did some experimenting together, and I was amazed at the results. Definitely adding in the footage on the green screen looked a lot better in Final Cut, than it did using the control room at Madonna. With this in mind, I decided to re-edit the piece and add in all the footage on the green screen in Final Cut. Being that I had more control over the green screen now, I was able to pull the right clips to match what I was saying during each segment of the review.
It also had to trim the edges using a crop to remove the ceiling in the studio, as well as the floor.
The only issue I had with the re-edit was I was not able to get footage from one of the segments from a camera. It was the segment that had the issue with the audio and video being out of sync. So, what I had to do was use footage grabbed from another camera, and that is why in one of the segments in the re-edit, I am not talking directly to a camera. But, I think it helps give the piece an artistic look, and I liked it.
After I finished the re-edit, I was more than happy with the end result.
WATCH "BCA 3750 - NEWS - TRON LEGACY MOVIE REVIEW RE-EDIT" ON YOUTUBE
I am looking forward to reviewing another movie for Campus Closeup, but not sure what movie yet!
