Hello! My name is Joseph Watson, I am a Film student at Freestyle Academy. Through this program, I have improved on my skills as a filmmaker and storyteller over the last two years. Outside of Freestyle, I spend my time playing sports such as hockey, basketball and football, as well as making music and hanging out with my friends.
For my Showcase I chose the works that I have because of the amount of time I put into them and the final product that came from that time. I have chosen my explorations project and my Junior Narrative. My explorations project is a short clip of the effects I had to layer onto my footage frame by frame, of which I did everything myself. The Junior Narrative was a collaboration between Ben Cornell and I. On this project I worked primarily on small sound effects as well as the editing process, with some work on the actual filming.
I would appreciate feedback on the effectiveness of the digital effects and the storytelling, focusing on how the clips are cut together as well as any effects you found engaging.
Next year I will attend St. Cloud State University to study Mechanical Engineering, though I fully intend to continue creating films.
You can reach me at josephw@freestyleacademy.rocks
Visual Effects
The Explorations project was an opportunity at the end of Junior year to work on something of our choice to better our skills of production (or pre/post production). For my explorations I focused on visual effects, more specifically light-saber effects. For this I took footage of two of my friends and went through frame by frame to create a short fight scene where their light-sabers are glowing and whatnot. Here’s my process:
First I took the edited footage into after effects and created a solid object and key framed its movement every frame for the later steps.
Next I added a glow effect to the solid to create a light-saber like glow.
I then added a color overlay to each solid to create the color of a light-saber.
Overall, I think that the final project, though short, was one of my better if no the best work of my Junior year as I did something that I wanted to learn and really did my best. Here’s the final result:
Visual Narrative
For the Junior Narrative we partnered with another film student to create a visual narrative. We were were assigned this project to use editing and scene composition to show the feeling of the film in different parts.