A College Education Podcast

James Last

What did I do? 

My Animatic explores the value of a college education in the Twenty First Century. As everyone is well aware, I would hope, the internet contains a vast amount of information, much of which can be accessed for free.  Contrast this to the rising cost of a college education which consumes (at least) 4 years of your lives.  To explore this question, I hosted a podcast including both students, industry professionals, and high quality visuals.

Looking at my visuals in particular, I think they turned out well.  My biggest challenge wasn't technical incompetence but trying to find images and videos that communicated my message... There's not many images that communicate the message: "This is why college is/ isn't important"

Nevertheless, I believe what I did come up with serves an adequate job.  I think my text is, for the most part, well designed, well placed, and implemented well. Furthermore, I think there is a good balance of images, video, transitions, and text.  I think that, overall, it has a clean and smooth vibe.

What is my Animatic Lacking?
As I suggested earlier, I believe that my Animatic is lacking visuals that communicate the message at hand. However, this might be an unavoidable obstacle. While a picture communicates a thousand words, per say, the words are much less concise and open to interpretation than actual words/ language.

Speaking more specifically, the photos that are used back to back at seconds 0:46 and 0:48 seem somewhat unmotivated compared to the rest of my media. This is also minor, but at second 0:47 the "r" on the word "teacher" goes over the main character in the photo... which messes up the illusion the the words are written on the chalk board... similar to what I did at minute 1:02. I might put a mask over the edge of the "r" to maintain this illusion.

What are my future plans?

My future plans will be to work on the things I listed above and to just continue to work on the look and feel of the (short) film... As previously mentioned fixing the "r" on the word teacher and replacing a few of my photo's with something more appropriate. I might also add some end credits to give it a more well rounded feel.  I will say, I believe that I am most happy with the beginning and the end of the film, which is a good sign that the quality didn't degrade at the end. Now I will just need to devote some more time to the middle.