War Horse Assessment
What is War Horse?
War Horse is a film created by Steven Spielberg in 2011. Based on World War 1 the story follows a teenager who joins the army after his horse was sold to the army and after a long war, they reunite. Along the way on the front line, they go through lots of trouble with the horse getting stuck in no man's land and and the teen being injured and becoming blind.​
My Assessment
My Assessment involves creating an AV projection with clips dedicated to the horses whose lives were sacrificed to help save hundreds more in the long run. This assessment will include working with a group to collect sounds and videos relating to World War 1 and the horses specifically. To find sound effects we were able to use sounds from the film War Horse, along with the clips to create the projection video. For some of the clips, however, we would have to use war clips from the internet to keep the purpose of the projection apparent.
The Planning Process
The planning process of the project started with my group getting together to discuss what kind of videos and sound we wanted for the projection. Once we had all of this information we were able to create a mood board of what we wanted the projection to look like. The next step was to collect all of the video and sound resources we could use. To get all of these sound cues we had to read the part of the script to find out what kind of video or audio cues we could take from the script and what we had to look for in other videos to relate them to the time period.
Video
The First step was to find all of the video clips I could use, these resources came from the film War Horse and other horse clips which could pass as being from the war period. With all of the possible clips collected, I could start putting together a rough order of the videos I wanted to use. For the clips with audio, I isolated the sounds and put them on a QLab file with the other audio files to add on at a later stage. The advantage of using QLab is both the video and audio clips can be edited together so they are related earlier in the process. A job in the process is the video editor, who would find the clips of video and edit them together so that when projected they will have a seamless transition. Another job role is the audio editor, which has a similar job to the video editor in finding and editing audio, their job also includes timing the audio to the video as the mood of the audio needs to fit the theme and tone of the video. Another job role is the operator of the projection, once the projector and screen or cloth are set up you will need an operator who can map your video and audio on the screen to make sure it fits the exact shape as the surface it is being projected onto. In the industry, I would need to know how to use all of these skills to be efficient and skilled in the role. To map our video from our screen to the projector we used Qlab because we were able to use all of the features we have used previously in different projects. Using QLab in a previous project helped us with our knowledge and key skills on the software improving the key skills we would need to be a video editor as a profession. However, I had trouble initially with connecting our monitor and Qlab to the projector. I had to mask our video which meant using a blank canvas to map out the shape of the screen I was using by clicking and dragging the screen to make sure the white mask filled the space of our screen as the black area would block out all images outside of the mask. When I had to scale our drawing I had to project our video onto the mask we created and size it up or down to fit the screen. A challenge I had when scaling and masking was the canvas shape as the edges were rigged and none of them were straight to reflect the theme of the project. Another negative experience I had was the resolution of the video because some of the clips were old-fashioned when they were sized up onto the screen through the projector the resolution decreased because they were not meant the be resized.
Audio
For the audio side of creating a projection, we started by discussing as a group what kind of audio we wanted, to use. Then we went onto audio platforms to collect sound clips that we could use that related to the war horse scene. After we had added the video clips into a QLab file we could narrow down our audio files by using the audio from the video clips and adding very few sound effects and music on top of the video clips that did not come with audio already. Once we had merged both we ran through the video multiple times to make sure each video fit the projection screen we were using. The impact of the audio was to go along with the video and make the audience feel remorse and sorrow as that was what the World War was primarily.
Evaluation
My War Horse project was to create a short movie that we could project onto a screen portraying the animals and horses that died during the First World War. Overall, in the project, we struggled because a few of the group members were ill, but once all of the group members were present, we were able to catch up on work quickly and efficiently. My group worked well together, and we were capable of making a good and relatable piece of work in such a short period, despite some technical difficulty with connecting one of our two monitors to the projector so we could scale the projection mapping base to the video while having the editor open. If I were to do the project again, to improve I should have asked more questions as I was not confident in my knowledge of Mad Mapper and connecting a projector to a monitor. If I were to do another project on AV, then I would make sure that I got more involved in the setup and displaying of the projection to make sure I understand fully what to do and how to do it. I will also research more into AV projections and when I go to events that may include projections, I will run through the process of how to set up and work a projector every time, as it will keep my knowledge fresh and will make sure that I understand how it is set up to look a certain way.