Triton Television Reel

This video showcases student projects within Triton Television (TTV), a film and media production student organization at University of California - San Diego.

Introduction

Triton Television (TTV) is a student-led organization at UC San Diego for student filmmakers to learn and apply their craft for photography, cinematography, creative writing, acting, sound, editing and many other skills.

Every two or more years, a reel would be updated to showcase a diverse set of the most recent student projects made in TTV.

The reel would be leveraged for marketing and recruitment purposes to showcase TTV's prowess in teaching and producing quality cinematography, acting, video/sound editing, etc.

Summary of My Contributions

  1. I gathered video files from student members.
  2. I analyzed, edited, and iterated upon the video files, a soundtrack found on YouTube, and found visual effects.
  3. I iterated upon the different reel versions, based on feedback from both regular and executive student members in TTV.

Initial Process

Understanding Project Requirements

After inquiring a couple of admin members within TTV, reviewing the 2015 TTV Reel video on YouTube, and researching other reels, I concluded that the reel must:

  • be short (about one to two minutes)
  • have quality footage
  • demonstrate strong but moderate usage of cinematography, storytelling, and editing
  • incorporate different, diverse student projects and videos covered in TTV

Setting Up the Project

I messaged student members via Slack to submit video files of their projects to a Google Drive folder for me to set up the videos into Adobe Premiere Pro.

Folder structure in Google Drive that emerged from 20 student members who submitted their video work.

I also found a Creative Commons licensed soundtrack on YouTube and remixed it.
I thought this soundtrack had the right tempo changes, beat, and mood to reinforce TTV's storytelling and branding within the reel.

YouTube soundtrack found, Interstellar Travel by Mark Tyner.
Remixed soundtrack used for the first draft.

Initial Choosing of Videos

As I made progress on the reel, the following were some example clips that I initially considered, each with my reasoning behind choosing them.

Cole Takayama's Film - A Beautiful View

  • Excellent framing of characters
  • Good camera movements between clips
  • Outside environments stand out from other student works.

Published on YouTube.

Trae Whyte's Film - Koulan

  • easy to interpret video segments
  • close-up camera views of the dancers' facial expressions
  • dynamic dance movements contributed to diversity of video projects

Published on Vimeo.

Footage from Various Student Events

  • clearly shows that TTV contributes to recording live student-centered events
  • easy to accurately portray the themes and contexts behind events

Visual Effects

Visual effects are manipulations to moving imagery to enhance some aspect of a video's storytelling.

Despite these effects being used sparingly in most reels, I experimented with such effects to enhance video transitions or beat changes to the soundtrack.

Film Grunge

This visual effect consisted of messy black spots with a faded white background, which overlapped two different video clips.

Light Flare

A brief flash of orange and pink light would be shown between two clips.

First Draft

This draft was more experimental with videos shown, rather than having a cohesive storytelling to brand TTV.

Feedback from TTV Members

  1. Video clips chosen were not visually compelling enough to pique and maintain interest to keep watching.
  2. The overall video lacked diversity, as there were too many clips of zoomed-in faces.

Iterating

Aside from replacing clips, I tackled three aspects that were directly tied to TTV's intended branding/storytelling.

Improvement #1: Related Movements

I made sure that foreground subjects for some video clips were also related to each other in terms of directional movements, thus showing TTV's caliber for cinematography.

Older Draft (Before)

Newer Draft (After)

Improvement #2: Balancing Diversity and Grouping of Video Parts

I made some parts of the reel grouped together based on how similarly they were framed while ensuring that there were noticeable visual differences between each video part used.

Older Draft (Before)

Newer Draft (After)

Improvement #3: A Subtler, but More Meaningful Ending

Towards the end of the reel, I dialed down the film grunge overlay used in earlier drafts just enough to let the footage speak for itself without the overlay being too distracting.

Older Draft (Before)

Newer Draft (After)

Final Video

Results

An earlier version of the reel was publicly shown during a student organization showcase on Triton Day, a day where undergraduate freshmen were able to preview some of the organizations and groups that UC San Diego had to offer.

Reflection

This was one of the earliest student organizations at University of California - San Diego that I have joined, and it inspired me to not just learn media and filmmaking, but it empowered me to go outside of my comfort zones to learn about filmmaking lingo, post-production software like Premiere Pro, and appreciate the power of storytelling and an excellent narrative for people to be inspired by.

I would not have accomplished any of my future video projects without the guidance and support from my peers and student executive members at the organization, and I wanted this project to be a lasting legacy, an ode to the projects that were never revealed to the general public.

The video would be dedicated to alumni who were students just like existing TTV members, to existing student members who want to remain involved and motivated to do good filmmmaking, and to prospective students who wanted to understand filmmaking from TTV members/students on campus.

Looking back, I still remain hungry to continue learning more about post-production and other aspects of video making for the years to come.