General Question

[Ednys]

Hello everyone,

I sit and watch in awe at many of the presentations that have been produced by PTE users.

When I usually start, I get my pictures into photoshop and with my limited knowledge, "which has improved since using PTE, but a lot still to learn" I tend to get the pictures together find some music and produce the show. It may only take me a few hours to do the show production. I have read some threads where folk have said they take 6 to 8 months to produce a show. As for sound I have everything to learn.......

My question in general is: How do you all start to put your shows together? Do you just put the slides together in the program and hope they look good, or do you all produce a story board and work on that for a long time to plan the look of the show?

I am interested as I especially want to improve my efforts.

So how do you all start?

[JRR]

How I start depends on the show.

If I am doing a travelogue, lecture/educational, I pick out the images I want to use and put them in the order I want (usually not the order they were taken in, but in order by colour and subject). The shows goes together, then I find the music. Picking out the images is a hard process as you have to be fairly ruthless in your editing if you want a good presentation. The editing can taking weeks before assembling them for the show.

If I am doing a show to a specific piece of music, I sort out the number of images required, what the image should be of (to match the music (words in a song) etc etc and then put it together.

Of course there are combinations and permutations between those two simplistic ones.

[ContaxMan]

There was an interesting discussion on this topic back in October.

See:

Creative Juices, How do you make a show?

Alan Lyons Posted: Oct 21 2004, 09:26 AM

[Alan Lyons]

Hi Ednys,

Rodger is right, we did have a long discussion on this topic awhile back. But it is one which will come up often, and that is good. The creative part of A/V is the hardest part to teach. Each person and indeed each show can use a different route to get to the final show. Recently in Belfast we were doing a sound workshop, and there were almost as many "tried and trusted methods" as there was people in the room.

As jim says there can be a lot of editing and hard choices to make to get the final show, but I would recomend showing your work to someone who is not involved in the production.We can sometimes make do when the production won't go as we wished. The "cold eye" is a good way to get us back on track.

Have a look at www.avworld.org for your nearest A/V group. The workshops are alyways worth the day.

Best of luck with your efforts,

Alan

[Ednys]

Thank you gentlemen for your input.

That was what I was thinking about trying to do, start a discussion topic going. It was curiosity to see how other people started to create there masterpieces. I will have a good look at the topic from October.

Glenys

[ContaxMan]

May I suggest that you subscribe to AV World - you'll not regret it...

www.avworld.org

[Ronniebootwest]

There are a few good CD/DVD tutorial available (at moderate cost) that will show in some detail how to proceed.

email me if you would like further information.

[fh1805]

I need to get a life if all I can find to do is to trawl through ancient threads on the PTE forum!

However, I came across this one (and the "Creative Juices" thread and another that Ron West had started way back) and thought I would see if there's still any interest in understanding the thought processes behind an AV sequence.

I recently posted a sequence called "Kaleidoscope". This sequence was inspired by the music and doesn't have a single photograph in it!

As I sat listening to the music - not just once but over and over again for an entire evening - images started to form in my mind. I am keeping those mental images because one day, at the right location in the right lighting I'll get them and build a different sequence to that music. But the general feel of the music slowly seeped into my mind. To me it was depicting a stylized form of Scottish country dancing, with the groups of dancers forming circles, whirling round, advancing to the centre and retreating again, all that sort of thing!

And that "feel" is what I tried to capture with "Kaleidoscope". How well I succeeded I don't know. You can find the sequence in the Sequences section of this forum.

Oh, as an aside, whilst I was building "Kaleidoscope" I got another piece of music fixed in my mind that I thought offered distinct possibilities for a similar but different sequence: "Windmills of my mind" - but in an instrumental arrangement. Anyone know where I can get a copy?

regards,

Peter

[Lin Evans]

Try here. Song was recorded by a number of different people beginning with Petula Clark. Available on a number of albums:

http://www.google.com/musicsearch?id=1op0S5_QztE

You can buy it here by a number of artists for $.99

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_dmusic?u...p;x=11&y=19

Lin

Oh, as an aside, whilst I was building "Kaleidoscope" I got another piece of music fixed in my mind that I thought offered distinct possibilities for a similar but different sequence: "Windmills of my mind" - but in an instrumental arrangement. Anyone know where I can get a copy?

regards,

Peter

[fh1805]

Lin,

Thanks for the links. A couple of very useful looking sites.

regards,

Peter