Filming Blog: Isolation

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, my group and I haven’t been able to meet up as often as usual. However, today we met to film scenes that hadn’t been finished yet. Of course, we’ve been told we need to self-isolate ourselves so we made sure to finish filming in my house and not revise our beach scenes. Today we filmed for a total of two hours. We managed to get the majority of our leftover scenes. Although we did get much done, we still have to work on a few more scenes and our creative critical reflection. Two out of our total of six cast and crew members weren’t able to make it today. This included our male character who we still have to film an entire scene with. Through this process we ran into a few small issues. First, it was still light outside which took away from the ominous setting we were hoping for. Then, we couldn’t film the two sisters in the same dress at the same time because we only had one dress. To fix this problem, we filmed double the scenes but with half with one girl in the dress and half with the other in the dress. Next, as stated previously, we don’t have the proper camera or tripod so we had to get creative with trying to stabilize an IPhone camera. We ended up being able to just hold the camera with a steady hand. Also, our two main characters changed their hair so it made it difficult to tell time in the scenes. This ended up working out in a way because it helps confuse the audience on which sister is doing what. Lastly, the noise. Due to the pandemic, all of my family has been at home which could be a little chaotic when filming. However, we used this as an opportunity to realize that on real movie sets, there could be ten times the amount of people that were there. To fix this, we ended up having to silence everyone before each take. We also closed doors when filming in rooms.

Filming and Editing Blog: Quarantine

For the past four days, our school district has been on lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the closing of schools, we haven't had the chance to meet with our teachers and use the proper equipment to film our movies. This pandemic has not only set us back but has set multiple television productions back as well. For example, the cast of HBO's Euphoria had just started reading through their scripts as a group. However, they made an announcement days later saying that filming will be paused until it is safe for the cast and crew to be around one another. For us, we are going to be out of school for a month which means we don't have our AICE Media Studies class until after the due date our teacher has set for our movies. We are left without resources such as cameras, tripods, and SD cards. Also, many students have all of their movies backed up on a laptop that can't be recovered from the school. Due to this, we haven't been able to reshoot what we received criticism on in our peer reviews. Another issue we have is not being able to be around each other. A lot of people are confined to their homes in fear of catching and spreading COVID-19. Through all of this, my group has been lucky. We edit on my laptop because we are familiar with the software. All of our edits made so far are saved on it. We also have good quality cameras on our phones so we can use them to film along with a tripod from home. Lastly, we have made a few dates to get together and film and edit as a group. We also need to do our creative critical reflection. For this we are doing a talk show style video. This is meant to analyze our video and recognize how we made the film. Below is a picture of us filming. In this scene the sound was a bit off so we are re-filming  this scene tomorrow.

Editing Blog: Adding Audio

For the past couple of days, my group and I have been focusing on editing. This is our strategy because we can't do any filming till next week. During these days, we've been working on two main things: titles and music. First off, titles. Since titles were the thing we got the most critiques on, we decided to work on them as soon as the peer review was done. We started with putting them in their correct spots according to our storyboard. (We had to change some positions for missing scenes.) Then we started to rework the fonts, colors, and sizes of the titles. For some scenes, we added filters for a better contrast between the titles and the background. Lastly, we went back and fixed if any names were wrong or changed. This brings me to my next topic of our audio. For this film, we found royalty free music that sets an ominous tone for the beginning. The song we are using is called The Disappearance by Emmett Cooke. Originally, we had a song picked out by an artist named Farrell Wooten so that's the name in our storyboard powerpoint. However, we've changed the music, so we've changed what the title says. When we downloaded the music, we ran into one small issue. Every few seconds, the track would say the name of the website we downloaded from. To try and fix this, since this was our favorite score, we cropped the music in different positions to stop from hearing the sound in the film. After we did this, we went in and increased the sound of dialogue in certain scenes. We also did this for scenes where we wanted ambient sound.

Editing Blog: Feedback

In the previous blog, my group had to peer review another group's draft of their film. After writing that blog, we received our reviews from other peers. This occurred to allow us to re-shoot and re-edit what we might have missed. We were reviewed by two different groups. From what I saw, our most common flaw was not having all of out titles or the audience didn't understand what was happening. For the titles, we had some miscommunication among our group. I did the first half and another group member volunteered to do the others but they weren't in the final copy. However, the titles that we did have were in order. We also came to the conclusion that the audience didn't fully understand our movie because not all of our scenes were included. Some scenes had to be cut in order for the film to make any sense at all because we weren't able to film all the scenes in our storyboard. Although our peers disliked these aspects, there were some qualities that they enjoyed. One group said that the fake crying in the movie was great.The other group managed to understand the film and commented on the complexity of it. Both group recommended that our dialogue be louder or to have voice-overs throughout the two minutes. The groups also commented on what camera angles and movements and editing tactics we used. Both groups had different responses to the questions about it so we need to go back and make each one more clear. In all, our group needs to work on this film A LOT. In order to prepare it for grading, it must be perfect. We fully intend, sometime this week or next, to re-shoot our scenes that need it and re-edit existing scenes along with the new ones. The pictures below are from one of the groups that peer reviewed us. 

Peer Review

A few days ago, we had to turn in our films for a peer review. We also had to peer review someone else’s film. The film we got was called Red Dot. Overall, I enjoyed it and it definitely helped me to see some of the problems in my group’s film. For example, their film told a story for the first two minutes. Since my team didn’t get to film all the scenes we would have liked to, our story doesn’t make sense. To go along with this, the editing was last minute, making it choppy. Even with the negatives, we still had some positives. Our movie was within the time frame. We also were able to fit all of our titles in. Our lighting was both good and bad. It was hard to film the ominous scenes in the dark with minimal light. Lastly, I believe our sound was great, but we should have added our music in to set the scene. Without it it’s just a confusing mess. One thing I would change about the Red Dot movie is add some other sound other than music. It kinda gave off a trailer idea instead of the first two minutes of a movie. My favorite part of their movie we’re all the creative angles they used in the scenes were the girl is seeing the future. Going into the re-filming and re-edits, my group will definitely use Red Dot as an example. We also need to try and film the majority of our film on a camera rather than a phone camera. When putting it onto a computer, the quality wasn’t as good.

Editing Blog: Time Crunch

On Saturday, February 29, we continued filming our movie. We filmed for a total of 3 hours and got about 3 scenes done. It was a lot of work to film on Saturday. We filmed in my house, but had to change it into many different settings. We made my house a dress shop, shoe store, and a dark, empty house. For example, we shot a scene with the main character crying in a dark bathroom as she washes her hands. Then we turned around and had a bright seating area at a "dress shop". After filming on Saturday, we continued to film today. Although we had came up with a plan to be picked up from school together, those plans fell through. Instead of filming around 3:00 pm, we didn't start filming till around 5:30 pm. We used as much time as possible and were filming non-stop. We knew we needed to get at least 2 minutes done, even if that meant compromising. We ended up only being able to film for about 2 hours before the main characters' parents came and picked them up. Fortunately, we filmed the majority of our scenes. However, since we are still missing some, our movie is a little choppy and doesn't quite make sense. We had to cut out the final scene, even though we filmed part of it, because it didn't make any sense. Since this occurred, when fully edited, our film only came out to be about a minute and 24 seconds. We also barely had any titles. In a creative way, we figured out how we would solve this problem. We put as many scenes as we could, without abusing it, in slow motion to add a few seconds on. Then we decided to just movie all of the titles up and fill in what's left.