Creative Critical Reflection

 

1&2: ccr 1 finished.mov

-google drive link

-link

3&4:ccr 2 finished

google drive link

if a link doesn't work, must of my work is uploaded to the Youtube Channel "videos mediastudies"

film opening

 here's my project, i really hope you like it :) <3

  

if link doesn't work here's another one: Shadows

let's reflect

 This whole experience has been a rollercoaster and it coming to an end kind of makes me sad. This was my first time ever working by myself on this class and im actually happy that I didn't pair up with my friend because I got to be the director, the editor, the cinematographer, the writer and more jobs that are really important to create films. Having that responsibility helped me learn this I didn't knew before and to improve on this I wasn't the best at.

Having to do this project helped me reflect on all the work people put on films because at least for me creating a 2 minute film was HARD, I can't imagine creating a whole movie. I know for experienced people my film might not be the best, but im actually really proud of it, I learned, planned, edited, directed and filmed it and this class is not provided in my country so this year was my first year of having any media related class. This experience also help me realize that there's always room for improvement and I can't wait to learn more this about media and maybe one day make a short film.

For next time I think I need to start doing everything sooner because recording and editing is really time consuming, editing 2 weeks before the deadline and having a vacation in between those days wasn't my best decision because if there was a shot I needed to redo, I couldn't do it or else I wouldn't have finished on time.

Im really happy I changed my schedule last year and added this class, I learned a lot from it and it made me even more excited to do things like this. 

editinggggggg

Hi guysss!!!

In the other blog I commented how when you start editing you don't know how to start the clip and how to follow it to tell the story in the right way. After a lot of thinking and trying different clips I decided to start my opening film from a black background to a tight close up shot of my main character's eyes to introduce her. 

Back to props----> In order to have enough garbage and papers, I collected my brother's snacks for a week and put them in a recycling bag. Mainly my brother is the only one who eats unhealthy snacks, so literally every time he ate something I reminded him to put it in the recycling bag. This process was a little gross but you have to do what you need to do, otherwise I would have wasted a lot of food.

I think filming the food and the garbage was a little difficult because my camera was moving a lot but to fix that, when I was editing, what I did was I put the clip on and slowed it down a lot to make the clip smaller and more stable.

Finally, every time I zoomed with the camera it ruined the original sound because you could hear in the clip how the lens moved, as I zoomed in most of the clips I had to remove the sound from all the clips that are in my film and what I will do is to add a mix of foley sounds, copyright free sounds and the sounds that are not ruined from the scenes. Overall I only have to re-record one scene in the whole film that I don't like because i didn't film it in one shot and you can tell when there's a cut which makes it messy and look like a mistake. Im currently on my last day of spring break so I cant re-record it until I get back home from the trip, Overall im really enjoying the process but I hope adding the sounds is not to hard to do.

film opening

 hi guys!!

so far everything is good, I started editing and at first I didn't know what clip to use first, something that i did messed up and would do different next time is adding something at the beginning to differentiate the scenes and the takes. 

Honestly, having to create a film of any kind without the will or time of the other people is more difficult since you may need to repeat a scene a few times and forget details, for example, in some shots I forgot to go back to the lighting it needed. That only happened with a couple of scenes but I managed to fix it by adding a free effect from CapCut called Purple limbo.

I didn't mention it before but in order to get television to project the news video what I did was to make it all one long video, putting together the video of my stepfather playing tennis plus the news video and finally the emergency message and upload it to the youtube channel where I upload most of my behind the scenes and projects. The only bad thing was that the video was only about 1 minute long and due to the fact that I had to record a scene more than five times to get the perfect shot, I had to be constantly rewinding the video, to avoid problems with the lighting and that scenes from the beginning came out with the background of the message and vice versa. Having to rewind it was annoying but it worked for most of them except for the clips that I put the CapCut purple limbo. effect on.

recording day !!

 hi guysss!!!!!

Okay I started recording today, and I can tell you it's way harder than what I though. First of all,  I was going to use my phone to record because I have a phone stabilizer that it's really good quality but the things is the iPhone camera SUCKS at night, it gets grainy and it just looks really bad. I ended up using my camera, it still wasn't the best with dark shots because sometimes it was grainy. 

To avoid getting grainy shots I needed to add a little bit of light near the camera, I used my little desk lamp and sticked it to the camera with a blue tape. I used the same blue tape to create this blue cold light effect by sticking it to the little desk lamp light, that really helped me out to give more depth into the film.

The hardest part though was that my hand was shaking so much that it was messing up good shots, I tried doing everything, all of the stabilizers or tripods I had where for phones and taping the camera to the stabilizers would have been to risky. Sometimes I did need the shaky effect for the film when my actor was walking to the door, but when I didn't I tried my best to avoid shaking the camera by supporting my arm to my chest.

My mom-main character is not the best at acting but she really tried her best. Overall she didn't have to do much, she only had a few scenes where she would make facial expressions and no scenes with dialogue. We did have to repeat a lot of times the scene where she gets annoyed and silences the phone and tv because she was over reacting her anger. Honestly, she did a good job but i'm glad the opening film didn't have dialogue because having to do a film and wanting it to be actually good when your actor is bad, sucks and makes the process longer.

TV PROP (editing pt 2)

 hi guysss!!!

part 2 of editing the tv prop!!

Okay, in this blog I will get more into detail of how I edit the clip.  First I want to mention that I though of instead of playing the tennis video I was only going to show first a reporter showing the weather and it would change to another reporter telling the breaking news but even if I liked that idea better, my sister didn't have enough time to record both parts and it would have been hard to record the weather news using only my own media.

After recording the clips with my sister, I opened up my computer and I made the background I talked about last blog. That was a little bit stressful because I didn't know if I could use another person's design and it took me a few minutes until I realized I could make my own design. After that I transformed the background picture to a video, and removed the background from the clip I did of my sister. CapCut offers some text frames that are pretty similar to the ones they use at the news, the frames really helped it look more realistic and I used Canvas once again to create the background of the broadcasting emergency message. I think the hardest part of this prop was thinking what to write on the text frames, I didn't want to give many details that could maybe spoil it but I also needed to give the scene more suspense and not let it be just a woman using her computer. 

Film background:

video of me editing it in fast speed:

TV PROP (editing pt 1)

 HI guys!!!

this blog will be part 1 of editing the tv prop.

Editing is definitely on of my favorite parts of this class but it is also the hardest, the school does provide  me the adobe apps programs, which of course are better and more professional but even after watching 1 hour long tutorials, I genuinely don't understand how to use any of the adobe apps, so to edit I always use the app CapCut because it's the one I understand better.

The TV is a really important part of my opening film because it hints what may be happening in the future. It changes from something entertaining showing in the TV to the news to an emergency message. The TV helps relate the story better and in this occasion it helps the viewer understand that something serious is happening.

All the media I use has to be mine, therefore, for the entertaining tv show I recorded my stepfather and his friend playing tennis after I went to the gym to use it in the film. I was going to use my one word film project but I needed something with a lot of sound in the background so that you could hear the difference when she silences the tv and phone.

For the background I was going to use a news background thing I found on google but I got scared that could be against the rubric because even though i'm only using it as the background it's still someone's work. I tried looking for copyright free background designs but i didn't find anything so I ended up doing my own design on canvas. I chose the color blue as the main color to really emphasize the contrast of when the TV changes. At the end I added some symbols to make it more fun and more similar to what a news background could be.

TV PROP (recording)

 

Hi guys!!

 I finally convinced my sister to give some of her time to record. She's in college so she's pretty busy with exams, she goes to her college every Tuesday and Thursday, she leaves at 6am and comes back at 10pm, the rest of the days, she studies A LOT and her only free time its from 6 to 7:30 which she uses to relief her stress by going to the gym..... now, if you're wondering why am I telling you my sister's schedule, the answer is to show you how hard it is to make plans with her :////// 

Now for the fun part!!!

Recording the background for the film was a little bit hard because she only had free time at like 9 pm after her classes and it was already dark outside. The problem was that my house has a warm yellow light so when I was recording the video didn't have the best lighting even though I used a ring light and a desk lamp that had a whiter and colder light. I used the help of my mom and my brother to hold the ring light in one side and the desk lamp in the other, to have better lighting.

I used the my living room's TV as a green screen, therefore, when I put the background it would look more real than if I didn't. The Tv wasn't big enough to cover my sister's entire body, but that wasn't a big deal because it didn't really affect me when I started editing. I was going to use my camera but as I said before, my house has a warm lighting which looks darker in the camera, but that wasn't the main problem. The main problem was that my camera was showing horizontal black stripes, when I realized there were stripes in the screen I almost had a heart attack because 1- my mom would have kill me  2- I would have to record EVERYTHING on my iPhone. iPhones have the worst quality cameras for dark setting so I NEEDED TO FIX IT.  I did my research, turns out, every camera does that when it doesn't have the correct settings for a type of lightning. I did the research after recording so i did end up using my phone for this.

what my camera looked like:

here's some bts of the recording:   

animation research

 hi guys!

When my class and I were introduced to this project, the first thing the teacher said was "don't do animation if you are not experienced", of course its understandable because animation takes so long and it takes a lot of patience and time for it to actually be good. On my last blog, I talked about two ideas I had for the CCR, but the one i'm going to talk about in this blog is the drawing idea. In the example I gave, the original Youtuber drew everything on a white board.

I like better the idea of animation and adding an image of a hand moving to create the feeling of the hand drawing on the board. The thing is animating it would be ten times harder but i still decided to do research and give it a try.

I watched this Youtube video called "How to create a whiteboard animation in one day"  

 

He started the youtube video saying that if you wanted to create an animation videos like his in one day you needed 10 hours and 29 dollars. I can split the 10 hours because i dont need to finish it in a day but 29 dollars??????????????????????? 

I still gave the video a chance to see why i need to have 29 dollars, turns out the software he uses called VideoScribe has a 29 dollars monthly payment if you want a good quality video and no watermark.

There's nothing I hate more than watermarks but that still doesn't mean in going to pay for this software for a 5 minute video and then never use it again so i kept investigating for other softwares that could give the same service but for free or at least cheaper. You can use Canva to create a whiteboard explainer which is great because i do have that app and i would only have to add drawings made in my iPad instead of animating the whole thing. Mango Animate is another software that does good quality whiteboard explainers videos for free but this option may take a little bit of more time. 

A few weeks before I turn in my project I will officially decide what i'm going to do....if I risk it doing the animation, if I use canvas or if I keep it simple and draw everything on the whiteboard. I believe any of the three options are good but i KNOW my teacher is not going to like the idea of me doing animation for one of my videos. 

ccr production ideas...

 HI guys!

OKAY i know it may be a little bit early but you know what time goes by soooo fast and it's better to think about this know than to think about it last minute. After my teacher gave my class a lesson about the creative critical reflection, I learned that I needed to use at least two productions to answer the four questions. I had some good ideas... 

For the first one, I got inspired of the example we saw in class of a girl copying the 73 questions videos that Vogue does to celebrities. The idea is to get inspired of the interview WIRED does to celebrities, where they answer the web's most searched questions, so what I would do is answer the two questions how they do it ( by removing a sticker from a google research history paper that reveals the web's most searched questions)

 here's an example

the other idea I had is inspired of Youtube videos I used to watch when I was little called "Draw my life", in the TikTak Draw channel, they basically tell stories through drawings. This drawings were made in whiteboards. My idea is to answer the other to doing the same thing, I would like it better if I could do it more animated because it looks less homemade but animations take time, which i don't know if I have.

example