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

ccr lesson!

 Hi guys!!

Today in class we learned about one of the most important parts of this project... The creative critical reflection!! We learned that the purpose of this section is to reflect on production, to respond questions and express personality. I have to answer four questions with a minimum of two products and maximum of 10 minutes for all the questions.

product options could be:

- Presentation with voice over.

-Director commentary.

-Podcast talk show. 

-Others.

How does your product use or challenge convention and how does it represent social groups or issues?

To answer this question, which is really important, the teacher recommended to start by discussing genre conventions and cite where you found the information. Next, she recommended to discuss genre conventions you chose to challenge or discuss why you chose not to challenge genre conventions and end with a discussion of choices made in how individuals, groups, events, and issues are illustrated).

How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?

Her recommendations were to answer how you arrived to target audience and how your production choices, content, etc work to engage with your audience and lastly address realistic options fir ab amateur filmmaker.

How did your production skills develop throughout this project?

Reflect on how your audience evolved throughout the production, discuss your approach to production ,for example, what did you have to change or adapt as you worked on the project. End it with a reflection on where you started and where you ended. You can discuss previous projects completed in class and how they helped to develop this project.

How did you integrate technologies- softwares, hardware and online- in this project?

For the last question my teacher recommended to discuss software such as blogger and HOW I used these technologies to solve problems.

The final statement should reflect on the project as a whole to discuss what you have learned, what would you do differently if you could and how could you improve.

Im glad my teacher did this lesson this week because it helped me understand a lot more a big part of the project. Also on spring break i'm going to record the most important parts and edit to hopefully finish earlier so that I can also have enough time for this questions. My teacher also told us what not to do and if my teacher hadn't talked about it, I would have probably done everything I shouldn't have done.

overall tips: -create script-incorporate research-creativity-cite sources- no talking heads.

   example of a creative way a student answered the questions

....usb c

 Hi guys...

today's blog is not as good as the others because we have a problem.

 I went to Miami to record some videos in the city that I could use in the background and I recorded the videos with the camera I own,  but when I came back to my house I tried using an SD card reader that you plug in your phones to transfer pictures or videos and I remembered that my current phone doesn't have the normal usb for iPhone and it uses the usb c one. I asked my mom to go with me to the store to buy a 'usb C to usb' adapter, but at first she didn't want to go because she drove to Miami to record some parts of the city, to convince her I told her that this project it really important for me. She did ended up driving me there and we bought one for 10 dollars at a tech store. When I came back home the first thing I did was plug the adapter and the SD card to transfer the photos but sadly my phone is not reading the card reader. Actually, this is not my first time this happens to me, when I got the phone I used the charger that comes with it and the usb-c port from my last phone and it also didn't detect it so that day I had to charge my phone with the computer's charger. The only three people in my house with iPhones have the same one as mine, therefore, they also use iPhone C chargers.

I have three options...

1-buy a new one but I might waste more money.

2-ask a friend that uses the other type of usb if I can borrow their phones

3- call apple

I actually think i'm going to do all of the options. I really need to fix this so that for next week I can upload the film's videos to my phone and then to my computer to edit it. By the way, apple computers also only have usb c ports which makes it even more difficult. I watched some Youtube videos about it, trying to find a solution and the videos said to force a restart on your phone, which I did but it still didn't work. This USB problem plus my actresses not having enough free time are really making me have a hard time.

TV prop part 1

 My sister, who is the journalist in my film, was studying all day for her exams. That means, we couldn't record today but she promised to give me some of her time tomorrow. I did create a dialogue for what she's going to say, which will make things easier for tomorrow.

I spent the rest of my day watching videos of how to edit a breaking news style video with multiple editing apps.  

here are two of the videos I watched:

watching this videos helped me educate myself more with editing, but I think I will be using the CapCut tutorial because it's the editing app that I have used more. Here are the steps I will be following...

1- Gathering footage

Before editing the breaking news video I need to gather relevant footage. I will use my TV as a green screen, it's essential to collect really high clips so that when I edit it, the green screen doesn't lower the quality of the video. 

2- Selecting videos

From all the footage I have to identify the best shots I took because the idea is to make it credible, and my sister is not the best actor, therefore we will have to record plenty of shots.

3- Editing and sequencing

Once I select the footage, I will start editing. CapCut offers a range of editing tools that will help me create a perfect breaking news video. I do need to ask my teacher if i'm allowed to use this image in my film and insert it in the breaking news video.

If she says I cant on Monday, then I'll try to draw it on the app of Procreate in my iPad. Once i'm satisfied with my video, I have to add the final touches.

How will I reproduce it on the TV?

At first I didn't know, and thought about it for a while because sharing my phone's screen won't show the video horizontally, which would make it unrealistic but I ended up asked my friend if she could give me an idea and she said to post it on Youtube and then just reproduce the video on the Tv's Youtube app. I'm glad I asked for her help because I would've of never thought about that by myself.

 hopefully, i'll update you tomorrow with actual footage of the news prop.

prop creation + changes!

 hi blog!

In the world of filmmaking props also play the role of bringing stories to life. Some props are meticulously done from scratch and others find their origins in unexpected places like the trash. Yes, trash can be transformed into props with creativity. In my case I don't have to do much with it since I just need the trash, to look like trash. 

I need to start recording this weekend, but one of the hardest things for now is planning when we are going to record since it has to be at night, my mom (who is the main character) needs to have free time and ideally no one else should be at the house. Those three things are complicating a lot my schedule because the times where I could record was because my mom left the house with my brother to hangout with her friends.  She did promise that this weekend she was going to stay home with my to record it and I really hope she doesn't forget.

On the other hand, back to props, I've been asking my family to put their "clean" trash and office paper works that they don't need in a separate box, so when I start recording we already have a lot of trash to work with. The rest of the props are cups, that I already own, and the pizza that we will order that day. 

If my mom does stay home on Saturday I will hopefully record some of it that day, but since everything I use in the film has to be mine, i've been thinking: what am i going to put in the TV? How am I going to do it ? I could maybe use the ADELINE X music video my classmates and I did a couple weeks ago or I can make it from scratch.  Analyzing more how I was going to do it, I remembered that if I use the music video me and my classmates did, I would need Lorde to let me use her sound, which is not happening. 

For what's shown in the Tv at first, I might do a quick "documentary" of nature to put behind or record my little brother playing with his friends to mimic a Tv show and for the News and warning parts,  I asked my sister if she wanted to be my journalist and she said yes! I will put her behind my Tv, that is going to be reproducing a green screen video, and I will make her look exactly like a TV journalist. Later I'll add the background, sound effects, and the emergency screen.

costume options! + good news!

 GUYS GOOD NEWS!!!!

 I changed my phone the other day!! which is so good because my old phone's camera sucked and my new phone has a cinematic mode, so now I can use my phone to record my film! I do own a camera, that is really good quality and i'm probably going to use it for the project but the thing is, my mom owns a phone stabilizer that could help me a lot to record the film but it's only for phones, not for cameras. I will decided later which one i'm going to use because I know the camera has better quality but it'll be harder to record with it. 

Videos of me playing with the cinematic mode:

Now that you know the good news, we can talk about costume options!

 

Costuming is a fundamental aspect of filmmaking, serving as a visual language that communicates the narrative and character's traits. The costumes worn in my film reflect Jillian's identity and personality. One of the first things you have to do when you are researching costuming options is to understand the character's background and personality. In my case, Jillian is going to wear muted dark tones to reflect her struggles. When a story is taking place is also a very important detail for choosing costumes, for example, in Stranger Things, all of the Mise-en-scène is meant to represent an 80s retros style. In my film, the story is taking place in 2024, which means I don't have to worry about finding clothes that fit another decade, in fact, since Jillian doesn't take much time for herself due to her workaholism problem, she's going to be wearing what ALL high schoolers and Americans wear....... SWEATPANTS.