Question 4

 Hello blog!

In this blog post I'm going to be answering my final CCR question: how did you integrate technologies – software, hardware, and online – in this project?

We incorporated many technologies while filming this project that included our equipment,  our editing software,  and any online services that we used. 

Here are some of the technologies that we worked with:

The Canon t7i camera that was used through the entire production process

 Adobe Premiere Pro for editing

 Canva for the making of our graphics

 voice memos for a lot of our Foley sounds and dialogue

 bulletproof bear for music

 pixabay for some sound effects

 and of course blogger for our blogs and our progress. 

here is a picture of the camera below:

Now, since this is my last question  that I need to answer for my CCR I'm going to be talking about what I'm going to do for my second CCR where I'm going to be answering my question number three and question number four.  for this CCR I want to do my own game show, however this might be a little difficult because that would mean that I have to get someone to help me film.  My plan for this was to get me as a contestant and someone as a host to ask me questions about my film opening (questions will be attached below)  while I answer questions points will be awarded  if I answered successfully. If I'm not able to execute this my backup plan would be to do an interview with me as the interviewee.

Here are some of the questions that I would be asked in the game show:

What is the name of the camera that you used?

What is the name of the editing software that you used?

What were your roles while participating in the film?

 Do you feel like participating in these roles made you perfect your production skills?

Name three choices that were made that ended up benefiting the film?

Name a challenge that you encountered doing the film that you were able to resolve and  that helped you grow as a filmmaker 

These and a few more that I might come up with before filming are going to be the questions that I'm going to be  answering in my second CCR.  I will keep you updated on my  production process for my CCR’s and I will be posting about that next week.

CCR Question #3

 Hello blog!

Today I'm going to be answering my CCR question number three. The question is how did you production skills develop throughout the project?

 I did start  this project with a little bit of prior experience filming and knowing a little bit about how to edit because of my television production class in school, however I feel like this project helped me become a better storyteller and cinematographer as well as producer.  While I do have some prior experience in my TV class I mostly focus on making news segments so I don't really get to work in films as much, so this project was a really cool opportunity for me to be able to step out of my comfort zone  and try something new. Starting with the  writing I helped write the script and it was a very interesting experience because I've never had as much creative Liberty with making a film before I was very involved in the process and I was trying to come up with ideas and how to better the story  I loved working with a big group of people because I feel that by all of us sharing ideas together we were able to create a great story.  producing this was very fun I was able to be really involved in the process of making a lot of decisions that would ultimately end up being a part of the film I produced alongside with Kenna and it was fun talking to her about many choices that we ended up going with and she helped me plan many things along with the group.  The Thing that I feel like I  contributed the most during the project was  filming.  I was  the main cinematographer in our film opening. I worked very closely with the director and with my fellow producer to be able to develop the scene and get our vision in the camera. Taking on that responsibility helped me become a better cinematographer and it got me thinking about how we wanted the scenes to look in order to be able to get the film exactly how we wanted it to look. Overall I feel like this entire project was a really good experience and it made  me be able to develop my production skills a lot more than I would have ever imagined.

Here's a picture of me with a camera below,  I'll keep you posted on my progress and I will post the script for my second CCR on my next blog! 

Group Meetings

 Hello blog!

 Today we had our second group meeting and we discussed CCR's and we updated each other on the post-production process of our film openings. In my group I worked with Vicky Aiden Nati and Victor. We also shared our blogs and we reviewed them to see each other's process and get caught up on everyone's film openings. We gave each other a lot of really useful feedback on the editing process and we were able to watch a bit of everyone's film openings and they all looked pretty well done so far.

After talking about film openings for a while we shifted the conversation towards CCR's. most of us didn't really know what we were going to do however I did end up coming up with a few ideas and they helped me develop them a little further. As I talked about in my previous blog, one of my CCR’s is going to be me putting a bunch of questions in a jar randomly taking them out on answering them.  for the other one I think I'm going to do an interview with myself in order to answer the next couple questions but I still haven't fully decided I will talk about that more in  my upcoming blogs.   Despite our lack of ideas at the group meeting I still think that everybody left the group meeting with at least some sort of idea of what to do for one other CCR's meaning that the meeting was successful and quite useful.

Here's a picture of my group!

CCR QUESTION #2

 Hello blog!

 For this blog post I'm going to be answering my second CCR question:  how does your project engage with audiences and how could it be distributed as a real media text?

 For our film we made many choices in order for the audience to be able to relate to our film. our target audience is young adults and teenagers that could relate to the characters seen in our film. By showing relatable characters that go through everyday life struggles under just going through the Journey of adolescence and self-discovery we relate to the people watching our film. Our film also is targeted to appeal to the lgbtq audience,  we include a little representation in our film and we show many different types of relationships and how teenagers navigate through their love lives as well as trying to go on a self discovery journey.   In order to reach your target audience we have to be able to distribute the film,  we plan to distribute our film through social media, YouTube and maybe even some Film Festival submissions. This way we can distribute our film without a lot of additional costs to us and still be able to get it out to our Target audience.

Since I now have the first two questions of my CCR answered I'm going to be writing my script below. and my first CCR I will be answering my first two questions, the one that I talked about in my previous blog post and the one that I previously answered above. 

So for this first CCR I'm going to be putting a lot of questions in a jar and I'm going to pick them out of the jar and from then I'm going to answer the questions.  I'm going to put the questions down below.

What is your target audience and why did you choose it?

What social groups does your film represent and how do they represent them? 

Why did you choose the main characters for representation in your film?

How would you plan to distribute this project?

Why did you choose the coming of age genre? 

What convention do you challenge in your phone opening?

What are some choices that you made that successfully represent the characters in your film ?

Does your project successfully engage where its target audience?

 I will continue to keep you updated on my process and I'm going to  talk about my other CCR and my next few blog posts!

 PS  I didn't really have any pictures to include in this blog post so here is a picture of the number 2 below 

CCR

Hello blog!

I'm starting the research for my CCR. I did miss this lesson while I was at STN so shout out to the amazing Lee for giving me her notes :) 

A CCR is a creative critical reflection and what that is is a reflection of the process of making the video and everything that came along with it.  there's four questions that we have to research and in this blog post I'm going to talk about the first one.

The first question is how does your project use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues. Well first of all our film is a Coming of Age movie which means that this is you going to  aim to represent teenagers and young adults in the film. Our story focuses on one main character who is the hero of the story and his journey throughout the film as well as other two characters and their journeys as well. Our film focuses on themes of growing up and just finding yourself and it does include some romance that will be represented in the film but the most important thing are the characters in the film and that is where the representation comes in. I've talked about representation before in a previous blog post but I'm just going to do a quick recap of how our thumb opening represents age groups and people.

We have three main characters appearing in our film opening we have our protagonist Atticus who is a teenage boy who has a lot of trouble separating reality from the fantasy world in the movie he  go through a self-discovery journey in which he not only learns what life is about, he learns how he fits into the real world. In our phone we also introduce the character Aurora who is a strong woman who starts out as playing the role of the love interest but eventually realizes that she doesn't need a boyfriend to know who she really is and she goes into a journey of self-discovery and self love. Finally our third character Kai is portrayed as some sort of building in the film however we don't want this to be a traditional coming of age where there's a clear bully we plan to humanize and keep them Humane through the film while showing their struggles.

Now that I know more about what I'm supposed to include in my first CCR I have to figure out exactly what I'm going to do. I plan to keep researching in order to figure out exactly what I'm going to do for my first CCR but at least I know exactly what I'm going to be talking about. An idea that seems pretty cool is doing an interview about the  project. I'm going to go ahead and do more research on ccr's since I didn't miss the lesson and come back to the blog and explain exactly what I will be doing in the future.  I will keep you updated on my progress and I will continue showing how the final project is looking.

P.S. I didn't really know what type of media to use for this so I attached this picture below.

This is me trying to come up with a CCR idea...

Foley!

 Hello blog!

For this blog post I'm going to talk all about the Foley sound. Even though most of the opening is going to be music and it's going to have a lot of natural sound that came from the camera we are going to use fully to create some sounds that we're going to need in the opening that we weren't able to film on site. Below I'm going to attach a video of Lee creating the sounds and this  is what we're going to use in the opening.

 

I'm really excited about how the project is coming together and I can't wait to keep updating you on the progress! 

Starting to edit!!!

 Hello blog!

We finally started editing!  Lee is taking up most of the editing in this project but all of us will also be helping out. While Lee edits most of the big project I have decided to take it upon myself to figure out how we're going to do the credits in the film opening. As I've talked about in previous blogs I had a vision of doing the credits in a way that they appear to be handwritten into the opening. This has been a little hard for me to figure out specifically because I'm not a graphics person so making graphics has always been a little difficult for me however I am determined to find out a way to make this work. I tried a few different platforms like canva and  Adobe After Effects amongst some other attempts in order to try to make these graphics look in the way we envision them to. 

AfterEffects: I've never really liked AfterEffects. I haven't really ever understood it. I have made graphics in it before but it has taken me a really long time to try to figure it out. I tried Watching many different YouTube tutorials to try to see if I could figure anything out but at the end of the day I just got frustrated and I kind of gave up on it. 

Canva: I love canva so much! I finally figured out how to make the graphic. it's not exactly how I imagined but it is the closest I'm probably going to get to how I want the graphic to look since I can't seem to figure out the after effects. Even then I really like this and the way it came out and I think I like the fall better than the other options that I had. Below I'm going to attach what it actually came out to look like and once I make the background transparent I'm going to have these as the credits throughout the entire film opening.

That's all for this blog post, I will keep you updated on the editing process!

Filming day!

Hello blog!

In this blog post I'm going to be talking about our big filming day.  So Madison and I just came back from our STN Trip so we had to hurry up and finish filming. Today we finally got together and finished shooting the rest of the scenes that we needed. However, we did run into some issues... we were supposed to film this Saturday but due to some scheduling conflicts we are going to have to divide our filming once again and film most of the scenes this week and the final few smaller shots next week making us fall a little behind however I know that our team will get it together and be able to finish production as soon as possible. We already started with the editing and all we would need to do is plug in the smaller scenes next week.  Luckily we had already filmed all of Kai's scenes before Madison and I left to stn because Madison was sick on our filming day. Since I mean actor Sam is not able to film until next week we filmed all of Lee’s scenes this time.  We were able to finish production and we're almost done with our entire opening. 

I will keep you updated on the progress and on the editing next. I really do hope that there's no more issues because I really want to be done with production as soon as possible so I can focus on my CCR.  Anyways, I'm going to attach a video where my team decorated my room in order to make the scene happen and some pictures of our filming progress. 

Graphics

Hello Blog,

 For this post I’m going to talk about how we want to do the opening credits. As I mentioned my previous blog the title screen is supposed to be the comics however I don’t want that only to be the comic page I want to somehow Animated along with the rest of the credits. I’ve noticed that in many film openings are common team is that their opening credits match the theme in their films and the title graphic so this is something that I plan to incorporate into our opening since the main character draw comics we wanna make the opening credits some sort of writing or drawings along while the opening is happening. We plan to do a lot of research and watch as many tutorials possible to make this possible and be able to incorporate into our phone because we think this will be a really cool aspect of our video.

Here’s some ideas of what this might look like and we want to find a way to make them appear on screen as if they’re being written at the moment.

Until next time!

Set?

 Hello Blog!

For this blog post, I’m gonna talk about set design. We ran into a problem. We don’t exactly know where we are going to film some of the scenes. We already established that the main room that we’re gonna use is Lee’s office however we’re struggling to find a room to do Aurora scenes. We were supposed to do it in my house, however, due to a competition called STN we are not able to film until after we come back. So we were talking about splitting the filming with Lee and Mackenna and seeing if they’re able to film some of horror scenes while we’re gone. However, it doesn’t look like we’re gonna be able to do this because we can’t use Lee’s office for both of the scenes since we plan to use different angles and different shots in order for the rooms to look completely different. Instead of filming separately, we’re probably gonna film when we come back. Meanwhile, Madison and I are at STN keeping up on the progress that they’re doing back home while we’re gone. They’re working on some set to sign and building some props in order to be able to film as soon as we come back and be ready on time.

Here are some pictures of STN!

I'll you posted on my groups progress, until next time!