Final Project Week 9: CCRs

 03/29/2024

    Alright here is the last of my blog for the finishing touch I present to you my CCRs. For question one I decided to do a podcast. This podcast is set up to be an entertainment news podcast that invited me on as a director of "Miss Sarasota" for an interview and to answer some questions. For question two I decided to do a news broadcast covering a local film festival and I made an appearance as the creator of the headlining film, "Miss Sarasota," to answer a few questions for the segment. For question three my group and I decided to do a director's cut that would appear on the bonus content of a DVD copy of "Miss Sarasota." There we each answered some questions that fans would have asked us. And finally, for question four, I did a slide show presentation as the director and editor of "Miss Sarasota". I framed it as something I would have posted on my blog for my followers who were interested in the film if I were actually making a film. All of the CCRs are linked at the bottom of this post. Overall, this was a fun project and while there were some ups and downs I am so glad I took this class and was able to learn and improve my skills in a subject I am interested in. Until next time, have a great day!

CCR Question 1

CCR Question 2

CCR Question 3

CCR Question 4

Final Project Week 9: Miss Sarasota

 03/29/2024

     I am so excited to finally share the final product of my film opening titled "Miss Sarasota!" Follow Harper and Nia, two best friends, as they navigate the hardships of life, senior year, and wanting to get out of their boring town of Sarasota. I hope you enjoy it!

Final Project Week 9: Bloopers

 03/18/2024

    So I finally finished editing. Despite popular belief the longest part and hardest part of editing are not the same thing. I would say the longest part was shorting through all the film and decided on which shots to use and where to cut them but the hardest part was most definitely the sound. Being able to muffle the background noise just enough so the audio sounds clear but not to the point of it sounding muffle or underwater. Another factor that I don't think a lot of people realize when it comes to sound is making sure it all sounds cohesive. For example, some clips were very quite or very loud for some reason so I had to go in and make it the same volume which is a little hard to tell and you have to make sure you cut it off at the right point so it does not sound like the dialogue is being cut off, every second counts. However, after sorting out what footage was usable and what was not Hannah took all of the bloopers and made a blooper reel with it. I pushed for a blooper reel since one of the CCRs we are all doing is a director cut segment something you would find on a DVD copy of a film under the extra content and I brought up how a lot of the time the bonus content also has some behind the scenes footage. I thought it would also be fun to show everything that went into the process on this blog not just the final project so it is my pleasure to show you the Miss Sarasota Blooper Reel.

Blooper Reel

Final Project Week 9: Editing

 03/27/2024

    So I finally cut everything down to as close as it can be. I am a little upset since a lot of the scenes feel a bit rushed but there is very little I can do without taking more away from the story. We started off our plans by wanting longer and drawn-out shots to help set the atmosphere and mood. I wish we had a little more run time to work with but I digress. Anyway, moving forward, I moved on to sound now that everything is cut together. All of the clips have a slight buzzing sound but with a denoise effect and a parametric equalizer effect but when it came to the mall scenes I wanted to keep a bit of the echo and background noise as I think it fits with the mise-en-scene of the scene but I had to toe the line between that and having too much noise were it sound unprofessional. On the other side of that line is having the sound be too muffled where the dialogue cannot be heard. After I finished up with sound I noticed some of the video was lagging a lot especially where I had a lot of graphics back to back for the title card. I of course went to my best friend at this time, Google, and looked into what could fix this. This is how I learned about the magic of rendering. After two minutes of struggling, I finally found the button and everything ran a lot smoother but I had to re-render everything every time I edited the footage and I still did not figure out how to get around that. Overall, everything is coming together and I really do believe I will get this done on time!

Final Project Week 9: Final Steps

 03/26/2024

    The task of the day is to cut done our project as much as possible. I went into class today to sit down with my group and I played what I had to them and asked for their opinions on what to cut. I then sat through the project about 15 times and continued to find parts to cut. I am nervous that we will still be a little over but it's better in my opinion to be a little over and still have a quality project I do not want our project to suffer from the amount of cuts being made. In the meantime, I am continuing to work out the scripts for my CCRs and I will link my Word doc that I'm using to plan out everything. So far I recorded my podcast and director's cut with Paris and Hannah. Slowly everything is coming together!

CCR Planning

Final Project Week 8: Editing and CCRs

 3/24/2024

    The end of high school senior year is stressful let me tell you. Balancing this class's final project along with my other classes, and work, and still finding the time to prom dress shop is exhausting, but we trek on. This past weekend I finished cutting all of the footage together and was planning to ask the rest of my group for their opinion and help with editing the sound. However, the runtime of our film opening right now is over a minute over the time limit so I was also going to ask my group what they think we should cut. In the meantime, I started to work on my CCR responses and started to write the script for my podcast response to hopefully record tomorrow. I am a little stressed about finishing everything on time but the more I work on it the more it settles my anxiety. I also got an extra day off work to finish up this project so hopefully my group and I finish strong.

Final Project Week 8: Music Permissions

 03/19/2024

    Currently, our group struggling with technical difficulties, so we decided to take care of our music and ask for permission to use the songs we are using. We ended up using about four songs though many of them were only used for a couple of seconds in the car as a song the characters skip but we still wanted to ask for permission. 

Songs we used include:

- "De Selby pt 1" by Hozier

- "Say It Ain't So" by Weezer

- "House of Gold" by Twenty One Pilots

- "My Immortal" by Evanescence

    However, we were only able to find the email for two of the artists' teams (Hozier and Weezer), and for the other two we had to resort to contacting them through social media (we used Instagram) since nowhere on their websites or social media pages was an email listed. I will attach the photos of our messages at the end of this post!

    Additionally, I decided to start to plan out my CCRs since Mr. Z went over the rubric today in class. I decided to try to do 4 responses and maybe three if my time is cut short. For the types of media I definitely was to do a podcast for question one (maybe question two), a director commentary style video for question three, and I wanted to make a magazine-style article for one of my responses and potentially a movie poster for our short film. I am going to start off by writing out scripts for the podcast and video so I can record those as soon as possible.

Week 6 Final Project: Last Day of filming

 03/08/2024

    Today we finished up filming the mall scene (finally). Overall, everything went really smoothly film-wise, our camera had battery and was working, our mic was working, and we were still able to film in the mall. The only thing I am worried about again is the audio since the mall had background music and people were walking back and forth between shots but I am hoping that it will add to the scenes to have a bit of noise since it is taking place at a mall. However, worse comes to worse I can try and lower the volume of any background noise in post or we can dub over the clips if needed. Since next week is spring break for us I am hoping to get some editing done so at school I can focus on the CCRs. Hannah has all the footage so after she uploads it to a thumb drive I was planning to pick it up so I can start to work on it. We also agreed that while I will start on the main project Hannah will work on the blooper reel since that is something we all really wanted to do and it would be too much for one person to do both. The only concern I had while filming was some of the patrons at the mall who would just stare at us. While yes you do not see a clan of teenagers (Josie and Kai were also there for cameos and moral support) with filming equipment on the regular at this mall no one said anything to us so I assume it was fine for us to film. Now we can move into the post-production stage of our project and as always I will keep updating to my blog on how it goes!

Finale Project Week 6: Filming Problem

 03/07/2024

    So today we dealt with something unexpected, to say the least. Today in class Hannah walked in and she had dyed her hair from purple to red. At first I did not piece together what this meant for our project till Hannah told me. She had this realization after washing out her impromptu hair dye, we had not finished filming and now her character's hair color would have changed suddenly from one scene to another. We started to brainstorm, we talked about putting her in a hat but that would not match up with the scenes we already had filmed, we tossed around the idea of trying to fix it in post but we are not confident in our abilities to make that look professional, we even brought up a wig or using hair chalk but quickly decided against it as it would not look the same. After all of this Hannah came up with an idea that might just work, we wrote in an explanation. We decided to instead of cutting straight to the empty mall we would cut to the mall bathroom and have a scene where Hannah's character dyes her. We decided to go with this as it would make the most sense continuity-wise since our opening takes place in one day and it would add a bit of humor to it, it's almost absurd to dye your hair in a mall bathroom. It also plays into the rebellious teenager stereotype that we are trying to convey through Harper, she is someone who makes rash decisions and rarely thinks before she acts. I also started to edit a bit of the opening with some of the opening credits. I also wanted to post some photos of Hannah's hair color to show how trying to redye it in a short time would not match how it used to be.

Before

After

Final Project Week 6: Representation

 03/04/2024

    To help us catch up in our textbook, Mr. Z assigned us some assignments focusing on representation in media. This not only gives us a break from our final project but allows us to conduct more research to help us get a better grasp and understanding of media representation and how we want to represent the characters in our film project. We were assigned activities 3.14 and 3.16 which took a look at how marginalized communities are represented and how specific topics are represented. For activity 3.14 I worked with Hannah and when we picked out what groups we wanted to take a look at we picked groups either we ourselves could relate to or groups we found interesting, especially in their portrayal in media. Picking groups we also identify with allows for a greater level of insight into their portrayal since we see ourselves in them and it makes negative portrayals all the more impactful since it directly harms the views others have on us. For activity 3.16 I worked alone and researched some films to see how they either reinforced or countered the list of topics that were provided. It was really interesting to see the effect some films' messages are even if they were unintentional. Media really does shape the view of the audiences and I think media companies have a responsibility to make sure the media they produce is not contributing to harmful stereotypes as it could harm whole communities of people. I attached both of my assignments if you would like to take a look at exactly what I researched this week.

Activity 3.14

Activity 3.16