Group Meeting #2

 We had our second group meeting today

Finally Finished Filming!

    We were finally able to finish filming today after having to change our schedules because of the complication we had on Friday. Our original idea was 

Starting My CCR!!

    Since I'm almost done with the whole film, it's time to start planning for my Creative Critical Reflection! 

The first question we are meant to answer for the CCR is: 

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

    For this question I'd talk about how my film followed the genre conventions of how coming of age films follow a character's development. The most common theme seen in this genre is either first love or friendship, but my film challenged that and my main focus is more on self-development as Layla has to go through this tough time of losing her brother and she is mostly alone because her parents are always fighting now so she turned to alcohol to cope. The film represents common issues that teenagers are now going through which is alcohol abuse and addiction. The overall mise-en-scene of Layla's room is meant to represent a teenage girl's room when her mind is a total mess inside as well. This can be seen with the clothes and trash everywhere and the dirty makeup on the desk and the unmade bed and the pizza box and the cans. I think a really important part of the film that shows how teenagers are is when she takes out the alcohol from her drawer because it is very representative of how teens tend to hide a lot of what they do when they know they shouldn't be doing it or its not right. 

Major Setback

    So our plan was to finish filming on Friday but that didn't exactly go as planned..... We ran into a problem. The day was going just fine. Me and my partner had already gotten the bike down from the rack at my house and we were ready to film, we just needed our actress to get here. Once she got here, we parked the cars two houses down from mine because we needed one of the garage spaces to be open, but when we were parking, our actress got a call from her mom that she needed to go rescue her because her car wasn't turning on. So we couldn't end up filming that day because even if she went to get her mom and then come back to film, it would already be too dark to film since we wanted to film with a sunset. It was such a bummer because the sunset was so pretty on Friday and it would have been amazing to film with those colors but it wasn't anyones fault. We had to rearrange our schedule and since my partner was busy during the weekend, we are scheduling to film on Monday at 7 pm. 

This is a picture of what the sunset looked like on Friday so you can feel my pain: 

Text In Our Film

    Today, I focused on creating our production logo and finding possible fonts for the title of our film and the credits we will include throughout the opening. 

    For the production logo, I used Canva since I am very familiar and comfortable with how it works and I started playing around with templates and changing them to fit what I had in my head. I knew I wanted a dark background, preferably black, with white, bold and simple letters. I thought of the name D&G Productions because me and my partners initials are that but I am still not 100% convinced with it but for now it'll do until we come up with a better more creative one. I've never used Canva for the purpose of having it in a video so I started looking around and saw that I could animate the text so I grouped all the elements of the logo together and I started seeing which animation could work for the purpose of our logo. I ended up choosing a simple one because I didn't want it to be all over the place so I chose the "Baseline" animation which just brings in the logo from the bottom to the center. 

    For the fonts, I searched for ideas on Google Fonts and came across this one that I'm writing with right now. The name is Caveat and as soon as I saw it I knew this would be the one to use because I wanted a kind of handwriting looking font to make it seem like Layla's handwriting and give it some authenticity. I downloaded the font to my laptop and I opened Premiere Pro so I could see how it looked with the overall edited part that I have already and once I saw it, I knew this was going to be the one. As I'm writing this I also just realized that I never said what the name of the film was going to be here. We decided the name of our film would be Am I To Blame? because it helps capture the inner conflict that Layla would be having and grief from the lost of her little brother. Hearing her mom constantly tell her dad that it was his fault that Liam was gone eventually made Layla wonder if maybe she had also contributed to it, because what if she wasn't there for Liam enough? 

edit edit and more edit

     Why is editing so fun but soooooo time consuming?????? It's my favorite part of this whole process but it takes up so much of my time and energy. I spent almost my whole day today just editing everything together and I finished just 10 minutes ago. I came across some obstacles but I was able to learn and move forward.

    Before starting this class, I had absolutely no idea how to use Premiere Pro so I'm still learning how to use everything. I had to search up how to use and how to do a lottt of things, such as how to stabilize a video, how to add a zoom in, how to slowly increase the volume, what the razor tool was and how to fade out audio. I managed to learn a lot throughout this whole editing process and it made me love it even more once I started understand how more things worked. The picture to the left is what I had done today at like 6 pm and I was far from being done with that part. Once I finally finished, I realized that we had definitely overshot because I noticed I was at 1 minute and 45 seconds which was a big uhoh since we still have like half of the opening to film, so I had to spend another hour or so cutting down some clips and deleting some, but I eventually managed to get it to 1 minute and around 20 seconds, which I think should work with the other part because it shouldn't be too long.   

Smertimb Graphics. (2024, February 15). How to Stabilize Shaky Video in Premiere Pro | Stabilize Video [Video]. YouTube.                         https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XdvxwqypxQ 

Adobe Made Simple. (2023, January 25). How to Add A Basic Zoom IN And OUT In Premiere Pro [Video]. YouTube.                                 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgf5JQQVGLw

CrumplePop. (2022, September 13). How to Change Audio Level in Premiere Pro: Adjusting Volume Guide [Video]. YouTube.                     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjTduvTpu2o

chinfat. (2024, May 21). The Tool Bar - The Razor Tool - Learning Premiere Pro 2024 - Episode 30 [Video]. YouTube.                                 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qlo9LKL7IPU&t=11s

Prop Creation

     

    One of our props for the film was a bracelet with the initial of Layla's brother, Liam, to symbolize her still holding on to his memory. For this prop, I bought a set of bead letters for bracelets since I would need the L for it. It got delivered at my house the day before we started filming and I started making it as soon as I could. I decided to make it black and white because it could represent the lost of her innocent brother to whom the world was so cruel to. The black represents the pain and darkness he went through, while the white represents how an innocent soul was lost. 

    Another important prop we had to make was also related to her and her brother. I asked my actress to send me a picture of her and her brother when they were younger and she found one and sent it to me. I printed it with CVS and then used one of my old picture frames for it. I had to cut the picture a little bit because it was a little big for the frame but once I cut it it fit it perfectly. I put the bracelet on the picture frame to show them both together and to allure to the fact that they are both related to the reason Layla is having such a hard time right now.