CCR Research

 I've started thinking more and more about my CCR and what I'm going to include to it so I continued my research and thinking about how I'm going to answer the questions. Here are questions 3 and 4. 

#3: How did your production skills develop throughout this project?

    - I feel like my production skills have improved so much with this     project because it has really made me realize how much work goes        into creating a production and how everything has to be planned or     else it will take so much longer, and how important all the            smallest details really are, such as lighting, angles, sound, and     just everything that is contributing to the film. I also feel like     I improved a lot with editing since I had to do a lot of research     on how to use a lot of things on Premiere Pro that I didn't need in     past projects like the Music Marketing Project or the One Word        Film. I believe that this project is going to showcase the best I     could have done with the editing, but I also believe that I have so     much space for improvement because I'm just starting and I still        have so much to learn and so many opportunities to improve even        more.

#4: How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware and online in this project?

    - For this project, I integrated a lot of different technologies in     order to achieve the best product. For example, the main software I     used was Premiere Pro for editing and putting together all of the     sounds and everything. I also used a software that I was already        very familiar with, which is Canva, to help me design the            production logo. For hardware technologies, we used my phone to        film since we had no access to a camera and also used it to record     foley sounds that we needed as well as the actual argument among        the parents. For lighting, we used a lamp that my mom had that        could change colors and in some shots, like the one where we show     the picture frame of Layla and Liam, we had to play with our            phone's flashlights to help the picture actually be seen, but        without having the light reflect off of it. In regards to online        technologies, I used Blogger almost every day to track my progress     throughout this whole production!

This is only an idea of what I plan on saying since I'm planning on still expanding it a lot more and elaborating on a lot, especially fro question #3. 

more editinggg

    I was on my way to Orlando so I used the time to continue editing my film. We had a little complication with the cast for the parents since we noticed that we would not be able to fit that in the two minutes of the film. We decided that we could just do a voiceover and we found the perfect part in which we could use it and it worked perfectly with the music because it was part where the music was lower. Since we didn't need the actual faces of the parents anymore, I asked my sister and her boyfriend if they could read our script and act like the parents and her boyfriend said yes immediately but my sister was not too hyped about it because she is a terrible actress. In the end, her boyfriend and his mom ended up doing it and I'm really happy with how it came out.     

    I managed to edit in the whole bike scene along with the audio of the parents arguing and it made it to 2 minutes and 25 seconds so I started cutting down a few things until I managed to get it to the 2 minutes. One of the biggest challenges I had while editing the sound after I cut some clips down was timing the part where Layla turns the music up to actually make it seem like she turned it up, but I got it eventually and I think it came out pretty well. Now I have my whole timeline ready and all I'm missing is adding all the credits in and a few more sound effects but that won't be bad at all.

    Watching the whole thing back I'm so happy with how it's coming out and I'm so excited to show you!

Group Meeting #2

     We had our second group meeting today! It was really interesting hearing and seeing everyone's ideas and how they've managed to bring their stories to life. One of the group members showed us his whole opening because his group was done with editing and I thought it was really well done! We all told him to try to fix the colors a little bit because it was different in some clips which made it look a little off but apart from that it was really good. Another group member told us all about how his schedule is not going as planned because he has had to push back a lot of stuff and he's kinda struggling so we all tried to help him work around it. We all talked about our possible ideas for CCRs and helped each other with inspiration overall. 

    I didn't have my laptop with me so I couldn't show what i had edited so far but I explained my idea and they helped me think and decide in which shot it would be best for me to put the title of my film.

    This group meeting made me realize that everyone is working on different timelines and everyone's at a different place, but it was really interesting hearing all the possible ideas that one could come up with for the film and I really enjoy hearing them talk about their film because the passion in their voice just makes it so much better. 

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 to film with a sunset in the background to act as a kind of contrast from Layla's situation, but unfortunately it was reallyyyyy cloudy today and it was kind of drizzling so the weather wasn't what we planned it to be but we managed to work around it and thought it could be good for our film if we saw it in a positive way. We thought about it and thought about how the cloudy ugly weather could be a reflection of Layla's feelings and all the emotions that are in that house.    

    We were able to finish filming fairly quickly since we already had all the shots planned ahead of time. We filmed I think one of the shots that I had the most fun with because we wanted to film her riding her bike towards the camera but while the camera was also moving, so we asked my mom if she could drive the car and me and my partner where in the trunk of the car filming while moving. I'm so excited to get to editing this part in and see how the whole thing looks put together!

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.