Group Meeting Reflection 2

Yesterday we had our second group meeting where we discussed post production and plans for our CCR as we begin to wrap up our portfolio project.

During the meeting, We all talked about where we were in our production/post-production process and most of us were on the same page. Aside from a couple of reshoots and some light editing, we're all pretty much finished working on our film opening. We went around showing our peers our group opening and gave each other feedback and suggestions. When it was my turn, we got a lot of positive feedback with only a couple suggestions about altering the establishing shots to include the opening credits during the montage.

DaVinci Resolve

Also, one of my group members found an amazing editing software that I used today to add the credits to the film opening. I'd never heard of DaVinci Resolve but it was honestly a lifesaver, Adobe Premiere is a nightmare to use. Although I still found myself looking things up constantly to find out how to do certain things, I found that DaVinci was a lot easier to navigate and was a lot more straightforward, which eased the editing process a lot. 

We didn't really discuss any ideas for our CCR, and I'll be honest I still have no idea what I want to do for mine other than having the questions answered. (Edit: I came up with some ideas and updated my CCR posts accordingly!!!) So for now there's not much of an update I can provide for my Critical Creative Reflections process.

Overall, meeting with other groups helps us get someone else's perspective for our project and even though there wasn't that much advice given, we still got great feedback which assured that we are on the right track for our film opening. I'm really excited to get everything finished and uploaded so that we can start wrapping up.

4th And Final CCR

Script for third CCR, "How did you integrate technologies- software, hardware and online- in this project?"

Script For 3rd CCR

  Script for third CCR, "How did your production skills develop throughout this project?"

Answering CCR Question 2

 Script for second CCR, "How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?"

Starting my CCR

We have finally reached the point in our project where we're wrapping up and can begin working on our individual Critical Creative Reflection. Although I'm excited to being so close to done, I can't believe how much time has passed and how much our group has accomplished in the last six weeks. With only two weeks left to work on this portfolio project, I've begun brainstorming some ideas for how I want to present my CCR. Although I do already have some ideas, I feel like they're a little ambitious for the time we have left to work on the CCR, so I might have to go back to brainstorming so I can create something doable with my time limit. My original idea was to do some sort of talk show where I played both the host and interviewee to create something more fun and creative.

The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon

Again, not sure how I plan to execute this and the idea might change completely if I can come up with something more feasible,  but for now I wanted to create a script so I could have the question answered at least and make brainstorming easier.

Script for first CCR, "How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?" :

"Our film is a Coming-of-Age film which follows pretty much the same themes of the genre. We wanted to utilize characteristics shared in other coming-of-age films like themes of personal growth and change, as well as characters facing some sort of challenge for the first time in their life where they have to make a choice that highlights how far they've come. Our main character Jordyn, is a teenage girl who wants to make something of her last year in high school, to make lifelong memories before she's fully grown up, and in that desperation she loses sight of what is most important, her best friend Amelia. Although we embraced a lot of the coming-of-age genre conventions, we really wanted to avoid showing Jordyn in a negative light throughout her journey. We wanted to step away from the stereotypical portrayal of teenagers in media and not create characters that real teenagers couldn't relate to. I can't speak for all teenagers when I say this, but nothing is less engaging than seeing media constantly show us as moody, disinterested, and using outdated slang. We wanted to keep our dialogue as realistic as possible, and wanted our audience to be able to see themselves in Jordyn and sympathize with her through all the mistakes she makes. Jordyn is flawed, she's stubborn and impulsive and the plot is driven by her constant misdirection. But she is also compassionate and adventurous, she's a well rounded character which allows teenagers to see themselves in her."

Editing Effects

Since our groupmate Elke was doing most of the editing process, when we met up yesterday we tried to figure everything out so that the process would be a lot easier for her. We spent a lot of our meeting yesterday looking for fonts that would fit the tone and aesthetic we were going for. Since it's a coming of age film with a more adventurous protagonist, we wanted the fonts used for the Title and credits to reflect that. After looking through the Adobe Fonts website, we found a couple that we felt would suit our film opening and the title, "18 Before 18".

Font we selected

With our fonts and sound selected and our clips edited, all that was left to do was for Elke to put it all together. She has been sending us updates and so far we all really like how the film is coming together. I would've liked for all of us to keep meeting up together to continue editing it, but with our schedules and the deadline coming up we figured it'd be easier if one person did it, so Elke volunteered to edit the film opening for us. Other than that, I really want to add some sort of edit to make the lighting a bit warmer since it feels too harsh and sterile in the school shots for the mood we want to create. Ideally, lighting would be completely in our control, but because we were filming at our school the best we can do is fix it in post production, since we cant change school lighting.

Sound Editing Process

After countless delays we finally began editing our film opening. With only a couple of shots left to film of the school, our project has finally made it to post production. The first part of the process was to get all the clips and sort through all the takes. Since we filmed on my phone because I have the best quality, I was in charge of going through all the clips and finding the best takes before uploading them to one drive so my group partner Elke could begin to edit on Adobe Premiere.

After we had selected all of our clips, Elke arranged them in order of the storyboard and trimmed them so we could match the different cuts. With that done, we decided to meet up earlier today so that we could begin editing together. We spent most of our time looking for sound effects and sounds we could use for the film opening like the sound of the school bell or the background music because we ended up not getting clearance for the Inhaler song, "It Won't Always Be Like This". Since we couldn't use that song, we had to find another royalty free song that had the same tone we were originally going for. It was honestly a bit of a hassle to try to find another song last minute because we really wanted to make the Inhaler song work. After searching through Spotify for small artists we could possibly DM, we settled for this royalty free website and found a song we all really liked, "Right Now" by Nicolas Major.

With the song choice out of the way, we just had to look for a couple more sound effects before wrapping up the sound portion of the editing. Since most of the scenes were long, there weren't that many clips to edit together and the easy part of the process had been completed.

Wrapping Up

 Although we finished the main part of our filming last week, before we can  start editing we had to film a couple of montages to add to the opening and for the title sequence. For the opening montage, we wanted to have a way to visually represent Amelia and Jordyn's friendship using photos they've taken and creating a small montage with them.

Pictures we used

We hadn't thought the montage through and how we wanted to go about filming it, but after some discussion we found an idea we were all happy with. We decided to print out the photos of Amelia and Jordyn and have them set on a white background to resemble polaroid pictures and add them to a door to represent Jordyn's bedroom.

Our Finalized Montage:

We also wanted to film a series of short clips of the school to create another montage for the title sequence to establish the setting. For this we just went around the school and selected angles that we liked so that we could later film those during our lunches so that we would have shots with students to create a cohesive setting. Otherwise, we're set for filming and have nothing left to do but edit our film opening.