Answer and Reflect

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

    Hey everyone today it’s time to get serious and dwell into these reflections. I need to first say I’m incredibly grateful to be given an opportunity to create and develop media that represents others. I want to break down the question above into a much more concise and clear understanding. 

    The question is asking for me to answer acknowledge is this the usual way things are normally done for the media industry and who does my opening show, talk about and how? Is it bad or good, is normal or abnormal. As noted there are TWO parts in this question. 

    First, is whether or not I follow the rules of a film in the dystopian genre. I want to be clear, I took inspiration from many other dystopian film openings , but I believe in some scenes especially during the beginning was more uncommon. During the beginning we introduced a breaking news channel and it captures the audiences attention by waking up and being alerted. I feel that this scene is different since in most dystopian openings contain an establishing shot and a clear view of the society. In ours we didn’t. We had to work what we had and this just help us establish the chaos and anger in OUR society and I believe it was the most important part in our opening. However, later on we did include an establishing shot of the area we call “the selection” to show the isolation and darkness to the society. In turn this follow dystopian films since it’s very common. We used no music or special effect to establish a clear sound design of a dystopian environment to create the sense of unease which is as well commonly incorporated in dystopian films.

    Secondly,I want to address the costume, most people won’t analyze as much but I want you guys to keep in count. I know we’ve agreed on keeping the society the same, but just in every society there lies a monarchy. Our two charcter are a representation of that. Lily (Oliva) is much more in the lower ranks of the society but she still wears the exact clothing as Livy, but keep in mind the accessories. We wanted it to be clear that regardless of having the same clothes, the same house, there will always be something else to set them apart. No one can stay the same. When looking at the film, which will soon be completed. We included our characters to wear headbands and shows. Lily has a black headband, showing off her aggression, anger and lower rank. While Livy wears a white headband, indicating her innocence, loving and high rank. The opening shows a contrast between both the rich and the poor, it highlights the economic inequality even in a “perfect” society.  

    I hope you’ll understand the importance of our opening and how addressing everyhting that create a clear understanding of ITS importance. Have an awesome day see you guys later!

Behind the scenes

 Post production 

    Hey there! Today I was just finishing up some touches in my editing process, and a LOT Of things came up. You see after recording our opening we had to edit it. Meaning we had to remove any extra footage we didn’t need, shorten it, add audio to it , add extra foley sounds, and possibly but not confirmed yet, some special effects.

    I honestly couldn’t imagine how troublesome the extra footage was, but honestly It was so worth it. I’m so excited for the final product and I honestly believe that we’re getting more and more closer to the final draft. There are however some bumps in the road. You see, we haven’t been able to record Vicky’s mom again for the news channel scene, or record her extra dialouges which has lengthen dramatically our post production stage. You see, she’s been away for work and having her away means we haven’t been able to re-record that. She told us she’ll be back for NEXT weekend and if lucky maybe even earlier. Having this in mind the instability of this and the situation has threaten our recording. We beileve that if she’s not here by Tuesday, we will just have to continue without her and use another actor. 

    Anyways we can’t stress about that so much since we should strive forward for now. We began editing more seriously today and discussing the sound effects we will add, and record most of the dialouges. The problem we’re facing now is whether or not we want to include background music. I feel like it loses a lot of the dystopian environment in the film and it will lose its realistic approach. In most dystopian movies they don’t contain any background music but since in our film there’s a lot of scenes where there’s little to no audio and we’re not sure if that silence should stay like that. Finally, we concluded that it much better and realistic to leave it as is and to move forward. 

    All that’s left is to get the voice overs from Vicky’s mom and reshoot that ONE scene and we can finally finalize our project! AHHH IM SOOOOO EXICTED!

Coming up

 Snip, cut and repeat

    Hello, hello and hello! For all of those who haven’t been here for a while or first time meeting me. Im Sofi and I’ve been working on my film project for the past 4-5 weeks.

This project is only the opening of our movie idea and hopefully we can capture you guys attention with it as well. 

Edit and add 

    I was under the impression that editing would be the next thing but boy was I wrong. Don’t get me confused I am going over the editing process but I want to review soemthing that happened along the way. 

    

    We took EXTRA shots for every scene to make sure we can find the perfect ones for them to have a seamless transition.oh my gosh. Tell me why we had SO much footage to cut out. Each scene had around roughly 8 different shots from the SAME angle. And holding around 15 scenes, that was 120 different shots of the same angle. Me and Vicky had to go through it all together, luckily we same a bunch a time helping each other out by discussing which one worked with which and which ones needs to shorten.

   

    In the end this was only just the FIRST part of editing and I’m already getting tired of it. I’ve never been the best at editing but I’ve always wanted to be. Hopefully I’ll be able to get in some practice to be better in shape. We honestly called it a day because it was taking long. In end we finally got all of our clips in ready to go into editing diabetic sounds. 

Onwards!!

  1,2,3 ACTION!

 

    Good evening everyone, after todays long shooting session we were finally able to finish our shots. I feel like it was a super successful, now just comes the long hassling process of editing. I’m NOT excited for that, but it must be done. Anyways I really want to go into detail what we did.

 

The filming 

    We decided that our film was going to be taking place at night time, we felt it gave much more of a mysterious idea of it and i felt that it was the best thing we could’ve done. There just were a lot of things that we didn’t considered.  First was definitely lighting, since recording took over a span of three days had to take shots during the night time. Most of it was done indoors, but some scenes, especially towards the end, was outside. I’m not sure if it’s cause summer is coming or just because of the area we live in but oh my gosh. It was INFESTED with mosquitoes and insects. I’m currently holding the world record of mosquito bites in both my arms and legs.  Anyways there wasn’t much we could’ve done to combat that other than having to split our filming days into three so we don’t get even MORE bitten.

 

    Anywho, we did change a few scenarios in our filming like we are including a background diagetic dialouge of the new channel suddenly go offline and that’s what cause our charcter (Olivia aka lily) to sit on the couch and change the channel. It saved us so much time by not making us have to use a mirror technique of an extended news channel. It also created this cool lighting effect that I found really mesmerizing.

    Lastly, I really wanted to incorporate some futuristic and technological feature in my film and I felt like an ACTUAL camera footage of her waiting outside for lily was the best one. Down below you can see what I mean.

 

    Thank god for Vicky’s tripod because without it we wouldn’t been able to stablize our cellar devices to record and make the whole thing a shaky mess. In the end we were Anel to overcome to much the past days, and I’ve learned that it’s super important to wear some sort of mosquito repellent when filming during night and invest in a tripod. Here’s some upcoming problems, we decided to record in MY house and my air conditioner can be really loud. In turn, some recording in where we had to speak had really loud air conditioning in the background which you can’t really hear my voice. No fear though cause that’s just tomorrows problem (the editing process). I’m just glad we got to finish everything with filming.

I am not gonna waste my shot!

 One shot 

  Hello there! This weekend I got to spend my Saturday recording one scene. The process wa s much harder than expected, w head to overcome a bunch of obstacles and tackle a huge issue in our production. I want o be clear about our thinking process before I dwell more into what went wrong.

 

The process

 

    When conducting this shoot, we decided to write a script for our actor to read along and follow what to say to the exact vowel. I cant emphasize how important it is to have either a storyboard or a script, this made the shooting much more smoother than what I expected. I don’t have the photo but when you watch our clips you will see exactly what we said. We decided to write it down on paper, it seemed much more convenient and easier for the actor to read.

 

    Upon shooting though, that’s when complications arose. We decided to go with one the methods I mentioned last post. And use a TV to illustrate the breaking news to make it much more convenient. We needed this clips to be 15 – 20 seconds long, we found a videos that was 1 minute long. You may think thsi would have much issues, but whenever you actors forgets a line or makes a mistake you need to reshoot no? That can take up to three different shoots and majority marks the end of the background video. As shown above you can see this error.

 

   However, thanks to Vicky’s mom memorization skills, we were able to tackle this obstacle. Even if it took a few tries we were able to get a green finished product. I believe this was our best shoot and no green screen was necessary!

 

  Although, it doesn’t seem AS realistic, and our actor did seem to have her eyes glazing elsewhere, we hope to reshoot using the green method soon as there nothing wrong with having extra footage! That’s all for today see you guys next time!