One last time

 Final reflection

Hey everyone, I can’t believe it’s finally come. This is going to be my last conversation with you guys, I mean not last, LAST but about this two month long project.

Let’s starts from the beginning, I want to talk about the class actually. Before coming into aice media I was fully convinced this was just going to be about social media and in some way, sort of similar to a marketing class. Don’t get me wrong, this is integrated in the class, just in a bigger way. Aice media dwells into ALL media, I did not media had more than one form. In all seriousness, Aice media was much more better than what I expected.  

When we got introduced to the project, this was rather early in the year, before we actually began. We started our research on different movie themes and genres. I full on fell inlove with coming to age and comedy movies. I knew though that the biggest hurdle would be definitely the dialogue and script. In turn, we would need actors if I continued with these genres. Luckily I decided to work with someone else, Victoria. She was a massive help with well just about everything. Having an extra hand was so much better then doing eveything myself. In a past post I described how I have been so used to working by myself since I’m a perfectionist, and tend to try to get things done the best way possible. This can conflict a lot with other people, since my ideas wouldn’t match up with theirs or vice versa. But with Victoria things flowed much more smoothly than expected, yes at first we didn’t know what we wanted to film since she was leaning more to a horror/drama  and I was more towards a comedy/coming to age film. Two opposites. However we retraced our steps, talked a bit more and found our mutual love for dystopian based films. And that’s when the project really started. 

After discovering our shared interests in dystopian films we decided to base our off that. Now the hardest part, the plot. Just in every movie basically, our story needed a conflict. However something much more political and government based would be beneficial for our story. Luckily, after researching a bit more we discovered that we should be our characters and not have to worry about finding other actors to help us film. No offense, I really don’t mind working with others, nothing against that, but with a big project like this one, our schedule has to be flexible enough to squeeze in any extra days if needed for filming. Having extra people in our team could cause much more problems for filming dates, time we cannot bother to waste at all.

In the end we developed our plot and began brainstorming ideas for our storyboard. We knew that in our opening we had to find a way to introduce our characters and their personalities so dialogue was needed. Another detail was that we needed a location for the “selection” we felt that the selection should be introduced right away to spark a conversation and excitement for the film. We can’t spoil too much of the film or else it wouldn’t be an opening. There was just so much to consider at this point. We immediately starts story boarding our ideas and combined them together, lastly we created a script for the small dialogues our opening had.

Then came production. Here is where most problems lied. You see first was that we what wanted this opening to be taken place during the evening, the lighting help spark a much more darker atmosphere and something amidst, you know? We had to film during the weekend to get these shots, however with daylight savings the sun set much later causing us to stay up late filming. This really messed up my sleeping schedule, cause the only days we could film was on a Sunday. We tried Saturday but Victoria had to leave earlier. In the end filming was just all over the place and being on a tight schedule wasn’t helping. Luckily, having eveything all done and written out, both our shots and dialogue. We were able to finish filming in the span of three days.

Lastly it was editing. Oh the horror. I’ve never in my life edited a video, well I have. In my pasts projects I’ve edited shots and angles and audios. SEPARATELY. I’ve never edited BOTH of them together. Not only did we had to add extra audio to emphasize certain a scenes we also had to decrease some audios to make the dialogue much more louder and clearer. Furthermore, who was going to tell me transitions were hard? I simply thought that just putting videos together can create a seamless transition. Boy was I wrong, I had to find transition and certain points in videos to create those transitions. Luckily, it was just a two minute video and editing also took around 2-3 days   to fully be completed.

This project was hectic but I learned so many valuable lessons, in teamwork, organization, editing, filming and patience. All these obstacles I feel have certainly made me not just a better filmmaker, but a better person. I’m so grateful to be given this opportunity, and I can’t wait for the next!