Tuesday, March 11, 2025
Group Meeting #2
Sunday, March 9, 2025
Final Boss: CCR
The time has come to challenge, in my opinion, the hardest final boss of them all, the Creative Critical Reflection. DUN DUN DUNNNNN. I think this has been the thing I have been dreading the entire time, since I can't get ideas from my multiple team members, and I have to figure out a creative way to describe myself through film. I know finding myself shouldn't seem so hard, but it is! There isn't much to pick out there for ideas, and I'm worried I won't be finding the right one, or two. Yes, two, it makes it even harder that I have to figure out two different creative approaches to answer all four questions! Alas, I still have to suck it up and figure it out, so I guess I'll do just that. Today I'll be discussing my initial research about this part of the project along with my CCR question #1!!!
I've first started in my Media class by taking some notes about all of the questions I need to answer in my CCR. Out if the four questions, today I will be starting with the initial battle, Question 1. Here are a few of the notes I took about question one along with all the key components I need to address to get it done right and well. So, we have question one: How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?
So, starting off, we chose to make our film opening a sci-fi film/drama. While we didn't 100% get the traditional sci-fi parts of the movie down, since there aren't many futuristic/science references throughout the film, our film would seem to rely more on the drama parts. Opening immediately in a time loop, the audience can tell something unnatural is happening, but without the futuristic appeal of a normal sci-fi movie. This does NOT follow the normal conventions of a sci-fi film, but we had reasons of doing so. Honestly, we didn't really want to have any science parts in our film opening, or film at all for that matter. It didn't really fit into the plot of our main protagonist, Alice, escaping this repetitive world while also trying to escape the confines of a struggling mental health.
Moving on, we wanted to represent the struggles of having negative mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety. We (hopefully) make it clear that she is in therapy for a much-needed reason; by showing the small stimming she is doing because of stress. The up close and personal camera shots show she feels like she is trapped within herself, while also being trapped within the name setting for an extended period of time. We also show how people with these conditions might not always have the resources they need to seek correct, useful help. While yes, Alice IS in therapy, she is being treated poorly by her therapist, as presented with the Drs. cocky and rude attitude toward her patient and others.
Saturday, March 8, 2025
A little inside peek
Well well well. What have my teammates been up to regarding the postproduction aspects of our project? We know I'm on sound effects, but what about the others?
Grace, our legend and if I could, would give her master editor of the year is our main editor for the project. She has been in charge of splicing most of the clips together to create the final look of the project. After the first edit of our project, she sent it to me, which helped me be able to determine what sound effects I needed in the different places of the film, plus the order in which I needed to place them in. So, very helpful so far! For some quick little BTS, here is Grace being literally awesome and sitting through editing in timelapse form:
Maiya is our color-coding queen! She is going to be tackling all of the aftereffects for our scenes to give each and every shot its own personal feeling and emotion. So far, we want it not to be eerie, but to be somewhat uncomfortable and confusing. We are thinking of her putting in some dim lighting, along with some more attractive colors to take out the washed-out tones that a natural I-Phone would give someone. Together we all settled on the idea of the blueish undertones throughout the movie to describe our character Alice further. In the mood board I put together a few weeks back, I wanted to incorporate a desaturated Navy/ light blue for Alice since her style is grungy.
Max is doing the credit sequences I have talked about in the past. He originally got this idea from the game GTA IV, where some of the credits were posted on the wall during an active moving scene. We all collectively thought this was a great idea and something that could make our opening so much more intriguing, and, if we pull it off right, make us look like editing pros. He did find some tutorials online to help him with this process of learning the material to make this happen, and I'm so excited to see the final product! He will also be focusing on trying to make every credit blend in with the environment and not overlap with our characters all too much. Here is a quick demo that Grace put together to set an example for what needs to be done.
Thursday, March 6, 2025
Foley Frenzy
SO. I have been assigned to do the sound part of the music video. So, what does this mean? I have to find all the sound effects needed for the project online, make some foley noises, and rerecord voice lines that are needed. I'm thinking of doing multiple takes of some of these sounds, so we would have plenty of resources to work with. However, today I'll just cover the foley chunks of the soundscape, and everything that happened with it!
Foley:
Using foley in my work have always been fun for me, and I was given the chance to do that this time! I first had the sound effects I needed in the following list:
- rec my Alice beginning voice line
- phone ringtone (marimba)
- re-record my “and how does it make you feel” line
- door opening and closing
- alarm clock sounds + clicking snooze button sound
- street noises (like birds and cars and stuff)
- footsteps (on tile and in concrete)
- wind sounds
- background music for therapists office
I decided to do around half of the sound effects as foley, to make it easy to have the perfect sound needed in our project. But, I also wanted to make it somewhat easy for a foley rookie such as myself, so I stuck to the basic foley sounds I had already learned so far this year. This being the door sounds, alarm clock, footsteps, and wind.
For the door sounds, I went back to see what type of door was being opened in closed in the scene needed, and lucky me, it happened to be the same type of door I have at my house! If I'm being honest, I took the easy non-creative way out of this one and just recorded myself opening and closing my door. This may seem dumb, as that's exactly what happened in the scene. But this will emphasize the sound, and not just let it seem into the background noise. This will also make it easier to control the volume of the noise, since all the parts, like the original sound is, will not be all in one file.
For the footsteps, I happened to have similar shoes (Converse) to what the main character was wearing (Doc Martins), which made it more realistic sounding rather than full of sneakers or crocs. I did two separate types of walking for each setting, which gave more variation to decide what sounds the best. One try I made the sounds just from the bare shoe, without wearing it. The second time I wore the shoes and walked in place. I ended up using the latter since it sounded and felt more realistic without having the empty feel. the shoe being somewhat muffled out because of my weight gave it a better sound.
Wednesday, March 5, 2025
Production on overload
Sunday, March 2, 2025
Secrets...
There have been so many bloopers and BTS scenes I haven't shared on here yet, so I'll try and compile a few shots together today. Plus, there's been an "easter egg" during the production of our film opening.
Clipboard:
One of my props as Dr. Schultz was a clipboard. And what goes on a clip board? Paper! And with no other paper close by, I decide on having multiple uses for our script. It being, well, the script, and it being the notes Dr. Schultz writes down about Alice. On the back of the script, we wrote two things, Alices full name, Alice Jones, and the condition she is in, her eyebags and mental state. Having the script on me at all times was pretty handy, and I got to have the most honorable title in all of filmmaking, Script Holder. Yea, yea, try not to get too jealous. But this still made it easy to just flip the script around and make the necessary changes, while also making remembering my lines all the easier.
Blooper scenes:
Friday, February 28, 2025
The Big T
One scene that took us an abnormal amount of time of was the meeting of our character T. Jacobs. Although, we were sadly not able to get the nametag prop in time, so there is no real way of figuring out his real name :(.
Lighting Issues:
When we first started setting up the scene, we realized that T. Jacobs cast a pretty noticeable shadow on the door, and we did not want this. We tried everything in our power to stop this and even brought out a very hefty flashlight to try and prevent the problem. However, this did more damage than good. The uneven spacing of shadows, the new shadow being cast, and the inevitable shining in the eyeballs did not help speed our situation up at all. We tried shooting the scene from another angle in hopes it would not show up as much, but alas, we just sucked it up and went through with the shot even though we did not expect the shadow.
Multiple Perspectives:
We also decided to film multiple angles of our shot at the same time. This not only gives us more footage to work with but makes it easier for the detail work for the time loop. This scene is the most prominent when referring to our time loop, and by shooting at multiple angles, it makes it 100% tat every movement will be the exact same, just at a different angle. We didn't want to use the same angle twice for our film opening, as it could seem repetitive and un-intentional. One of our perspectives (shot on a tripod), intended for after the time loop, shows our character Alice in the shot as well. This shows both the repetition of the scene and the expression of the confused Alice, who has now gone through the same interaction for a second time.
Unplanned, but planned?
The other perspective we had shot was handheld by me. We didn't want to have a handheld shot in this scene, but we had to make up for the lack of a second tripod. I happened to have to hold the camera, since everyone else was participating in a role already. Of course, I happen to have the shakiest hands in the entire universe, so we had to retake the shot a couple of times due to my trouble. In our last shot we did, it happened to still be a little shaky, but I was reassured that this slight shakiness could be easily erased in postproduction thanks to an editing stabilizer. On the other hand, this happened to be one of the shots we had most planned for. Keeping out actor on the right third, this gave a big empty space on the wall on the left side of the shot. This will be used for the credits in post-production, as one of our group members had the great idea to put the credits on the walls instead of just on screen.
Wednesday, February 26, 2025
Oscar Winning Acting
The time has now come to illustrate our production processes. I've thought long and hard (10 minutes) about what I wanted to accomplish in my first blog post regarding this and have decided to make it a tribute to our acting.
Acting Pros:
While I'd like to say my acting was okay, it didn't compare to my group member Maiya, who played Alice. She happened to have acting classes under her sleeve, and while I'd like to challenge this as unfair to be compared to, she did amazing. However, I'd say we spent about 30 minutes waiting for us to quit laughing over the seriousness of our tones. We needed dead silence for our shots to begin, to create an empty sort of feeling to our scene. This also gave room for the eerie non-diegetic music we want to put over the scenes in post-production. But yes, how could we all resist laughing when we are all staring at each other in dead silence, we aren't professionals okay?
Some of these shots we happened to have made up on the spot. While we tried our very hardest to plan out absolutely everything before our filming date, sometimes we would be struck with a really cool idea we wanted to try. One of these shots happened to be a 180-degree loop around. This shot turned out SO awesome. It held so much depth from the emotion from her acting, and the significance of this reflecting on how Alice is thinking. She focused on creating her voice to truly show the terror Alice is feeling in the moment, while providing hand gestures to further capture the worry and tension going through her mind. Plus, by doing this, the camera is almost trapping her from all sides, which helped to center on the confusion Alice is feeling after being sent back in time to do her therapy session again.
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Here's a cute little BTS pic of the two of us! |
All seriousness aside, we had so much fun doing these scenes together and the fun little acting moments we had.
Tuesday, February 25, 2025
Time Traveling...
I'm pretty sure this is the last planning post I have to do for this insane journey. While I'm sad this fun project is soon ending, good RIDDANCE to planning. As I've said, all we have been focusing on is planning planning planning. So, I'm happy the next step in our production process is soon going to be underway. Since we finished filming everything last week, I'll try to "time travel" and go over our planning process for that day.
It Twas the night before Chirstm- filming, when all through the group, everything was stirring, especially our time loop. Hopefully you enjoyed my short cheesy rendition of The Night Before Christmas poem. Anyway, we did a LOT.
Where to?
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These were a few example rooms I found from the website. |
I covered in detail our actual filming location last week; however, we had many more plans before we settled down on that location. In the midst of our planning process, we were concerned about where we were going to film the two scenes we had in mind, our main therapy scene and the outdoor scene. For the therapy scene, we came close to settling down on renting out an office building for $30 and hour, which contained a desk and two chairs. Luckily, we didn't settle down on this because I barely have 5 dollars, oops! But our main reason, besides the other hassle of having to pay, was that this restricted us from added more spice and character to our room. We wanted to show off a little bit of Dr. Schultz personality in the room, and a pre-decorated room just wasn't going to cut it. Plus, it ended up taking us 3 whole hours. 90 dollars for a room? Heck no. Then, one of my group members offered her house for filming, and it turned out to be perfect!
When to?
Our schedules turned out to be a bit conflicting, and with a whole week of production posts ahead of us, we wanted to get filming done as soon as possible. So, we chose the Sunday before the planned production week! This gave us plenty of time to do our blog posts for this week, started our editing process quicker than anticipated, and took the stress of filming off our minds. But, what time of day to film? Our therapy session was set to be in the afternoon, so we scheduled our meet up a few hours in advance to shoot the indoor scenes before heading outdoors, with a good 30 minute to 1 hour leverage period. Sadly, at least for one of my group members, this did mean beginning to get ready at around 12:00, to start shooting at 2:30.
Sunday, February 23, 2025
Dress to Impress + Bonus
We just finished filming a couple hours ago... and let me tell you, it was spectacular! One of my favorites, if not my favorite thing I have filmed so far this year. The well thought out sets, lighting, costumes, script and just about everything helped put our thoughts together to create out best possible outcome. Today I will discuss our use of props and costuming to create the full effect of our characters and the setting around them.
Costumes:
My character was somewhat easy to portray through costuming. We wanted for her to be seen as "perfect" which is where the nice white blouse came in, also showing professionalism. I was lucky to have a mom who not only has 1, 2, or 3, but 8 white blouses in her wardrobe. So yes, a lot of options. I was able to settle on a pretty long sleeve with a V-neck which was beautiful. I ended the costume with a nice pair of plain jeans.
The props I used/was associated with was my clipboard, glasses, and alarm clock. The clipboard was used just to give the therapist a more professional feel, where we even wrote down some notes about Alices character on the paper on the clipboard. The glasses also were also just used for a more aesthetical look for the therapist, with no real practical use (when I put them on, they made me blind). The alarm clock... oh let me tell you... TRAUMA. I brought my physical alarm clock to use as a timer for the session, and whenever the alarm went off, flashbacks of the noise from the tired school mornings all throughout the week. And we shot with that alarm, MANY times. The scene we decided to shoot with required perfect timing, and luckily it didn't take us too many times, but I heard definitely that clock go off more times than I wanted to. (Dr. Schultz, me! ---> )
Maiya's character, Alice, has a grungy look to her, and although we didn't have a top to her that exactly fir the color scene of Alice, it still gave the exact same feeling. She wore a long sleeve white shirt with a graphic design on it which gave the emo/grungy feeling to her character. She wore her hair up in a very messy ponytail just to emphasize her lack of trying. Also, I guess it was lucky that our actress Maiya already had some eyebags? It does fit the character, so I'd assume that's a positive.
Last but not least is T. Jacobs. Although there isn't much for his character, him being an intern for the office, he still holds an important role for the reoccurrence of specific scenes. Jacobs wears a white tee and brown pants, giving him a plain look as a background character and intern feeling to him. His probs only consist of some films he is meaning to give Dr. Schultz, when he interrupts he twos therapy session.
Saturday, February 22, 2025
Location, location, location...
What do you mean we are almost on week 5?! And we are scheduled to film tomorrow!?! These past few weeks have flown by so fast, and I'm so so so excited to start filming! But one of the main parts of filming, is yes, where you are doing it. We have struggled to solidify our locations in the past, but luckily this time we know what we are doing. So today, ill cover just that, everything about where we are filming!
P.S. Not looking too good for the Williem Dafoe cameo, as said in the message, they were supposed to reach out after 4 hours... and here, almost 24 hours later... nothing. :C
Who, what, WHERE:
We have decided to do what we did for a previous project, film at my teammate Grace's home. An impractical 15-mile drive, but hey, it's worth it! She wonderfully took the time to design her own set from furniture she found around her home, and created this masterpiece:
But that's not all, Grace has not only been our lovely hosts but also has lighting equipment! She said the light isn't too professional, but a light is a light. This will be able to light up the characters faces a tad if we need it and provide different perspectives in how the two main characters are used.
Friday, February 21, 2025
Audio is Our Savior + Mysterious Bonus
You may think visuals are the most important part in storytelling... well if you do, think again! Audio is one of the most essential aspects of media, and without it, confusion takes over. Audio is probably the most crucial part of our film. This will make or break us. Well, obviously, it will not be doing the latter, because, well, we're awesome.
I've had my fun, now I'll go deeper with what sound means in our project, and all the cool details we have to tie it all together!
Scenes:
There are a few specific scenes I wanted to lay out where some sound techniques are vital to give the full effect in our opening. In the beginning scene, right after the beginning credits roll, Dr. Schultz's voice will slowly fade in. This gives the feeling that we are in Alice's mind, right after she has been drifting off into space. To demonstrate the time loop further, we are deciding to use specific sound motifs such as an alarm clock that goes off, our character, T. Jacobs, slamming open the door, and the repetitive ring tone from the mysterious caller. Hopefully those will solidify the time loop, as we have always been given the question during our process, "How will you know it's a time loop?"
Foley (yay!):
Foley has always been so fun to me and I'm happy it was basically a requirement to have in our project. We are deciding to use these for sounds unique to our soundscape, and other noises that would be quite easy to create. Noises such as footsteps, door creaking, and maybe even a personal ringtone???
Other Resources:
We will try and make our lives easier by just accessing free, license-free (yes, a lot of free) sounds from sites to use for most of our sounds. A couple of websites recommended to us were freesound.org and pixabay.com. I've used these two websites in the past to help me with my soundscape project, so I believe these would be reliable resources. But after mainly utilizing these easily found sounds, we will rewatch our project to see any other spaces that need to be filled with foley sounds.
Plus... we are perchance discussing whether we should or should not compose our own music for the opening. I doubt this will be the case, but my teammate Grace talked to me about a way that could make the process easy, plus she had some experience in the past!
Mysterious Bonus:
Two words, Williem Dafoe. What in the world does this have to do with anything you may ask? We contacted him today in the hopes to try and get him on our project. Trust, we have high hopes this will work out for us. If you need proof.... look no further.
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