Group Meeting #2

    Today we came full circle with the ideas we once had in the form of another group meeting. Now that our projects have been filmed and mostly finished, it was so interesting to see all the progress that all of my team members had. Except, I wasn't necessarily there for the beginning of some of their projects, since group members were all shuffled. However, one of my group members this time was a partner of one of the group members I had before. This case was especially interesting because I was aware of the progression and evolution of their plot!

    But that's not all, since the beginning of our CCR chapter was last week, this meeting was dedicated to just that. We first shared many ideas with each other to help form ideas in one another's mind, and each person managed to narrow their ideas down to some awesome creative ideas. My group this time was Marrisa, Nico, Joaquin and me!

(I took the photo again!!!)

Their Ideas:

    Nico had the idea to do a CCR reflective of the popular show, The Tonight Show. He was thinking on this, or more just like a typical game show/ talk show. I feel like this could be a really fun idea, but at the same time, the idea seemed a little basic since I have been hearing a bunch of other recommendations of similar content. Although, Nico also had the idea to do TikTok street interviews, which could be an easy way to get the questions out of the way, but I don't feel like it has that much creative flair. I recommended that maybe he be interrupted by something or someone that causes his course to go astray, making his CCR that more interesting.

    Joaquin had the most creative and unique idea of all, so unique I doubt anyone else would create something like his... he wants to make his CCR David Lynch movie themed. Honestly, I have no idea who David Lynch is, but it is his favorite movie director of all time and do what you love! Another thing he recommended, which I thought was really interesting was a section based off of the game show Hot Ones, where people are asked questions, and if they don't want to answer, they have to eat an insanely spicy chicken wing. If he copied exactly the same thing, it wouldn't be that creative, but his idea could be heavily derived from this to create a hilarious product!

    Marrisa had the idea to base her CCR off of Vouge's 73 Questions. This could be a great way to effectively answer all of the required questions while adding a creative flair to her CCR. She could walk around a creative setting, giving more creative chances to add camera movement and interesting mise-en-scene to her production. She also had the idea to do an Oscars theme for her CCR. This would be really fun, and I pitched the ide of someone booing her as she earns an Oscar, where she then has to justify her win by answering the questions.

My Ideas:

    For me, I'm pretty behind on the creative juices. All of m friends and team members for the film opening project all have well-structured and thought-out ideas, but I really don't have any. I'm honestly starting to get kind of scared and nervous because, THIS IS SERIOUS!!! I guess I could start writing my script for the answered questions before any of the creative parts so I don't waste any precious time, but I still need to figure out my creative ideas, and fast. I did come up with some, but I'm not sure if ill use it in the end. 

    One idea is me as a movie director as the camera cuts to me during a live set. I could create a new personality for this character, and it could be pretty creative, although I don't know how I will incorporate the answering of questions in this scene. 

    I also had the idea of doing a zoom meeting, a very official one, where I happen to be green screening my background. Then, my background malfunctions and it reveals I am actually doing something like a roller coaster or bowling. This could establish myself as a silly, unserious person, and add some creative flair. I would still answer the questions, as I would still be oblivious to what has happened to my background.

     The last idea I had was a western themed approach. I could be a cowboy, riding a toy horse, so it would be comedic, yet serious. I could find ways to ask questions by my opponent, who I would be dueling, who asks the wide variety of CCR questions.

    

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.

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.

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.

These are two clips of me trying out each approach for the footsteps

    When doing the alarm clock, I just decided to do something similar as the door, use exactly what was in the video. Since I was the one who had brought the alarm clock on filming day, I had the exact sound it makes with good timing. I honestly just recorded that alarm for a few beeps, and then me shutting off the alarm with a simple click, just like I did in shooting.

    

For the wind, I saw this reddit post online discussing foley sounds for wind, and I found an interesting one I wanted to use. It said to take branches from outside with leaves on then and flow them across the microphone to get that natural wind. I did not like it at all. The mic sounded pretty staticky and distorted from the clunkiness of the leaves and was too distracting and out of place. I ended up just using a premade royalty free noise from pixabay.com to swap out the ratty sound.

Production on overload

        After the 3 entire production posts from last week, this week will mark the beginning of the end of my "time traveling" to that fateful day. Plus, I have been assigned to the soundscape/foley for the entire opening. I am SO excited!!! Adobe Premiere Pro is about to be my best friend over the next week, but this also means I'm probably going to see it more than my actual friends... darn it.

Wandering Whereabouts:

    After our successful filming at my team member Grace's house, we then had to have a location change to a medical plaza nearby. The second we got into the car, we all immediately agreed on putting song the song "You Are" by The Punch Brothers. This is a recall to a past project of ours where we had to create a music video based off of this song. The drive there was smooth, and luckily, we did not crash along the way! During the drive we captured some BTS footage: 

    After our short ride, we drove into a completely empty medical plaza near her home. This made it easy to know there would be no other people in our footage and gave an easily controlled setting. Making this scene in front of a medical plaza reestablish that Alice is in therapy, but the absence of people could also show how her is all alone in this situation. The eeriness of her being alone also fills any plot holes of other people being in the area during the time loop.

    While I wasn't directly a part of the shooting this scene and genuinely could not stand anywhere near them because of a mirrored wall, I was again given the most respectable job... script holder. I know, again, I would say I'm a professional at this point. But anyway, if I did stand near then, I would be in the middle of the road or in shot. But this also affected our videographer. We had to figure out a way where her reflection of the mirrors in front of us would not be shown in the shot, so we put her on the other side of a pillar to block her reflection. I however was wedged in between the pillar and the mirror, so I could not be seen at all.

Soundscape Project all over again:

    I will be doing our soundscape for our opening project... and that means one thing, making and finding the sounds. Foley is so interesting, and since I have some experience from our past soundscape project, I am going to have so much fun with this.

    I've figured out a few of the sounds I am going to need for this project, a few being a door opening, a phone dial, and footsteps. Honestly, I don't know if I'll foley a lot of these, just naturally record them off of my phone or find non-copyright sounds online. Although I can't 100% tell all the sounds I need yet because I don't have the finished video, I'll start looking around on pixabay.com.

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:

In this scene we film a close up where Alice gets her first phone call from the mysterious caller. While the shot seemed relatively easy, the timing for the phone call she receives was not. Apparently, when you are 10 feet away from each other, it still takes about 5 seconds for a call to fully go through. The stats at the end for this scene alone took 22 phone calls. Twenty. Two. Plus, we had additional retakes from laughing, such as this clip, or technical difficulties. One of these difficulties was the fact that we needed to see the phone for context of our story, except the phone we were filming had a privacy screen on it. So, every time the scene went perfect, but the angle of the phone was slightly off, we would have to redo the entire scene because of it.

Referencing my last post, this is footage of the other angle we see when T. Jacobs walks in. You can see both him and Maiya, which helps show the facial expressions of both characters.