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:
Group Meeting #2
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