Wow, we have really came this far. That’s actually insane in my opinion, but anyways, here’s what I and my partner have been working for for the past eight weeks, I hope you enjoy these as much as we did:
Film Opening: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IKn4NNhSg7IctrJQ-jsLw5DuF8l3STPD/view?usp=drivesdk
CCR 1: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jg2lB4VL4ZNxCfrhZvrGppsH81uArPGw/view?usp=drivesdk
CCR 2: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YJvPVtcizurC438Rpu4ljzGNG2n-_fG8/view?usp=drivesdk
And so we have officially made it! We are at the finish line now. This has been quite the interesting journey for both me and everyone involved in the development of this project. Here’s a final, summarized reflection on absolutely everything me and my partner did throughout the eight weeks we were doing this project for:
Starting at the beginning, I was kind of expecting that I was going to work with my partner mostly because we did quite a few projects in the past together and we each had pretty good times doing them at the same time together. This time was no different, although we did have our disagreements every now and then relating to the project but we were able to compromise in the end. For example, during the editing stage of development, we each made different iterations of the film (we edited the film on our own each of us) and then we showed them to each other. From there, the changes that me and my partner made were combined through compromise and that ended up leading to the final project being made as a whole as a result.
The planning stage of the project was pretty abstract in my opinion mostly because of the fact that we had basically nothing planned or anything in mind whatsoever as to what we wanted to do with the project. Originally, I proposed that we should do either a psychological thriller or a coming of age film, but after a small delay in deciding, we ended up going with an action genre that my partner decided that we should do. The crime part of the action film wasn’t even considered fully until we were deep into planning as what we came up with naturally resonated with crime so the crime part of our film came later and honestly, I am glad that we did that kind of subgenre because without it, I believe our action genre alone would not fully represent what we had planned, and it wasn’t like we were going to fully change our already established plan which would’ve took too much time to do and would’ve put us in a great deal of stress at the same time.
From this project, I had learned everything from techniques, to representation and many more media studies related material. Even before I started this project, I had a basic understanding of the concepts and their use cases but during the progress of this project with some of my partner’s advice and research done by me at the same time, I feel like I have developed a more clear understanding of certain techniques and representations. This will be very useful for when it comes time to take the Media Text and Media Context Essays in May of this year (for my school).
Overall, this has been an amazing yet challenging journey and looking back on everything that I did, I would’ve tried to push myself harder than I pushed myself during this project as I had issues during these eight weeks with intuition and I felt like I was doing a lot of stuff last minute which was not only very bad school and grades wise, but also very bad in real life outside of school.
Thank you to everyone involved in my project including my partner (obviously!), his friend who filmed a scene with him in our opening (he is listed in the credits of the scene), and my partner’s dad (he helped film most of the opening when we couldn’t, credits are also listed on opening). If any of you see this post, just know that without you, we would’ve never been able to do what we did specifically.
Final projects coming soon!
The time has come, it is now time to answer the last question of the four questions of the CCR. This question states what exact technologies (hardware and software) were used during the development of the film opening. This one is a pretty short question compared to the previous three questions as I will only be stating what I used to do what and not anything else. But anyways, let’s get this done with.
The first and probably most obvious technology that I used is Blogger. A blogging application owned by Google, this is what I and every other AICE Media Studies AS Level Student used to post our blogs that document our journeys with these film openings and how we decide to do with them.
My three editing softwares that I used during the editing process was Adobe Premiere Pro, Microsoft Clipchamp, and potentially iMovie. Premiere Pro was my primary source of editing as it gave me what I needed to edit properly but I ended up using Clipchamp toward the end as well because my partner started experiencing issues with Premiere Pro on his end with collaboration settings. iMovie is what I plan to use to edit my CCRs when I end up producing them.
As for what we used to actually shoot the videos, we primarily used me and my partner’s iPhones and my partner’s dad’s Samsung phone. We did not use any professional cameras or any other expensive equipment as our phones were enough for what we had to record.
As for what exactly I edited with, I used my PC to edit the film opening and I plan to use my phone to edit the CCRs when I produce them.
During editing, it is also worth noting that I used Epidemic sound and Pixabay for sound effects that I did not have during the recording process and only added while me and my partner were editing.
And just like that, that is all the CCR questions answered! Stay tuned for production ideas and CCR production and editing posts and as usual, here is my script for the fourth question:
BEGINNING:
Ok now moving on to the last question, I used a variety of different software and hardware to help develop the film opening as a whole.
Starting with the most obvious one of them all, Blogger, I used this to document my development process all the way from start to finish.
Next, in terms of editing applications, I primarily used Adobe Premiere Pro to edit the film opening but I also used Microsoft Clipchamp toward the end of the editing process. I also plan to use iMovie to edit the CCR Videos.
As for what I shots videos with, I used an IPhone 14 Pro and my partner’s and his dad’s phones as well. (I unfortunately don’t know what their exact phones were, sorry).
And last but not least, I used both Epidemic sound and Pixabay to add copyright free sound effects to the film opening.
That is all for the second CCR video. I had a really great time overall with the project and it was definitely an interesting experience for sure, bye guys.
END OF VIDEO
Now it’s time to answer the third of four questions of the CCR. This is the first question that I will be answering in my second CCR video where I will answer both this question and the fourth and last question. This question essentially asks how exactly did my production skills develop throughout this project. I will be discussing thoroughly how exactly my knowledge of pre production, production, and post production processes expanded as the project progressed. Let’s get to it!
Firstly, when I first started this project with my partner, I personally felt like I was only beginning to figure out certain techniques especially surrounding shots, angles, movement, and composition. There were lots of them you could do but they were very plentiful to the point where I felt like one could be confused for another especially if they had very similar but ultimately different meanings. This also applied to other aspects of techniques such as sounds, editing, mise en scene, and even some forms of representation as well. But as time went by and through research at times, I ended up learning more about the specifics of certain techniques and how they worked exactly. This mostly happened during the planning stages of our film opening where me along with my partner were discussing exactly what we would do with the exact camera angles when it came to a certain scene and how we wanted to play that out.
But this didn’t just apply to the pre production process, we also experimented with different techniques surrounding mostly shots and angles but also with other aspects as well. The day we recorded, we experimented and pondered over what we would do with the techniques even though we planned them out during the pre production process because when we went to see the scenes in person, we ended up having different thoughts on our scenes as some scenes would’ve looked worse than we thought they would during the planning stages. This is primarily the reason why we ended up creating a rough script for the opening and updating our storyboard after we already made another one because we ended up making a lot of changes to our original plot all without making the plot look too different than it was before. During production of the opening, we both gave each other some insight into what shots should’ve looked like by us telling each other what exactly to shoot and also by telling my partner’s dad (who filmed a lot of our scenes, thank you) what exactly to catch in a shot to make it look as good as possible.
Post production skills also improved as well. During editing of our film opening, we initially did not have a complete idea of how to use Adobe Premiere Pro (although I did have a basic understanding of it, my partner did not) and we had to watch tutorials to help us navigate through the software but it was worth it because in the end, we were able to edit the film to a great degree and we were able to fine tune all of the details. The only thing that I will say that did hinder us with Premiere Pro was that whenever we wanted to edit together at the same time, we couldn’t even though there was a certain feature that we tried to use but could not figure out how to use it so my partner ended up switching to Microsoft Clipchamp towards the end of the editing process while I continued to use Premiere Pro. But other than that situation, we mostly learned our editing through the internet and each other at times as well.
To summarize everything, I initially had only a basic understanding of every technique to the point where we could only describe it but now looking back, I was able to learn through a mixture of internet research, advice from my partner, and my teacher.
Here is a script that I will use to answer the first part (question three) of the second CCR video:
BEGINNING:
Welcome back everyone, this is the second of two CCR videos that I will be posting where I will be answering four questions about my overall reflection to the film opening me and my partner made. Let’s get started!
The two questions I will be answering in this video are how my production skills developed throughout the project and what technologies did we use during the development of our film opening? Let’s dive into the first question.
Initially, I felt like I had a basic understanding of all the techniques used for pre production, production, and post production. But I knew this wasn’t going to take me far enough and I knew some things were going to change throughout the development of the film opening, and I ended up being right about that.
To be more specific, I along with my partner would end up pondering with each other where we would discuss certain topics surrounding techniques during the pre production process to use and through that, I would end up gaining some knowledge about said topics and so did my partner as well. We basically taught each other things as time went by.
This ended up continuing during the actual production process where we would tell each other what exactly we should have done in terms to techniques especially since we constantly changed course during the planning process and we both wanted to create the best scene possible from what we had.
During post production, we also took time to help each other during editing with Adobe Premiere Pro as although we had a basic understanding of editing techniques and use cases, we still taught each other methods and watched tutorials on the applications as well. In the end, my partner ended up using Microsoft Clipchamp as well due to an unrelated issue with Premiere Pro on his end but we were still able to achieve what we wanted editing wise.
END OF 1ST PART
