Post-Production

 This week is the final week before spring break as well as the last week to wrap everything for our portfolio project. With this in mind, this week has been spent revising and editing our film to its final form.

How we used editing

We used editing in our film to create meaning and intensity by the use of fast cuts and transitions. By quickly cutting between scenes a feeling of rush and intensity is added. This complements the other meanings already established by the other elements of the film.

The process of editing originally started off rough. We were first instructed to use Adobe premiere pro, however, the computers were experiencing issues that did not allow the students onto the software (still unknown) which resulted in the class having to switch to WeVideo. Normally, Wevideo would be fine as it is very user-friendly, though it does not have all the tools Adobe has and even contains a watermark. Luckily for us, our wonderful teacher bought a subscription that thwarted all of this. Through this, I learned that WeVideo is actually a decently good editor when you have the paid version. I also learned that doing voice-overs is way harder than expected and takes many tries to perfect. Luckily for us, WeVideo was very user-friendly so we did not have to consult any type of youtube tutorials to achieve what we wanted.

Following convention

The mani convention we followed in our film was definitely the title. Conventionally in Sci-fi films, titles are short and or point to the main event in the movie.

As you can see here all these titles are short (1-3 words) and they all talk about what the film is dealing with. For us, we named our film "His Journal" because our film is centered around a journal.

What we added

Through editing, we added a plethora of transitions, effects, and credits in our film. Firstly we added the transitions (such as fade out and quick cuts) to give the film a feeling of intensity and we added the credits slowly using fade-ins at the start to slowly introduce all the people that worked hard on our film.

Sound has also been a rather long and interesting process as we had to add a voice-over to our film. The way we accomplished this was I recorded myself saying all the lines then we imported it into the editing software and made cuts to put the audio into the correct spots where the dialogue was needed.

Colors

The overall color of our film (in reference to filters) was simple. We never had to add any filters into our shots because all of our filming was done at the same time of the day resulting in the background staying consistent so no corrections had to be made. Also, we never had any flashbacks or such in our film so that is also another reason why we did not need any filters and kept the lighting consistent.

Revisions

One of the biggest changes we had to make was taking out some shots as our film originally exceeded the 2-minute mark. Luckily the short below was rather useless in comparison to the rest of the shots we had.

How I feel about the project personally

Overall, I feel the process of editing was fun, however, it had its setbacks. The first setback was definitely the first day of editing in class where I had to constantly change computers attempting to find a computer that worked with the software just for the teacher to say not to use the software at the end of class. This was only a temporary problem so I believe we should switch over to the more lighthearted moments.

In my opinion, the best moments of editing were going back and looking at the clips unedited and having to cut out the endings because almost all the endings our actor would make weird faces or laugh.

For example:

Filming production

 The last week and half of our class time have been spent filming our pre-planned shots that we completed a few weeks ago. Normally, this process would be simple: Go in, film, and leave. However, things proved to be rather challenging not only for me but for my group as well.

The technical side of filming

The filming stage was rather different from the typical convention for technology as when you think of film production you think of big high-tech cameras and lights. However, my group used our cellphones because some of the shots we had to do were rather risky for a big camera such as the running shots and especially the stare case shot that required the phone to be held over a drop of at least 30 feet. The cellphone in question that we used was an iPhone XR.

Through this, I feel that my group both learned that incorporating lighting in a shot can be extremely tedious.

I feel like this picture in particular shows this the best as the tedious light above that door created so much glare onto the camera and we had to adapt accordingly since we are filming in our school and we do not have control over the lights or anything like that.

Luckily for my group, we are all well-experienced in filming with a camera and also our telephones due to the plethora of filming projects we were assigned throughout our time in Media Studies.

All of our shots were original and were created following standard convention for most films, we did not really take any ideas from films as far as our shots were concerned. We wanted to be original but also be normal and not too over the top.

Hardship

To talk about our experience and the great challenge we had ahead of us, I need to take you back two weeks to the 28th of  February when I seen this.

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This became an immediate problem as in every written and verbal plan for filming I was the main role playing Darren. Normally, this would be no problem we simply put off shooting until I'm better; however, this project is time-sensitive and we MUST use the time allowed for filming, no more no less. So as a quick solution we had to use one of our group members (Kendrick) who was expected to be the cameraman, now turn into the main actor. Though this is a major problem concerning the filming this wasn't the only difficulty we faced on the way.

I'd say the biggest problem for me was not being in school to help out, there was very little I was able to do as I was extremely sick to the point where I was almost bed-written so it became extremely hard to collaborate with the group. Nevertheless, under no circumstance would I want to become dead-weight so I compensated why overviewing all the shots and I would commonly set alarms to wake up during the time we would be in class so I could speak to my members through text so I was still caught up in the loop. In addition, I also picked up the role of doing voiceovers for all the shots and dealing with the sound in order to make up for my absence.

The good ending

Though all of this sounds extremely negative, there was still lots of good in it. These were found in the form of viewing all of my group members having fun with filming. I'd say the funniest part was waking up to seeing at least 20 videos being sent to me via text message of all the shots that were taken that day and you could hear the laughter of everyone as they were filming. Even though I wasn't there to experience, I know everyone had fun as did I looking back on these shots. Unfortunately, these videos are no longer available as they were all deleted as we prepare all of our final sots for the editing section of our project.