FILM OPENING

 After weeks in the making I have finally finished my film opening. It was a great learning experience for me and I had a lot of fun while doing this project

- I hope you enjoy. 

Film opening "press play"

CCR

 Here is the creative critical reflection that I made for my film. Hopefully it can give some insight behind my processes and decision making. 

thanks for watching 

CCR

Editing completed

    Finally after a long time as a work in progress I finally finished the editing of my film and CCR.  Though it felt tedious at times, it helped me learn a lot about the editing process and what goes into it. It definitely has given me a newfound appreciation to people who do any kind of video editing whether it be a YouTube video or an entire film. 

    I am honestly very glad that I decided to edit more than I thought was necessary cause it was definitely very time consuming and I don't know if I would have finished otherwise. Interestingly, I felt that editing my CCR was an overall more difficult task than the actual film opening itself. I think that has to do a lot with the length of it but also inputting all the images and clips were difficult. There may have been an easier way f doing it then the way I did it but I am just relieved to finally be done. Of course there are some things that I would like to improve or do better but overall i am happy with the work I did.

recording/editing the CCR

 Now that I have edited the project and written  the script for the CCR I finally had to begin the recording and editing process. The goal was to get all the filming done and to get at least half of the editing done. Since time is starting to get tighter and tighter it was really important that I get a lot done today. 

    The filming of the CCR went about as well as I thought it would. It took a couple long tries but eventually I got something that was usable. One issue that came up though was that my phone was running out of storage. So each time I recorded I had to decide if it was good enough or if I wanted to delete it to reshoot it. Ultimately I ended up rerecording it about 7 times.

Luckily I wasn't feeling too burnt out and I think I was able to get a good bit of editing done. Its a little more than half so I exceeded my goal and I think I should be able to complete it very soon. Just like my actual film I used an app called capcut to edit it. I honestly just find the app very easy/simple to use while at the same time there's a lot of things you can do with it. Not to mention that it is free. 

It feels stressful but good at the same time to finally be in the home stretch. I hope I can finish this up quick and call it a wrap.

    

Writing the script for the CCR

My teacher gave us a presentation on how to do the CCR as well as some tips to make it as good as possible. One thing that she mentioned was not to wing it as it could turn out sloppy. For some people bullet points may work if they're a natural speaker but for me I think that writing a full out script is the best way to do it.

Though I don't plan on sticking to it 100 percent, I know that it will help me a lot to organize my ideas and probably just make it better in the long run. Just like a lot of my previous tasks, I used google docs to type it out. Before starting I re-watched some examples my teacher showed us and looked at the notes I took from the presentation. The presentation was really helpful as it showed a breakdown of the question which I used to answer each on piece by piece. 

Though I haven't started recording, I do have a general idea of how I want to do the video. What I mean by this is that I think I am gonna do a step by step approach in which I break up the video into 4 parts to answer each question. 

Finishing the editing

 After the last my last blog posts I was about half done with editing but now I am just about finished.  It is getting pretty close to the deadline so I am a little nervous about the upcoming CCR I have to do but for now I think I'm on track to finishing it in time. With the editing I think I've done all the effects, cuts, sounds, etc. that I needed and now all I have to do is put some of the actual credits that are left.

I left black spaces in between each cut as a place to put the credits as I think they work in the context of the opening and don't interrupt the footage. Here's a list of the credits that I put in order-

1. production logo

2. director-Branden Koo

3.Edited by Branden Koo

4. Starring Diego Ricci as Erick

-and Santiago Mason as Santiago

very end- Press play film title

Besides that, I am basically done with the actual film opening. I just need to finish this up, re-watch it a few times, and tweak some things based on if there's any mistakes/errors. Hopefully soon I can get to work on the CCR.

Halfway with editing

In my last blog post I started just inputting the clips into Premier so now I am going to try and edit as much as possible. The opening is meant to be shot from an older camera so I wanted to see how I could create that effect. 

    First I tried downloading after effects cause I thought it might have something I could use but I ultimately found it was too confusing.  Then I remembered a phone app called cap cut that I used with premier in a previous project and felt it would be perfect for what I was trying to do. But since it was on the phone I had to get the premier clips I put in, into the app. To do this, I exported it as a mp.4 file and put it into google drive. I then downloaded it onto my phone and put it into cap cut.

 

Overall the app proved to be extremely useful and easy to figure out. I found effects on it that could help me accomplish that older camera feeling and also was surprised by the amount of things that could be done in it. The ending, which I was scared to edit since I didn't know how to tackle it, was surprisingly not too difficult as I found a way around it that generally fits my initial vision. Though I did get a lot of it done, I still have some more to do as I need to include the credits, the title, and still tweak/add some things until I am satisfied with the product.

Selecting the right footage

     Now that I was done filming and compiled all the clips I needed, it was time to select the ones that would go into the final product. As necessary, I went through each clip and got rid of the ones that had some kind of mess up or had a better alternative. 

    Once I finished with that selective process, I then cut down basically every clip. I did this because I wanted the start of each clip to feel random and spontaneous to replicate the found footage feel that I aimed for at the start, After doing all this, the total time of all the usable clips combined came down to under the 2 minutes the opening needs to be. However, I plan on adding empty black space between the cuts in order to further the time and contribute to the found footage feeling. Plus, this would be where I could include the credits of the opening without having to disrupt the scenes as much. 

After I did this I thought I could get a little editing done, before I get further into it. To start I emailed the clips to myself so I could open them  on my computer and put them into Premier Pro. Once I got to this point, I decided to just arrange the clips into the right order and put the blank spots between them.

Filming

 I finally found a day and time where everyone's schedules were aligned and we could begin filming. The location was the same place as I originally planned, Regional park, and I made sure that it was dark outside by the time we started. After printing our a few copies of my script I left at around 8 pm to meet with my actors at the basketball court. Then once we walked over to the playground area, we began filming. 

    Though I had took time to write a script, I didn't find it necessary to stick to it perfectly which is something I told my actors. Overall I just wanted their interactions to feel as casual as possible. When we got there were a couple people in the playground so we focused on shooting all the scenes that didn't require us to film there. By the end, I had more than enough clips I needed and everything went relatively smoothly. I even got suggestions from the actors that I felt helped to improve certain scenes. Thankfully we had finished just a few minutes before all the lights were starting to go out. 

Some of the footage

The main thing to do now was to collect the bits of footage I had and edit/cut them plus throw out the ones that I didn't need or didn't fit. Right now though, I'm too tired to do anything so I'm gonna have to do it another day.

thinking of a title

    For my title, I wanted to keep it short and simple like most film titles are. As a rule of thumb, I tried to limit the amount of words I used as best possible by keeping a maximum of 3 words. 

    Something I found that made thinking of a title especially difficult for me was that I felt like I didn't have a good enough idea of what the rest of the film would be like outside of the opening. Because of this, since I didn't have much of an overarching story to base the title on, I thought it would be good to reference the found footage aspect of the film. 

    While brainstorming ideas for a title, I looked for inspiration through titles of other horror films. What I found was that the titles were often very simple but in that simplicity they also felt cryptic or alluding in a way. Some examples of this would be films like The Ring, Mother!, etc. After a little bit of thinking, I came to 2 possible titles. "Press Play" or "Press Play Record" Ultimately thought, I think I prefer Press Play because I think the simpler the title is the better.

Rescheduling again

 Unfortunately, I am going to have to reschedule the day for filming again. Similarly to last week, this is due to conflicting schedules between me and the actors. Though this is a problem, at least I am gonna have plenty of time to get stuff done during spring break which should help alleviate the multiple reschedules I've had to do.

    However, with there being spring break, that also means that a lot of people are going on vacation. This is the case for one of my main actors who was going to play Erick. Thankfully though, when I first started casting, I had more than enough people who offered to help in some way so finding a replacement is not an issue.

    For now, I guess the course of action is to do what I did last time I had to reschedule and work on other aspects of the production that I can do without having to film anything. Most likely I'm going to start thinking of a title as that is obviously an important part of the opening and something I have to figure out before the post production starts.