To mark the official end of this project I’ll leave my answers to the Creative Critical Reflection here. Taking different approaches I was able to give some more detail into what it was like to make Golden Escape.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/12b2mdvhlOIhN4EdLyfvQ0kQl9ykhO-ig/view?usp=drivesdk
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ejq4wuIzMDxX-NtKp41n-RaN4W1Vf7hX/view?usp=drivesdk
We are officially done!!
We’ve reached the end of this crazy journey and I couldn’t be more excited, although I will miss Golden Escape… Please feel free to enjoy our 2 minute film opening now!!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fmWlG6Or5lT_8j_fxt6irMLm1y7Ixxcs/view?usp=drivesdk
We have reached the end of the Portfolio Project!!!
I cannot believe it. This has been such a great learning experience and has taught me a lot about myself and my capabilities. From requiring creativity to come up with a story, to executing my ideas and problem solving when things went wrong, I've been challenged from the start. I believe that I did a good job with organization with this one; by sticking to the schedule I planted for myself at the beginning and even reaching a point where we were ahead of the schedule.
Getting to use the knowledge I acquired throughout the year's projects on my own accord was definitely a highlight. For instance, filming using shots and angles that I thought were effective for telling my story and editing in ways that transmitted meaning. By far I think that mis-en-scene was my favorite part though. Getting to choose my character's clothes and styles in ways that enhances the story telling; the detail behind every decision was something that I became very interested in. Even the use of props such as the golden heart necklace and the ways in which we decided to tie them to the story. I think that I realized many of the things that go into making a good story, and most were things I had never even considered before, but they made such a difference on the finished product.
I'm also very proud of mine and my partner's communication and problem solving skills. We were open with our ideas and opinions, always willing to hear each other out and never afraid to voice constructive criticism or disagreement. I'm positive that this conjoined effort and ideas were the reason why this project is something we are proud of. When problems inevitably arose, we both kept our cool and worked together to come to a solution. Like when we realized a mistake we made during filming (leaving a prop on when it should've been off) we bounced ideas off of each other until we finally came to the solution that we would edit it so the prop was not visible, since we were not able to re-film anything at that point.
This project made me re-think my limits as well. I never believed myself to be very skilled at any type of editing, until i was in charge of the opening's sound. It took me a while to get the hang of it but at the end I felt confident that I had done a good job and now I know that this is something I'm actually good at, which I will definitely keep in mind for future projects. Not only did I exceed my expectations in this aspect, but I also think that I was so intimidated by the size of this project that I doubted my ability to do it; however, I'm glad to see that our hard work paid off and that being organized can help you tackle any hard task.
Ultimately, I'm just very proud of both my partner and myself because we made our vision become a reality and grew so much as creators. I honestly hope I get to work on similar projects in the future! So keep an eye out for Golden Escape...It's coming soon.
Highlights from Golden Escape:
I've reached the point of reflection... I'm finally coming up with my answers for the Creative Critical Reflection!! I will attach some pictures of the answers I have so far and then instead talk about my ideas on how I will execute the actual videos (the creative side of it).
Our teacher advised we should do two pieces of media where we divide the questions into. We can divide them any way we want we I have decided i will do 2 and 2. So, I will be putting the first and second questions with one of the two lasts just because the first one are much longer than the others.
I have a couple of ideas for the videos, starting with a visual podcast. A lot of the podcasts I've been listening to lately have added visuals of the hosts talking during the episode on YouTube, and I find this to be highly entertaining because I get to watch reactions in real time, not only hear them. If I take this approach I would also add a screen in the back that shows images related to what I'm talking about, including snippets from the opening, which will keep the audience engaged. The podcast by Noel Miller and Cody Co, TMG, is a great example of this. They have built a studio that is decorated according to their podcast's theme and sometime project pictures and videos of what they are talking about in the back. They also have guests come on their podcasts and run a type of interview with them, this is exactly what i would like to do. Another example of this is Brittany Broski's The Broski Report podcast, where she also goes on to publish visual podcast episodes on YouTube and talks about various topics, using a TV screen behind her to project things she talks about. In my Creative Critical Reflection I would come on a podcast like this that invites small directors on to discuss their project and there I would answer the Critical reflection questions as if they were being asked by this host.
Thankfully, we had done some experimenting towards the beginning of the project with the type of font we would like to use for our title based on the research we made on the genre, so we had somewhat of a clear vision of what we were looking for regarding that. However, we had not visited the idea of credits yet. This is the font we had chosen for our title many weeks ago.
Using what we already knew, we got to work on finding a font that looked similar to the one above (which was created on Canva) on iMovie. After trying countless fonts we settled on one named "Georgia." It is simplistic but elegant, and doesn't let itself reveal a lot, just like we wanted for the suspenseful side of our production. This is when the choice of where and at what point of the opening our title would be placed. We knew we didn't want to put our title at the end of the opening because of our teacher's advice against that, but also because we thought it would take away from the suspense we wanted to leave the viewer with. This is why we decided to put it at the beginning instead; in fact, it is the very first thing the viewer will see. Another choice that was not foreseen for us was starting the opening with a black screen with the title. After showing what we had of the opening to our families after finishing sound they manifested that it was kind of hard to understand from the funeral scenes that it was happening at the same time as the change of appearance. This was a huge problem for us because it really was important for the narrative and the thriller side of the opening, so we got to think of solutions to this issue. We decided on the black screen so then we could put a date and time on the establishing shot that followed (stating that this change of appearance was taking place the same date as the date that appears on Grace's funeral card). We could technically have put both the title and date on the establishing shot, but we thought this looked too crowded and rushed. Then the only thing left to do was choosing the color of the title which naturally took the form of a goldish brown to go with the title and heart necklace.
This is how it ended up looking!
Much less work went into choosing the credits' font. Although we hadn't discussed it before, when we did we were on the same page: they have to be as simplistic as possible. We chose a very straight lined, uncomplicated font and made it white. Our choice was simply based on the fact that we wanted the viewer to not be so distracted by the credits as what was happening on screen was important to the rest of the opening. We also chose to keep credits rolling only until the voice over started, so nothing took away from that. Since both me and Violette divided the production jobs pretty much in the middle we just alternated between our names because we didn't want to put both of our names for every one; and then of course we credited our actress. Keeping it simple, as I said before, we just have the credits slide in and out of the screen.
Here are some examples:
I'm so very proud of how close we are to the end. This has genuinely been one of the most challenging but also rewarding projects I've worked on so far. See you next blog to talk Creative Critical Reflection ideas and answers!!
Now that our much-needed spring break has begun we had plenty of time to work on the last details of our opening. Remember when I said that we were almost done editing the sounds in? Well...we weren't :/ We were apart for the first half of spring break and I hadn't been able to get Violette's feedback on the sound editing, so lets say we had a lot of catching up when we met up two days ago. I showed her what I had so far and after sharing our opinions we decided we wanted to scratch a lot of it off. For example, we both HATED the way the prayer sounded, so we got to work on finding something else we could use for the background of the funeral; we ended up using a sort of sung-prayer sound instead which wouldn't clash with the voice-over we still had to add. We also added chatter to the gas station store's background for it to sound more realistic and adjusted the volume of some sounds; so yeah little details like those really added up and forced us to spend more time than planned fixing these issues.
I think that sound editing was definitely the most challenging aspect of this whole project so far, not only because of how tedious it was to sync the sound to the video itself, but also choosing sounds that create the most realistic atmosphere and effect. For example, using footstep sounds that sound as they would on concrete floors when Grace is walking on the parking lot with her heels. Another huge part of this was volume and sound perspective; lowering and increasing the volume of some sounds was necessary to create the desired effect and put focus on vital points like the voice-over and making these decisions not only required my perspective but also other's opinions, as my ears had gotten so used to the sounds that I couldn't tell the difference anymore. This also depended on sound perspective; depending on where the shot was pointed and focused we had to alter sound volumes to make it as realistic as possible, like lowering the sound of outside atmosphere when entering the shop.
Overall, it was a great experience. I practiced patience and attention to detail and I think that it was definitely a skill I got to improve. After fixing the general sound we got to work on the voice-over, our main sound. Once I arrived at the Keys we got Sienna to record her lines for the voice-over. We did this in the bathroom to avoid having any unwanted background noise and then used wired headphones with a little microphone to enhance the sound. After we inputted the recording into CapCut and then I got to cutting the long Voice-over into smaller sections in order to spread it out through the opening in the way we wanted. We decided where, when, and at what volume the voice over would be and experimented with all of these factors to choose what we liked best.
Lastly, we just just fixed the minor detail of bird sounds at the beginning of the opening when Grace was outside. After showing the rough draft to Violette's mom she gave us the feedback that the bird sounds we had added prior sounded happy and optimistic, which didn't match the piece's tone. So, we decided to scratch that and use crow sounds instead, making it more eerie.
All that's left now is to transfer the finished product to iMovie ( again...) and add the title and credits. We chose to use this app instead of CapCut because it already had templates for the titles which were easier to use than CapCut's and we were more familiar with the font choices.
This was our recording session in the bathroom!!
As I've mentioned multiple times now, we are planning to incorporate a voice-over as a main aspect of our opening's audio. A voice-over is a non-diegetic sound, meaning it doesn't come from the narrative world, and it is often used to "provide more context and enhance an existing narrative." (What is a Voice Over?) In the case of our opening, a voice over would work to provide insight on the thoughts behind our character. We want to give the audience a taste of what is driving our character without giving them the full story. This is the concept of 2+2 that we learned about in our storytelling lesson. One of the 2s being what the audience is watching and the other one being the message the voice over is providing, which isn't transparent enough to be redundant but it does the job at making the audience imply what Grace's reasoning is.
When adding the other sounds to the opening, such as environmental and synchronized sound, we were struggling to figure out how we would incorporate this voice over. We had pitched the idea of a voice over to our teacher a few weeks ago and she had given us the green light but warned us about making it last continuously throughout the whole opening, which might've ended up sounding lazy; so, apart from some of the research I've already made that included voice-overs, we decided to look at a few other movies that use voice-overs to see how they did it.
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
Ok so, now that we've put the video together it is time to add sounds to it. As we've mentioned in prior posts, my partner and I want to have a voice over as our main sound during the opening; however, we don't want it to last continuously throughout the whole thing; we would like to scatter it throughout so it doesn't get boring and repetitive. That means we will need to add other sounds like diegetic, synchronized, and environmental sounds.
This is very similar to what we did for our sound project a few months ago, so I decided to use the same sound library I used for that, as well as the editing platform to input them. Since I don't use a Mac book I couldn't keep using iMovie for this part of editing, so I decided to use CapCut which has worked well for me in the past. I'm using the sound library called Pixabay which was recommended by our teacher when we did our soundscape projects, but we will be doing Foley for some sounds that are more specific and niche. I consider this process to be even more challenging than editing if I'm completely honest. It is incredibly tedious to match the sound to what's happening on screen and know how to adjust volume, fade-ins, and fade-outs for it to sound the best.
But nonetheless, we will figure this out! I've already inputted the full opening (without any sound) onto CapCut and I'm starting to add the basic sounds such as wind rustling trees, cars, and birds for the outdoors and ventilation, as well as some chatter for indoors (gas station and bathroom). Apart from that, I've used some synchronized sounds such as doors opening and closing, the bell that sounds when you open a shop's door, the zipper sound for when Grace opens her make up bag, and the sound of a bag dropping on the floor. For now I'm obviously still missing some of the sounds such as footsteps and the basic ruffling of clothing being moved for when Grace is changing, so I will be looking for those in the sound library.
However, I'm currently more focused on figuring out the Foley sounds. For example, the heeled footsteps we need I haven't been able to find on the library; they only have normal footsteps with sneaker-like sounds, and they don't really match the pace at which Grace is walking on our opening. So i think we will have to make that. Another Foley sound we will need is the mumbled prayer we want to include for the funeral shots. None of the sound libraries have anything similar to what we are looking for, so we will also be making that ourselves.
What I'm taking from this part of the project is attention to detail. It is very important to pay close attention to when a shot ends and begins to add the sound correctly. It was also challenging because we are doing parallel editing, which means that we are switching between shots that have different sounds really quickly, so aligning sound that way has been hard. However, already listening to what I have so far adds so much to the overall quality of the work that it makes it so worth the effort. I'm looking forward to listening to the finished product.
Here's how my sound is looking so far:
Well I think we pretty much have gotten over that, yayyy!! Honestly the process of editing was less daunting than we had originally thought it to be and we are essentially all done with it now. All of our different shots have been put together, have received feedback from others and are approved. We did decide to go with Plan B for the ending of our opening because our original plan of shooting inside the car just wasn't working and was honestly looking pretty bad. We decided to ask some of our family members to look over what we had so far and asked them to give us any feedback they thought would make the opening better. Plan B's (having Grace come out of the store and throw the necklace away to the trees instead of doing it from the car window) fluidity and coherence in clip order was what made the majority of the people we asked prefer this option to our original one.
Apart from helping us choose an ending, the feedback also included tips on how and where we should shorten, adjust, and lengthen our shots depending on what looked better. There were some evidently awkward pauses in between shots that had to be cut out and we learned that the short shots of the funeral scene had to remain between the 1-1.5 second mark. We also got feedback on tightening some shots to increase the intimacy and connection felt towards the character by focusing on details, facial expression, and important props. It was also crucial to remove some of the scenes we liked, like some of the make up scenes, because they weren't crucial and we would've reached over the 2-minute mark otherwise.
So, our final shot ends up being one of the heart necklace hanging off a tree, which finishes the opening with a question, what will she do now? It serves as kind of a loose end to her story which will be answered with the rest of the movie.
All of our editing was done on iMovie because it is the editing platform we considered the easiest to use and one that we felt comfortable with; our teacher also recommended we use this platform considering our limited experience. But now all we have left to do in regards to editing would be adding the different sound effects we need, the voice over and then inputting the title and credits.
I'm very glad to be back on track because last week wasn't very productive. I had to be absent from school for a couple days so we missed some time that we could've used to work on the project, but thankfully it is now spring break and I plan to use this time to our advantage. Today we met up after school to finish off the editing and plan our next step. Overall, I feel proud of our editing and the fact that we took on a challenge for ourselves. The process turned out to be pretty simple and now we feel that our editing abilities have definitely improved.
Here are pictures from our meeting!
Editing has officially started!! We are both excited and super nervous as to what this will bring, but I'm looking forward to some challenge ;)
The first step in our day of editing was sending all of the footage we had filmed on my phone to Violette's Macbook because we plan to use iMovie and my own Macbook is very old and slow, so we decided to use hers. We were at school so it took some time to get this done because the Wifi was not on our side that day, but slowly and surely we started to organize the shots in chronological order on the laptop's desktop to keep track of their order. Once we were able to get all of these onto Violette's desktop, we fed them into iMovie.
We watched the entirety of the combination of scenes together without paying to much mind to the length of it just to get a sense of how it looked. Upon this first watch we noticed a few things. First of all, that it would be extremely difficult to get this opening to the 2 minute mark and that we would have to let go of some unnecessary footage and shorten a lot of it as well. I'm happy that there was over-shooting because it allows us to play around with the editing as much as we want, but my main worry right now is choosing the right footage to keep and discard.
This first rough watch also brought to our attention a specific mistake we will have to figure out how to solve. Whenever we filmed our main character driving around, we did this at a different setting than the gas station parking lot hoping there wouldn't be too noticeable of a difference and that it would be safer for our actress since she isn't an experienced driver. However, looking at these shots together it is hard to ignore that change of scenery and it ruins the continuity of the shots. We will have to decide whether to try to re-record this scene in the gas station parking lot again or to use our alternative sequence. We had come up with this alternative before filming because of some suggestions we got during our group meeting in which they told us that it might help us save time to eliminate the driving-away scene at the end. Instead they suggested to skip the car scene altogether and just have the character just throw the heart necklace into the bushes at the end of the opening. This would avoid the need to re-film the car scene and probably take up less time of our total 2 minutes.
After we figure this out we are planning on shortening and adjusting all of our shots so they fit seamlessly together and then we plan on focusing on our parallel editing technique. So far editing has gone great and I can't wait to keep learning about it.
As we near the time to edit the footage we've filmed for our opening, I decided to do some research about editing to see what I could find/re-fresh my mind on. As I've mentioned before, neither my partner or me are very skilled editors, so i hope that this research helps us work through some new skills.
First of all, I liked a blog post by the Nashville Film Institute (Film Editing: Everything You Need to Know) because it provides lots of visual examples of the different/basic editing techniques that could be used for a film, as well as the different things that can be achieved through editing like editing for tension and creating juxtapositions (and telling you how to do this). I will definitely be taking this information into account, specially when it comes to editing to create tension and capturing emotional themes, since these will help me tell our own story more successfully.
I found a different article by the organization Raindance, titled "6 Stages of Editing as a Film Director" which, as the title suggests, shares the process of editing and the different steps there is to it. According to this article Violette and I will start our First Assembly soon, which means that we'll take all of the shots we filmed throughout the last weeks and put them together in a way that makes sense. I'm looking forward for the Rough Cut and Variations part of editing. This is when me and Violette look at what we have put together so far to see if it is continuous and looks good, and depending on what we find here we can make any of the necessary changes. As of now I can already think of some scenes that might not look the best, so i will start thinking of ways to fix this.
Also, since one of the editing techniques me and Violette definitely want to use is a little more advanced and we had never done it before (parallel editing) i thought it was important to research about this as well. I found a great article on Soundtripe called "Everything You Need to Know About Parallel Editing and Cross Cutting" which I found super helpful. The first thing this article states is that although cross-cutting and parallel editing are very similar, they aren't exactly the same. They are both used to show that different sets of action are happening at the same time, but parallel editing focuses more two sets alone, meaning to connect specific themes, while cross-cutting includes several sets of action that are meant to entertain the audience. Considering this useful differentiation, the article also recommends to know what you want to transmit to your audience before choosing which of the two to choose. In my case i would use parallel-editing because I'm only connecting two sets of action and I'm definitely more focused on transmitting the themes of frustration and mystery that my character and her situation involve. According to this article one of the most important tips when editing this technique is to storyboard a bunch; planning roughly where each of the parallel-editing cuts will take place and how that would look is extremely important to maintain organization. Another very useful tip from this article was to balance the narrative between the scenes I'm using, meaning to sense which warranted more or less time on screen.
Here are some examples of parallel editing that I will be taking inspiration from:
-The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
-Strangers on a Train (1951) It's safe to say I'm very glad that I took some time to do this research because now I feel more prepared to tackle editing!
