Creative Critical Reflection

Here are my CCR submissions

Question 1:

Question 2:

Question 3:

Question 4 : 

Finished Film Opening

 Here is our finished film opening, thank you for following along with our blog, me and my partner are quite proud of this due to the research, time, money, and problem solving skills that went into to creating this This took a while to go through the necessary process of research, planning, and production. I learned a lot about editing that I didn’t know before and I learned so much about the little things and details.

Thank you reading and finally here our finished product -OFF BALANCE- Film Opening

By Melanie Justo-Chiong and Noemy Buenaventura

Production - Editing Last Part

 Introduction

Hello and welcome back, today we will be finishing our editing by adding our beginning credits like directors and producers, and also add the music / dialouge that our film opening is missing, and last will be making transitions smoother by watching the film and fixing anything that looks strange before fThis blog might be a little longer then usual since we have to use a feature of Adobe that we haven’t used since that practice editing in the beginning of the year/blog. 

Editing In Music And Words

First, we had to meet up for 30 minutes to research/look for song choices for both our nostalgia scene one and our car scene radio scene three This did take a minute to find the songs because we had a vision in mind and were a bit picky, But we were able to find the music we wanted both on YouTube and non-copyrighted. The other sound we needed for this film opening was the ringing sound that comes after the nostalgia.

Here is a link to the song that we used at the end Of our film opening/scene three as our radio song. https://youtu.be/TB0VvsjM7rU?si=CA6dJPlsDrgPP70V

Here is a link to the song we used at the beginning/scene one for our nostalgia scene. https://youtu.be/azNw-vQhAXQ?si=zT8SGd638Tdud3XI

And lastly, here is the link to the ringing sound we use for the transition from scene one two scene two. https://youtu.be/uZSLFMa2gac?si=2Yk0P3blA2_VVkWX

After finding the music and audio we needed me and Noemy continued our day. Noemy was able to speak to her friend Jessica, who is in our schools TV production team with three years of experience using Adobe for her class So Noemy showed her our film opening for advice, Jessica said that it was well put together but the audio in scene two where Laura calls Emily sounds of it weird so her advice was for us to use a voiceover and put the original volume of the clip to zero she also told us to put the volume to zero for the parts with music, which was very helpful because it greatly improved the quality. 

Her last comment was to make the audio better in the transition from seeing one to scene two she told us to make our audio fade in. She showed us an example on how to do that and Noemy asked how do we make the music in scene three get louder throughout the scene since we wanted to start off as background music and then take over the audio so she helped us with that too, since that was something new and unfamiliar to us. below is a picture that shows what the audio box looks like it’s the little green box and to make it seamless we muted the original clip.

Conclusion 

This concludes our editing process and we are very grateful to Noemy’s friend Jessica for her help. This has been a fun experience that I have a learned a lot from and I can’t wait to show you our finished product in the next blog. Like always thank you for reading.

Production - Editing part 3

Introduction 

Hello and welcome back to Today’s blog. We will be editing scene three. This blog will be a bit shorter because our third scene contains three long takes, so we won’t have to edit as many clips together and because we’ve gotten more comfortable with the software, plus the fact that the clips are already in order in our bin.

Editing Scene 3

My partner and I got on call again just like we did for our last blog, but this time we had less time to work together since we both had plans that day. We went in order of the storyboard, so we started with the clip of the car leaving the parking lot. This was our only short clip for the scene. Next, we added our first car clip of Emily‘s conversation with Veronica, her mother. This scene also included audio like the car leaving the parking lot did, but it also has background music from the radio and not just dialogue from the characters, so we will be adding in the music next blog. 

Our next clip was also a long take. This clip was of Emily looking out the window and over the shoulder shot where we can see the playground outside that they are passing by, and this shot is followed by another long take of Emily’s face as she watches the other kids play. This concludes the third and last scene, so we now have all our clips together in the timeline, and this was fairly simple to put together since our second clip was already the perfect time because we had started and stopped the dialogue with the film filming in the same amount of time we wanted the clip to be and then some of the other long takes, we only had to shorten a little bit to fit cohesively. That said, only two of the clips in this scene have dialogue, and the other two have no sound, which can be seen in the pictures below that show all four clips on the timeline, and a little white arrow shows where the audio stops. In our other video, it shows all of scene three, but only half has audio as of right now.

     

 Car Scene

Conclusion 

This concludes putting our film clips in order, now we just have to finish off our film opening in the next blog and we will be done. Thank you for reading see you next blog to finish this off.

Production - Editing Part 2

 Introduction 

Hello and welcome back, today we will be editing all of scene 2. This scene is our longest out of the three but it likely won’t take too long since of our clips are already downloaded into our bin and they’re in order so we don’t have to scroll and dig to find the proper clips. We will be following the storyboard and script to keep things organized and thanks to how we filmed the clips we won’t have to do much editing to the lengths of our clips.

Editing Scene 2

Me and my partner are in different states right now due to spring break so we did our editing over video call. After getting on call we opened Adobe and went into the project we started yesterday. We left off on young Emily jumping so we matched it up with older Emily landing on the beam but this shot took probably the longest to edit since we needed them to match up properly for a smooth transition. Below is two pictures from our editing, the first shows Noemy dragging the shot from our editing bow to the timeline so the second picture shows the clip in the timeline (the clip is the little blue box) you can also see the shot in the big editing box in the top left corner.

Next me and my partner put the upcoming clips on the timeline like Emily’s jump, fall, and then the coach calling her, after that we put the over the shoulder shots in the timeline and while watching what we had so far to make sure it was looking right with no weird cuts or misalignment we noticed that the audio when I called Emily as the coach sounded a bit strange so we will have to fix that in the future when we add our other audio. The editing for this wasn’t too difficult, we just has to get rid of some silence from the beginning of the clips and zoom some of them in a little to bit to stay consistent with the angle of the phone/ how far from actors. Below here’s a video that shows the over the shoulder shots we put together.

Conclusion 

Me and my partner were able to get scene threes editing done before parting ways to enjoy the day. I feel we will be able to finish editing together successfully even though we aren’t together in person because today went pretty well. Next blog we will be editing scene 3 so thank you reading and see you next time.

Production - Editing Scene

 Introduction 

Hello and Welcome back to my blog, today we will start editing the film opening using the clips gathered from our production day. Me and my partner are both a bit caught up in our schedules so we will call more often to edit together that way instead of just together in person but when time allows we will also do it together in person. These upcoming blogs will also be more brief.

Editing Scene 1

We of course want to edit most of our film in order so we’re starting with scene one. Neither me or my partner had adobe installed on our laptops so we had to download Adobe Premiere Pro to in order to begin but we have had a bit of practice with the app from our media studies class and some work we did in the beginning of the school year that’s also on my blog. But even though our practice was a while back, I’m sure we will pick it up quick and even if we don’t we have the available resources like tutorial videos to navigate the app.

With that said we started by creating a new project to label film opening and then we added all the audio files and clips gathered from filming into Adobe Premiere on Noemy’s laptop since we decided it was best to edit on Noemy’s device because she has a Mac book and I use an iPad with a glitchy keyboard and no mouse so it would be much easier to use her device. Below is a picture of us putting the clips in the bin for use by pressing the import button and below that picture is another picture that shows all our shots in the bin.

After we had everything in the bin we were able to start putting it together/on the timeline since we could now select a clip, that would then show up in the upper left corner where we could edit before adding it to the timeline. A great feature from this editing software is that we can drag in only audio, only video, or both. 

Hence we started our timeline with a clip that has a short pan of the room before showing Gaby playing with a ball, this is our first scene and therefore the opening. We did edit this clip though/ adjust timeline because the clip was quite long since we recorded a bit extra to ensure we had what we needed. Then we continued this process with different clips of Gaby happily doing child like things like playing with a hula hoop. This continued up until the jump cut where scene 2 starts.

This took us a while to do since we were feeling out the software while editing our first scene. We made sure to follow our story board and script for the scene to remain organized and we created this scene without audio since we plan on putting our nostalgic music over this.

Conclusion 

This concluded the editing of scene ones clips together, our editing will likely amount to four post including this one since we will probably do one per scene like this one and then our fourth post on editing will be adding the words and music to all of the scenes since some words like the director credits will start in the first scene but continue into the second scene. Thank you for reading and see you next blog to edit scene two.

Production - How film Day Went

 Introduction 

Hello and Welcome back, today me and my partner and did all of our filming and I’m gonna tell you how that went in order of our original timeline to make some comparisons between how we planned the day would go vs what really happened. Spoiler alert a lot went wrong but we overcame.

What Happened Before Shooting

- 6:00am to 7:00am - We got ready for school and we made sure we had our equipment ready and saved pictures of our script and storyboards, I also brought my portable charger just in case and packed what I needed for school. I confirmed with our Veronica but then spoke to my partner who informed us we had lost our coach, main Character Emily, and we weren’t able to get any young background characters. We lost them to different reasons like their parents changed their mind about missing school or they did or their plans changed.

This is the main issue we had to overcome since our cast is obviously important for the film. I immediately started thinking of solution for our lack of actors and I decided we should just replace our actors in the film. Noemy, my partner is already a gymnast so we decided to use her as the main character.

As for the coach, I stepped in for the role which worked out great except for two things, I had a bit more experience with the equipment so I was supposed to be the camera lady, and also me and my partner could not be on screen at the same time which we would be in the second scene, we overcame this issue later on by using my mother as a double on screen since her back would be to the camera anyways and we just changed costumes with her. We also made my mom sort of angle her face away from the camera at times.

- 7:00am to 11:45am - We attended school as normal and both arrived at the gym semi on time, my partner was on time but I was about five minutes late due to doing my hair and makeup in the car since I originally wasn’t gonna be in the film I didn’t do it earlier.

Filming At The Gym And Car

- 12:00pm to 1:30pm - With our new plan, we moved around some mats and used my mom in my hoodie to be Emily’s coach. My partner did a great job as Emily which didn’t come as a surprise since she is a gifted gymnast and theater student. Later in the second scene we used my mom as Emily as well but putting her hair in a bun and having her change costumes with Noemy. Below are some pictures from our filming where if you look closely you can spot my mother as the double by her hair color that is different from mines and  Noemy’s because it’s more blonde.

- 1:30pm to 1:55pm - We ate lunch as originally planned.

- 1:55pm to 2:50pm - We continued filming scene two since we didn’t have our young Emily for scene 1 and we took longer then expected on the first scene since we had to use a double and learn our lines since we hadn’t planned to be in the film. We finish filming scene 2 and clean up/ put back what we used so we can go film our third scene and return later for scene 1 with permission. 

We then looked over what we had of filming like shots and favorited the best takes. Then we went outside to film the shot of the car pulling out of the parking lot.

- 2:50pm to 4:00pm - We practiced car scene lines and then filmed our scene. This scene was the smoothest and easiest to film out of the three. The we returned to the gym to meet with our actor Gaby and her mom. She was a bit nervous at first so we talked with her and Noemy hula hooped with her to get her happy and relaxed for the scene. The lighting was great and so was Gaby so it went very well.

This finally concluded our filming so we looked over the shots and the high fives before parting ways like planned.

Conclusion 

As you likely noted, most things that went wrong were before filming even started, the actual filming and using our equipment went pretty smoothly and I’m proud of how me and my partner were able to overcome the issues that came up today. Next for us is editing this all together so see next time and thank you fore reading.

Production - Practice For Production Day

 Introduction 

Hello and welcome back, today I will be sharing how my production practice went with my partner. In my second to last blog I mentioned how me and my partner planned on testing our equipment together before film day. Well today me and Noemy (my partner)  went over to her house after school because all three packages had arrived. We unboxed the items together and then looked over each item one by one and then practiced using the equipment together.

Microphones 

We unboxed the microphones and all the pieces were there, the instruction were quite long though but using this piece of equipment was quite easy. We charged both mics and then tried using them and it worked. The microphones definitely made the phone audio better and more focused. 

The only thing I struggled with was remembering what the lights meant because both microphones and connector to the phone had these little lights that would indicate separate things like if the mic was stable  red and the connector was a stable green light it meant they were connected and their was many different combinations that meant different things so this meant we had to carry the instruction for the microphones with us.

Stabilizer

This item arrived in pieces that we had to put together, it was quite simple and the instructions weren’t very long because we just had to connect the pieces and in order for it to hold your phone you would put it horizontally and tighten the grip in the middle frame. 

We did notice that the picture taking button on the frame did not work so we tried rereading instructions to fix it but we weren’t able to get it working, luckily we don’t think this we effect our filming so we aren’t too worried about that. Me and Noemy recorded this flower from her yard to try the stabilizer out while filming and trying to zoom in while holding the frame since there isn’t a feature for that on the frame. Below is the video.

Light

The light attachment came in one piece and had in depth instructions, I was able to figure it out quite quickly and I don’t think I’ll need to look over the instructions again on filming day but of course we will bring it just in case. It arrived charged and has a long battery life so I doubt we will have to recharge for filming day but I plan on bringing my portable charger just in case. 

The lights worked great and we liked that we were able to easily attach the light to our frame by screwing it in. On the frame it felt very secure and we tried a couple settings on my partners sleeping cat as shown below. The first picture (top left) is our control group, the picture was taken without any light, just the phone and stabilizer, the second picture (top right) was taken without any light the white light attachment came 100%. The third photo ( bottom left ) is taken with an orangey color I scrolled to find at 100% and the last photo (bottom right) is taken without any that same color but 50%.

We also practiced a couple shots like the jump for example with our equipment, the jump can be seen below.

Conclusion 

Me and my partner feel pretty confident in our equipment and this has helped us feel more prepared for filming tomorrow. We will make sure to charge everything and bring it and we will use our production timeline to stay on track, it nice to see things coming together after the thought and work we’ve put into this so thank you for reading and see you tomorrow to let you know how filming went.

Production - Timeline of Production Day

 Introduction 

Hello and welcome to back to my first blog of march, we have four days till filming. Today we will be making a timeline for our production day to help everything run smoother and to ensure we use our time that day efficiently. It is important to note that this timeline though useful, may change depending on how the day goes but we hope it follows our plan.

Timeline 

- 6:00am to 7:00am - Get ready for school, make sure we have our equipment ready plus script and storyboard and put it in our book bags, also packing for only the classes we will attend. Also texting our cast to make sure they bring their costumes either on or in their bags for later.

- 7:00am to 11:45am - Go to and attend school until it’s time to leave so we can meet at the gym. It’s only a seven minute drive from our school to the gym so getting picked up from school at 11:45 works great,

- 12:00pm to 1:30pm - Get our equipment set up and film the second scene first before our young Emily arrives. Older Emily will arrive at 12 and enter with us and then change into her leotard in the gym bathroom. We will also move around some of the mats to guarantee us the shots and angles we want. We also have to spray/prepare the mat that older Emily will jump on and set up/ organize the area we plan on recording scene 1. We have about an hour maybe a little more to go though our story board and script to make sure we record our shots for scene 2.

- 1:30pm to 1:55pm - Wash our hands and eat lunch together, we plan on having sandwiches made by my partners mom who lives very close to the gym. We may also have some additional snacks and water to stay hydrated.

- 1:55pm to 2:50pm - We will film our scene 1 with Young Emily, we are asking her to come later so she misses less school and because we do not need her till this time, the light coming from outside will also be less bright now then at 12 making it easier our editing. We have almost an hour to film the nostalgia scene of young Emily having fun and doing the jump.

-  2:50pm to 3:40pm - Over these 50 minutes we will pack up our equipment to make sure we leave the gym the same way it was when we came in. Then we’ll go to the parking lot and record the shot of the car pulling out of the parking lot. Then Emily and Veronica’s actors will read over the script a couple times to ensure they get their lines right since the car scene contains a long take of their conversation. We will record the rest of scene 3 will Veronica/ Isima drives around and I and my partner record from the back seat until the last scene.

- 3:40pm to 4:00pm - Me and my partner will look over our footage, heartening the shots were sure we will use because surly we will a lot of extra shots, so we check it all and then once we know we’re good on filming we will high five and part ways.

Conclusion 

This timeline will be helpful on Friday because it’ll act as a guide on what to do at what time so we don’t waste time at the gym and we don’t have to worry later about what scene we do first. I hope that the day allows us to follow this timeline but I know that if any issues arise me and my partner will be able to overcome them. Thank you for reading and see you next time.