Production Halted

As many of you know, the recent Covid-19 outbreak has stopped numerous activities and disturbed daily schedules. Not only has the virus recently intruded into the state of Florida, but school has been suspended for a week. Now public health officials are cautioning us to not catch and spread the disease by social distancing. Social distancing is the term used to describe the process of lessening  the contagion possibility by keeping humans home and as far away from each other as possible. This process is aimed to slow down the infection rate and allow our healthcare system to adequately care for those suffering from critical to severe Corona symptoms. Due to this, filming, editing, and meeting up as a group has been difficult as going outside of one's home is only meant for a must-need basis. Prior to the shutdown due to the virus, we had planned to re-shoot some scene coming off from the peer review we had done weeks back. In some scenes, especially the two shot car ones, the lighting was not the best and we wanted to fix that by scheduling another filming day. Instead, schools suspended for god knows how long, and we are advised to self quarantine. In reality, the best thing we can do from home is try to reedit the footage from home. Trying to sharpen the cuts and transitions is a must. Designing better title cards is another aspect we can work on. All in all, these past couple of weeks have been a hassle and a drain on productivity. We hope that this pandemic blows over or at least we're able to mitigate and contain it in the states so that normal daily life can continue.

Filming Blog: Reshoots

For today’s blog I will be detailing what we did after our last blog, the peer review. Initially going into the peer review and submitting our product for viewing, we knew that it was not the best or to say, final version of our film. We really wanted to reshoot some scenes to get better quality ones. When the other group looked at our film, they also noticed some minor issues in our film. For example:

Just.a snapshot of the car crash scene above reveals some issues. First, interior light in the car is quite an eye sore in the scene. The brightness of the light not only takes away attention from what’s going on in the scene, but is also desaturating the focus of the camera. Another aspect that we would like to improve in our scenes is the acting or more specifically the line composition and delivery. We found that the dialogue of the film could be better if we would have prepared more and written an in-depth script to memorize off from. This is not a huge flaw since acting isn’t that important to the quality of the final product, in this type of film, but more fluid dialogue would only improve the film. We plan to continue our reshoots. For now, we’ve been talking about how we could can our music selection for the film. However, that’s for the next blog.

Filming Blog: Peer Review

Earlier this week we were instructed that we'll be peer reviewing another groups project. The template (shown below) was meant for us to jot down how the other groups project is turning out. We had to make sure that their film followed the basic criteria for the project and also added in constructive comments on how we thought of the film and if there could be any improvements. The initial viewing of the other groups project left us quite confused. Like many other student films, including ours, the filming technicality is there but the plot is not always so vivid. A first impression of the other groups film gave off the idea that a girl with premonitions of a grim future, tries to prevent that from becoming reality. At first we didn't really understand the premise. It seemed a little convoluted. However, after watching the film a couple of times and conversing with the other group we understood it. We suggested that they re-edit their film since the quick edits and seemingly non-sequential, or rather confusing cuts, made the film convoluted. Despite that, they most of the criteria for the film. They used proper lighting, varying camera angles, and executed the title slides properly.