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.    

Filming Blog: Progress

We haven’t been able to film anymore than we did earlier this week due to schedule constraints. I have to go to work, so does Nyaria and Katie has practice throughout the weekday. We did however, goes over the shots we captured during our initial shoot. After looking through my cameras playback function, I found that we took a lot of takes and most of the shots we had were bloopers. It really shows how much work and refining is needed for a final product. Some of the funniest bloopers were from the murder scene where the “killing” shot took multiple takes due to us laughing. In spite of the craziness, we compiled a shared google drive and file on a USB to save our work. I remember my previous project with Preace, we couldn’t email the footage to each other because it was too large, so we uploaded it to a google drive. We plan to continue filming this weekend. My partners should be free and ready to film this weekend as our deadline is coming fast. One of our peer editing deadlines is due later next week, and we want to finish before that time. Filming may be the most difficult part to plan due to availability, but editing may take up the most of our time. Well, let’s see how filming goes this weekend, until next time.

Filming Blog: Day 1

Today we finally filmed!  After almost a week of delays we finally got some of our initial shots. We had arraigned to meet up at Nyaria's house after school to film. We choose her house because she a dinning table needed for our date scenes. I had driven my other partner, Preace to her house and when we got there, my partner Katie had brought an unexpected guess, Lucas. Lucas was a kid Katie would drop off from school daily and he tagged along to help and watch us film. Previously, the girls had already planned their outfits while I just simple changed into a dress shirt, very simple. Nyaria however, had to go to work at six, an essential time for our body bag dragging scene as it was nearing sundown. To compensate, we decided to do some of the scenes instead like the date scenes. The actual filming was pretty fun as we had a good time, laughed and shared ideas to make the scenes even better than planned. I remember setting up the camera on a tripod at just the right angle so both parties were shown in the two shot. The funny thing its that we never really delved deep into the specific dialogue for our film. We knew the general message we were trying to invoke, but it turns out that precise dialogue is preferred so we know specifically what to say. It turned out great though as the lines seemed to have came out of us smoothly. A shot that was rather well choreographed was an over the shoulder, following shot that I might say, was pretty well shot as it turned out stable.We ended up wrapping up our date scene but we knew we still had much more left to film. It was nearing 5:40pm when we finished filming, just in time for Nyaria to go to work. So, we wrapped up the shoot, gathered our cameras, tripods, and etc and headed home, waiting for the next filming day.

   

Nyaria on the left, Katie in the middle, and Preace slumped over as apart of a scene.

Filming Blog: Bad Weather

Due to bad Floridian weather, we did not end up filming this past week. We had planned to film our initial scenes this weekend but torrential rain ruined our plans. Even though we did not film we had ample time to further plan and gather our resources. The unexpected rain could have been a setback, but actually it gave us valuable time to compile our costumes, props, and finalize our scripts. We will take this time to plan out our project more. Some of the key props we need includes: fake knife, string, fake blood, etc... The customers we have planned consists of everyday outfits and street wear except for one scene where we have to dress like we’re going on a date. An issue that we had talked about dealing with our projects stems from who’s car are we going to use for the interior car scenes. We made sure that we would film the car scenes in the safest way possible and limit moving shots whilst in the car. Eventually, we decided on using Katie’s car since it’s a Benz and would look much more prestige than my Toyota. Sadly we couldn’t film this past weekend, but the setback allowed us to refine our production more. We are excited to film this coming weekend though as the weather seems to be clear and we hope to get as much video content as we can. I will be posting more updates on our project as we go along.

The view of the weather this past weekend, it’s started to pour soon after this photo was taken.

Storyboard for Final Project

Today we finalized our storyboard for our final project. Since nobody is that good of a drawer, Katie did all of the drawings as she drew the best. We did help her with the captioning and ideas though. The storyboard ended up being ten sheets of draft paper and encompassing 56 shots. Uploading those pictures to our blog was difficult since the pictures would format weirdly or be oriented the wrong way in the blog. To elevate that problem, we just placed the scenes into a slideshow and uploaded that; just like our planning blogs from before. The next step in our project is actual filming and we have some filming days scheduled already, let's hope we make the most of our time and get the shots we need.