My Film Opening and CCRs

This is it. Everything I talked about in the past 8 weeks is done and I’m ready to show you guys. I think that this project was probably one of the most interesting and challenging things I’ve ever done but I learned so many things from it. Without any more stalling, here is my project 

Dear Diary; Film Opening  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZJiqM2p_z7oUZ9Qo3Omw62ShRD40fI0n/view?usp=sharing

CCR #1 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fPEbdsFPctFkbZRWMdl8AEmeTmErjqUg/view?usp=sharing

CCR #2 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1D2oWOPlc53mn9uGIy7T04N4twmAMVEbv/view?usp=sharing

CCR Post-Production

 I'm not going to lie, editing my CCRs has been rough. For my first one, I had previously mentioned that I was doing a talk show. The filming was hard enough on its own but when I went to transfer all my clips to my computer, they all were very low quality since the quality I had recorded with was not supported by my laptop. I had recorded all the clips in 4K, and my poor laptop couldn’t handle it. First, I freaked out since I had spent 2 days recording everything, but then I took a deep breath and tried to solve this. I ended up finding an app called Inshot which allowed me to import my videos and export them at a certain number of Frames Per Second that my computer could handle.  

 

 

  

I also had a hard time figuring out how to download movie clips to include in my CCR but then I found this app called 4K Downloader where you can put the link of any YouTube video and it will download it for you. This made everything so much easier. I also took all my sound effects like the audience cheering and the theme song from this website called Pixabay. 

For my second CCR, it was mostly editing. I would have to screen record my blog, put in behind the scenes clips, put in clips from my movie. It was much simpler but more tedious.  

 

Music_For_Videos Big Band Show Pixabay https://pixabay.com/music/traditional-jazz-big-band-show-146321/ 

KevinWei93 crowd_laughing_short 8 Pixabay https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/crowd-laughing-short8-291613/  

KevinWei93 crowd_laughing_applaud5 Pixabay https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/crowd-laughing-applaud5-291616/

The End is Coming...

2 days before the due date, my project is done. This whole journey has been incredible, I never imagined doing anything remotely like this. In this blog post, I wanted to reflect on the whole process. 

The research part was one of the most helpful. It gave me an idea of what components film openings typically have, how shots create different moods, and what they tend to introduce. Then, the planning started. Here I planned what I wanted Maddie’s diary to look like, the sets we were going to use, the music that we wanted to include, we created a storyboard, we created a script, and the props. 

Now the production was honestly the roughest part of the whole thing. It was on day 3 of the production that we realized that our story was too long for a film opening and we had to scrap various shots which also meant getting rid of other elements like our old story board, the props for the scenes in the school, and half of the script. We had to scrap ALL of our clips and start again the next filming day. We created a new story board and decided to film on a camera instead of an iPhone and once we finished filming, we were much happier with what we had done. This time the film truly felt raw and empty, just like Maddie. The easier thing, honestly, would have been to continue with what we had even if it didn’t match our original idea, I mean we had already written like 10 blog posts discussing everything we’ve been working on, we already filmed the whole opening, and it wasn’t terrible. But sometimes, you can’t take the easiest route. In this case, the easiest route meant having to submit something that we weren’t happy with. 

And we didn't. We changed everything and started from scratch just to create something that aligned with our original idea, to create a film that felt raw and sad, something different from the typical happy high school experience.
 

I would like to share a quick draft of our old version of the film opening so you can compare it with our final product: (please don't mind the sound, most of it wasn't supposed to be listened to either way)

CCR Production

 My first CCR is a talk show so to create the typical late night talk show setting I had to move things around. I used my sister's room to set up the whole thing, I used this blue armchair that I had in my room and my sister’s desk and cleared everything on one side of the room. I placed them side by side, kind of looking at each other. Since I was going to be both the host and the guest, I would only need to include one of them in each shot. 

This was the inspiration for the set: 

 

This was what it looked like: 

Filming was a bit of a struggle since I was the only one there. I had to get up to start recording, sit back down, act, and then get up again to cut the camera. This took up a lot of my time and made filming very difficult. I also had to stop filming at one point because my natural light ran out as the sun set, meaning I had to continue the next day. Honestly, the most important thing was making sure my acting was engaging and appropriate for the talk show kind of like how you would see on TV but since I’m not actor, I tried my best. 

Here is the logo I created for my show: 

 

My second CCR was much easier to film, for this video I created a diary entry video to go with Maddie’s reliance on her diary to express her feelings. Here I need to shoot various shots of me writing in a diary, voiceovers, and I need to get lots of multimedia of whatever I would discuss. Filming myself writing in the diary was tricky since I didn’t have a tripod that would help me film from above and whenever I tried to film myself with my left hand it would end up looking shaky. I ended up having my mom and my sister help with this part since I couldn’t do it alone. 

CCR Question #4

The fourth question for the CCR is “How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware and online – in this project?” I want to discuss any technologies that I use while producing like hardware (cameras, lighting, mics, phones and tripods) and software (planning tools, editing tools and Blogger) and then how I use these technologies and if they helped me solve problems. 

One of the main problems we had was choosing which tool we would use for filming. We used about 3 different tools, but we landed on using Santina's mom's camera. First, we decided to film on Fatima’s small digital Canon camera but then we realized that the quality wasn't the best, and we couldn't find the charger for it. Then we started filming on an iPhone, which had good camera quality, but it was lacking a sort of professional look that we're going for. Our last option was using Santina’s mom’s camera, which was mostly for pictures, but we made it work to record video. That camera made our shots look so much more professional. There was one problem with this camera though and it was the filming process. Even though we had a tripod, the tripod would fall over due to how heavy the camera was, so we had to hold it and try to stay still for most of our shots which was hard to do and some of our shots did look a little shaky in the end. 

The main software that I used were Canva and Blogger. On Canva (a graphic design platform), I created the animated production logo for the opening, and I also created various mood boards for the project like what the contrast would be in Maddie's old life versus her current life. On Blogger (blog writing platform), I documented every step of the process of creating these opening from the planning to the production. There I shared behind the scenes videos, weekly updates on what we changed and what was going on, Pictures of our props and sets, and all the research I did on both the drama genre and the coming-of-age genre before I started filming. We edited the whole opening on Adobe Premiere Pro which was helpful since we had it on both the school computers and our own.