CCR Ramblings

With the due date for our project nearing fast, I started to think about my CCR and how I want to present it. In class our teacher talked about being original and that we shouldn’t just sit in front of a camera and ramble on. For my CCR what I am thinking of doing for now is a commentary where I incorporate little drawings that I make really simply in ms paint interlaced with actual pictures. I think that something like this would be pretty personalized as it is the reflection as I see it. Thats my plan right now but I am going to work on it for a bit and see what else I can come up with.

Prequel to my Cabin Fever

I wasn’t too sad about missing school at first but as the quarantine continues I find myself missing school more and more. I like to come up with random electronic projects and being around a lot of people led to some really funny ideas for me to make. Being stuck at home is really killing my creativity for now since I don’t have a ton of people to draw inspiration from or bounce ideas off of. I have been watching Netflix’s series “Drive To Survive” for now since that keeps me pretty entertained. Also, our AICE Media Studies class had our first online meeting and it was pretty interesting. We all were able to give our weekly media recommendations which allowed for a bit or normality in this weird time.

Corona Part 2

There hasnt been much work on our opening since our last post. We have been continuing talks of how we want our editing pacing to be and what fonts we are going to use for the final edit. From now on it looks like I am an online student because of corona. Meeting up in person now is really hard because of the social distancing we are following for the time being. Looks like even my group is going online for now.

I am bored.

Hello, No new news on the project today. School is still closed and I wish this whole thing could end already. At my current job my position is no longer needed as there is not enough people in the restaurant to justify it so it looks like i will have a lot of free time this week. Enough bad news though! The place Oliver works wants to hire me! I put in my two weeks and I am pretty excited to start working with Oliver. I wish I had more to write about the project but hopefully my personal news will suffice.

Editing commences

With filming done the next step is to edit together the video. Oliver and I are both very experienced with Premiere Pro so we are using that. As I said in the last posting, Oliver's computer is not strong enough to run Premiere so he convinced his parents to come over to my house. I grabbed another powerful computer I had so we are able to have workstations. We started working on a rough draft and got a basic timeline set up before Oliver had to go to work. Oliver is a better editor than I am so he is doing the tedious work and I am working on fine tuning and working off his ideas.

Our very messy workstation (with my cat Moe)

Filming Complete

Hey, OUR FILMING IS DONE!!!! I am extremely happy with how it came out. We started filming at around 11am and finished at 3pm. We had a ton of fun filming and Katherine's mise-en-scene she did in her room was fantastic. Oliver's camera battery has a pretty small capacity so it died a couple times while filming and we had to take breaks and charge it. But other than that it went great and I am so relieved it is over. With the coronavirus having everyone paranoid I can only hope Oliver is able to come over and edit as his computer is not strong enough to edit.

Here is our finished set, we moved over to Katherine's bedroom as it would be easier to make believable

Basically the Black Plague

Ok, so this post is going to be a depressive heap of our problems, I really wish I didn't have to make this. Currently this corona-virus is bringing a lot to a halt in my area. Oliver was the first victim of it without even being infected with his competition cancellation and now it seems like the whole world is up in flames. I am hoping this won't affect us too horribly but going shopping for props and such is going to be less than ideal. If any of us catch this I don't even want to think about the consequences this will have on our project. After reading this back I think I should worry more about the real consequences this could have that aren't just school. The only thing I can do now though is just take precautions and hope the next post is filled with happiness.

Film Opening Name

VALID

One decision that I have not made a post about yet is our film opening title. We wanted our title to be simple and to the point. We went through a lot of different names and iterations but ended up with the title Valid for the time being. For my groups last project we made a wacky indie band called Super Cyberpunk Space Cowboy Band, yeah the name is a bit excessive. It worked with our target audience though, just how that long crazy name worked with its audience I feel that having such a basic and simple title will resonate more with the teenage audience our film would be marketed towards.

Script DONE

Our group finished writing our script for our opening. This will allow us to spend less time filming as we already have our characters script finished and our actor Katherine is practicing the lines to allow our filming to go as efficiently as possible

Int. Photo Studio- morning

CAMILLE is on the phone talking with a friend. A bunch of clothes sprawled along the floor can be seen, and there are smudges of makeup on the mirror.

CAMILLE

What do you want?...No I don't think I can today, I need to make a post... Yes again! I can't just not post, I'll lose followers... ok, ok, I'll see if I can... sure, whatever.

She hangs up and takes a few selfies. Disgusted with the photos, she begins frantically adjusting her outfit and changing in and out of clothes.

CAMILLE

(turning to mirror)

Ew my thighs...it's fine.

CAMILLE dashes to her makeup desk and starts applying makeup. She screws up when she starts applying mascara and then proceeds to aggressively rub off her makeup. She then runs back to the mirror to take more selfies. Each photo she takes looks worse and worse, and she finally cracks down.

CAMILLE

Ugh fuck I can't do this!

She chucks her phone across the room and flips her makeup table in a fit.

Int. Photo Studio- Later During the day

CAMILLE is wearing sweats with disheveled makeup, scrolling through her cracked phone. She's scrolling through instagram accounts of famous social media influencers. Feeling hopeless, she starts crying.

New Schedule

My group has figured out a new schedule after not being able to meet our previous filming date, one of our reasons for trying to film so early is that our group member Oliver had to compete at a television competition called STN in Washington D.C. Oliver was supposed to be gone until March 16th so we wanted to have a headstart. The trip was cancelled midway through because of coronavirus so Oliver returned early. This allowed us to have some talks about our overall vision while drinking Milk tea at a local Korean restaurant.

New Schedule:

March 17th - Finish Filming

March 23-28 - Editing

Visual Storyboard

Hello everyone! We have reached a big step in planning that I believe will be extremely beneficial when we film on our revised date of March 17th. The director of Lil Nas X's "Panini" music video, Mike Diva talks about how he uses visual storyboards with his cell phone to map out a video before he shoots it in this video. I really liked his method and it is also similar to a project we did in our AICE Media Studies class at the start of the year where we made a storyboard with only photos. After being inspired by Mike Diva's pre-production techniques I mentioned it to my group and we worked on it today. We are still deciding how we are going to convey our final shots but here is a slideshow of our visual storyboard for our opening.

A bit of our set!

Hello! Today's blog is going to be a short one as not much has happened between the last posting and now. Today Katherine and I had a really short time frame to go to Oliver's house and arrange his room to become a "Social Media Influencer's room". Our choice for the room consisted of blacks and creme colors while attempting to keep things minimalist. We chose these for the room based on influencers we studied, one thing not pictured is the large creme closet the room has. The bottom picture has already been changed a lot to remove the wooden table and stool and even add a clothing rack to the side. We will not make our filming time of tomorrow so we will improve on our room and do a visual storyboard.

Storyboard Draft Complete

For today and the next 2 days my group will be meeting up to get more work done on our opening. Today's meeting was based solely around our storyboard and what direction we think our opening should go in. It took us a while since we took so many snack breaks but in the end I am pretty happy with our storyboard and now that we have it done our filming should be much easier. During our meeting we also discussed the room layout and how we want to design it. We ordered some props, one big one being a clothing rack to have on the side of the room.

Below is a collection of our storyboard and some of our planning papers. There is a lot of pictures so I did not want to clutter my blog page with all of them

Planning Papers Album

Group Meeting Feedback

Today in class we had the opportunity to discuss our current film opening progress with our peers. Getting an inside look at how other people are furthering their projects gave me a better idea of continuing with my own production. I think one of the biggest things that interested me was hearing other peoples problems. Now, this may sound counterproductive as learning about others problems won't help me create my opening. However, through learning about some group members struggles (one big one being set design) I am going to talk with my group and figure out how we can navigate further. With our current schedule we are set to begin filming on Sunday, after hearing about problems with others setting up their sets the day of filming I am going to try going to Oliver's house a day early to get our set finalized.

Plans in motion

Today my group was able to all meet up and finish our 1st draft for our film opening. This is really big for us as we are staying perfectly on schedule and organized. We also decided on a filming location of Oliver's spare room in his house, the room is mainly empty which will allow us to create our ideal set without many problems. Between the 3 of us, my group has a good amount of mise-en-scene elements for right now. We may have to do a small amount of shopping to make it exactly how we envision it though. That is pretty much the extent of our work today, I will be uploading pictures of our first storyboard draft tomorrow when I get them. I hope everyone is enjoying watching our journey and I hope you will not be disappointed with the final result!