Critical Creative Reflection

Wow. Making the critical reflection was probably more annoying than making the project itself. I just didn't know how to get my words out effectively. It probably took me like five or six different scripts before I finally created one that was serviceable. I didn't write five full scripts, I wrote a bunch of partial scripts and only finished one. But the trouble doesn't end there. It took me forever to successfully read my script. I'm talking well over an hour and a half. I messed up so many times I was considering making a blooper reel. Then I realized that would take too long, so I'm probably not going to bother. Maybe I will next time I'm bored, who knows.

The best part is that my internet was down today. The day my project was due. I was supposed to add all the video to my CCR today, but I had to change my plans due to this complication. Instead of doing a standard screen cast, I had to insert videos, pictures, and sounds we captured during the production process. I tried to make what I was showing be somewhat related to what I was speaking about, but there were times where I couldn't do that. In those situations, I did one of two things. Either I dragged in part of our film opening, or I created a drawing in Windows Paint to fill the gap. I wish I could've done the CCR I wanted to complete, but things didn't go my way. I mean, I'm sitting here at my grandparents' house uploading my CCR off of a flash drive onto this really old laptop just so I can upload the video to Google Drive. So, much like the conditions I'm uploading this in, my CCR is less than ideal. The audio itself is pretty good though, so just pay attention to that I guess.


Without further ado, here's my CCR.

Overall, this project was actually a pretty enjoyable experience. All the work we put in to make the film opening seemed kind of worth it. I also had a good time filming, editing, planning, and everything else. But then my internet went down and killed the good vibe. Can't let the haters keep you down though, this is Jacob signing out.

Tiffany

Here's our film opening. Don't really have much to say. Just sit back and, hopefully, enjoy.

The Sound of Music

I'm happy to announce that we're officially done with our film opening. We finished adding everything together a couple of hours ago. All that's left is to render the video and upload it to YouTube.

We spent like 4 hours today adding in all of our sound and boy does it make a difference. We now have sound effects, music, and stings to really set the mood rather than the previous silence. It really helps out a lot.

We have two music tracks in our video. One of them is a royalty free pop song from killertracks called Nobody Like Me by Phillip Andrew Buckle. We felt it matched up with our character pretty well. This character gets very little introduction, but the music certainly helps to explain what she's all about. The other is a more generic horror track. It's much more subtle and gives off a creepy vibe. We found it on freemusicarchive.org. It's called Crises érotiques and it's made by
Pas Dans Le Cul Aujourd'Hui. I'm like 99% sure that's french. But it sounds spooky while being ominous, so we decided to use it.

We also found a few notification sounds to use in our opening. Our sound for receiving a text was taken from the sound effect called Phone Alerts and Rings on the YouTube Audio Library. It sounds like a super generic notification while also being royalty free. We had to go for it.

We have two stings in our project as well. Both were found on freesound.org. One of them, called "DeepReverbyBoom" was uploaded by the user waveplay. The other one, "Violin Scare" was created by a SirBedlam. Both serve a similar purpose, to make something more impactful. We use them for different things, but I think they ended up being pretty effective.

The rest of our noises, unless I'm forgetting something, are all made by us. Things like a door closing or a door creaking open were fairly simple to make. We just recorded us doing the things we wanted a sound for. We even created the sound of a window breaking ourselves. We simply got a glass jar, put it in a few layers of ziploc bag, and threw it into the street. It ended up working pretty well.

I would show you some videos of us creating our sounds, but I can't get the files onto this computer. My mom managed to cut our internet and TV cable while doing some gardening work, so I'm on a different computer than normal. You'll just have to watch the video to hear the sounds in action.

References:
Philip Andrew Buckle. (n.d.). Nobody Like Me [MP3]. Australia: Universal Publishing Production Music Australia Pty. Ltd. APRA.
Phone Alerts And Rings [MP3]. (n.d.). YouTube.

It's Finally Sort of Complete

We just spent all day editing. I'm really tired so this is going to be brief. We finished editing all of the visual aspects of our video. Every shot we're using is edited as perfectly as we could. The last minute took just as long as the first despite our newfound knowledge. We also got to struggle with the lighting of our first 30 seconds today, something we purposefully skipped last time. That was fun. (That's sarcasm)

Nothing we tried looked quite right, so we had to settle for mediocre lighting for a good 15-20 seconds of the project. It's unfortunate, but there was nothing we could do other than refilm, which we don't have for even if the actors were available, or we could suddenly learn everything there is to know about colors in film. Neither of these options seemed particularly viable so we settled for mediocre. It's alright, but it's not great. Adequate, if you will.

After getting all of our clips together, we decided to add our credits. We wanted to integrate them into our film, so I spent like 20 minutes creating our own text message. We used that for a couple credits and then realized it didn't look good. It just didn't feel like it belonged despite our film revolving around social media. All my hard work down the drain, just like that. So, we replaced it with simple text instead. If it works, it works.

Example caption.

We also got our narration recorded today. It was roughly 40 seconds of audio to read our 6 full lines. That was too much narration. We ended up having to cut like half of it. It was quite the struggle trying to finagle our audio so it fit while also sounding okay. We got there in the end, but 2 or 3 of our 6 lines are no longer with us. May they rest in peace.

We also finally came up with a name for our film. I say "came up with," but it was basically the opposite. We couldn't think of anything, so we just named it after our main character. So our film is now called Tiffany. We then spent way to long looking at a drop down list of fonts before we stumbled across one that fit. I think it looks pretty decent and that was good enough for me after like 8 hours of working. It's nice and techy while retaining a girly vibe because it's pink. It's off-centered for some reason I don't fully understand. Enjoy.

After all our hard work, our video ended up at a whopping 2 minutes and 3 seconds. Yup, we were over the limit. So when we get an F on the project, now you know why. We're going finish the audio at some point, we don't know when. We were tired so we all went home.

Looking back, this was not very brief. I guess I rant a bit when I get tired. More reading for you, I guess. 

The Sounds of Frustration

We got together today and spent a good 5 hours editing our opening. We're still nowhere near finished. We haven't quite filmed any of the sound yet or acquired any of the music we'll be incorporating. So, we simply dragged our clips into our free trial of Premier. We spent a bunch of time putting them in order and cropping them to be just the right length. We skipped to the second part of our opening because we didn't have the previously mentioned lighting problem with those shots. We ended up getting a solid minute in place, but that's a minute without any audio. It's going to be a struggle to get this thing finished.

On the bright side, the group as a whole learned a lot about editing with Adobe Premier. It was a lot of trial and error, but I'm happy to say we know how to do a variety of things now. We trimmed clips, split video and audio clips to delete the audio, zoomed in to an almost microscopic level for the exact frame we were looking for, created adjustment layers, got rid of our adjustment layers after realizing we didn't need them, messed with some transitions before realizing they looked bad, and even sped some clips up. Shout out to Adobe in a Minute on Youtube for teaching us basically everything we didn't know how to do. Things were getting pretty frustrating before. None of us knew what we were doing and things were rapidly going downhill. We may have had a real murder on our hands without this individual.

It was quite the journey. Now that we're more comfortable with the software, it should be much easier to finish up the video tomorrow. I can't wait for Adobe to take away the program in roughly 25 days so everything I learned will become meaningless.

The audio front is not looking as good. We plan on getting our dialogue recorded tomorrow. It shouldn't take very long since our script is literally 6 lines long. After that, we're going to have to record a bunch of other sounds like doors opening and closing or lights shutting off. We also need to find some nice royalty free music that fits into our movie. The last thing we want is a copyright suit from Justin Beiber or something. Ideally, we're looking for one fast paced pop song for the start of the opening, and a creepy/spooky song for the rest of it. Sebastian said he was going to take care of that, but we'll see how that goes. What I'm really looking forward to is when we try to create some ambient noises as well as our notification noise. Apple's aren't royalty free so we have to make our own. I don't know how, but we'll figure something out. As for the ambient sounds like crickets, cars, and owls, I'm excited to create those noises using my mouth. I make a great whoosh noise for the cars, but the other two will be a bit more challenging.

This is a Bloody Mess!

Last time I said we were done filming. I was mistaken. We still had to film our very last shot. This shot required us to make some fake blood and use the curling brush we bought earlier.  We had some food coloring and corn syrup and very carefully followed a recipe we found on Google. The recipe didn't actually give any measurements though. It just told us 1 part water, 3 parts corn syrup. We tried something like that and it didn't go very well. The substance wasn't thick enough, but we went along with it anyways. We added some food coloring, but to no avail. It ended up looking more like cough syrup than blood, so we had to start again.

1st attempt at fake blood.

The cough syrup we made by accident.

The next time around went much better. We started with a smaller Tupperware and used much less water than before. As a result, the blood remained thick and didn't require a bunch of work to stir. When it came to coloring, we didn't use blue food coloring. We replaced that with the more subtle green and wound up with a much nicer looking blood. We let it sit for a bit and then it was time to get to work.

The "blood" we made.

Our last scene was going to involve our murder weapon, some blood, and a dead person. Unfortunately, we couldn't find a corpse lying around so we had to use my sister's hand and our imaginations. We made it look somewhat like a crime scene while keeping the floors clean, that is quite the accomplishment.

Here's a sneak peek of the actual shot.

With that mess taken care of, we were officially done filming. But we had a bit of an issue. The lighting on a good amount of our shots was far too dark. We didn't know how to fix it, but we thought messing with the brightness and contrast was a way to do so. After an hour or so, we had to download a free trial of Adobe Premier and use their lighting effects feature. It doesn't look amazing, but at least it looks like something rather than a dark blob. This is as far as we got in the editing process.

Filming

Our filming is now complete. It was quite the process, I just wasn't there for most of it. We took the approach of just filming every idea we had and deciding what was best during editing. Because of all our footage, I think it's safe to say we are done with filming for good.

When we first got to the filming location, it took us about an hour just to set everything up. We had to figure out how we were going to film things, where we were going to film them, etc. But the most time consuming thing of all had to be the lighting. We ended up having to double layer sheets over the window and tape them to the wall with some blue construction tape. This still wasn't perfect, so we ended up adjusting how much of the window the second sheet covered. This part was done on a shot by shot basis, so it took a while. This still wasn't precise enough, so we had to resort to using a phone flashlight that was wrapped in a blanket to give a little bit more light.

Method for keeping out the light.

What it looked like with the lights off.

We also just used flashlights as spot lights in multiple instances. They were surprisingly effective when a thin layer of sheet was put over them. That's not all, we also had a lamp for when we needed more intense lighting. It was getting dark out, so simply letting in more sunlight wasn't going to cut it. The lamp was a bit too bright, but that's where more sheets come in to play. Just wrap that bad boy in enough layers and the intensity of the light will be exactly what we're looking for.

The previously mentioned lamp.

One example of the phone flashlight.

We filmed everything in two rooms and a tiny hallway, but we tried our best to conceal that fact. Here I am telling you that anyways. Through a creative use of camera angles, lighting, and props it shouldn't be blatantly obvious. It might even be unnoticeable to the casual observer.

Unfortunately, I had to leave rather early in the filming process. We were 2 or 3 hours in and we were approximately 10 shots into the film. That means I missed out on making the fake blood and all sorts of other things. If you want a more detailed account of our filming you're going to have to check out Sebastian or CJ's blog.