CCR Research

     Now that we're finished with the production and editing of the film opening, I began researching how to do the CCR portion of the portfolio. First I began reviewing the CCR segment on the rubric where I found the questions that we have to answer throughout the reflection. These questions are the following:

• How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?
• How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?
• How did your production skills develop throughout this project?
• How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware, and online – in this project?

    I then answered each of these questions every roughly, focusing more on identifying the answer rather than actually making them the nice version of what I will be saying in the video. 

    In order to gain a better understanding of what a CCR is, I watched some of the ones from past Aice Media Students, which taught me that the CCR doesn't have to be just one thing, which makes sense as the first C stands for creativity. 

    After this realization, my mind began to wander off on the different things I could do to differentiate my CRR from others. I came up with a really cool idea for me to film in my "studio" (which really just is my room with an easel) and to make a cool, short intro inspired by Bob Ross. If I can, I would actually love to include the Joy of Painting theme song however I'm not entirely sure if I will be able to due to copyright laws, but I will get back on this thought. 

    

Listen to the Joy of Painting theme song here

    

    I am cutting short on time with this CCR as I initially hoped that I would begin filming during break and editing through the final week however I am confident that with some proper time management (which is something I've always struggled with) I will be able to complete it. 

 

Final Touches

     Today I am finally finished with my Aice Media Film Opening! After a full week of editing, shooting, and more editing, Catharsis is finally complete.

    It was a little rough working through Spring Break. As much as I've come to like filming and editing, a part of me still just wanted to go to sleep and only wake up once school started again. During the week I worked on shooting a new beginning of the opening which would be the turning on of the radio. I also recorded some of the song through my phone in order to create an effect of transitioning the song from being in the scene to out.

Picture of the radio that I used for the first shot

    

    After this, I began working on the music itself. It was fairly simple, the only difficult portion was figuring out how to fade out and fade in the song during the scene where the artist messes up to the part where she knocks over the painting. 

    Lastly, I added my credits and title to the film opening. This was extremely difficult as this was the first time I added text to a video. I also had a hard time downloading and uploading the font I had chosen. I had to ask for help from MANY youtube tutorials as well as some friends who are more experienced with editing. 

    And that the end to the production and editing portion of the film opening! Though it obviously didn't go exactly ad I had initially envisioned, I'm still really proud of the outcome!

Blooper!

     In honor of finishing the (majority of) the editing portion in this project, I thought it would be fun to share a small blooper that took place while filming with Nicole. 

    As we're nearing the end of the project I can't help but be a little sad. As someone with 0 experience with filming and editing, I actually found this process to be really fun despite all of the challenges I've faced and will face. Though the end product won't be the way I envisioned it initially I'm still proud of everything I've accomplished this year when it comes to Aice Media, I've grown a lot since August and I can't wait to see what comes next. 

Music & Tunes

     Today I spent the afternoon searching for songs to include in the background of the film opening. In order to get royalty-free songs, I used a website called Chosic which allows me to not only search songs based off of mood and genre but also through similar songs. 

    Through the Royalty Free tab, I played around with the different tones and genres available, initially starting with the Rock genre as well as a calm tone. 

    The website was a bit slow and hard to manage however eventually I did find a Blues song that was amazing. The song is called Niles Blues by Kevin Macleod and I thought it fit really well with the film opening. When I went to edit it in, however, an idea popped in my head about making the first shot of the opening a scene of the artist turning on a radio and the song playing. I have this really pretty vintage imitating radio that would fit perfectly for this but in order to include these scenes in the opening, I would have to either cut some scenes or delete shots in total as the opening would be too long. This is something that I will be mulling over spring break and though I'm not entirely sure if I'll be able to do it I still think it would be a cool idea.

Listen to Niles Blues here 

The Search for Fonts

     This past week I spent time finishing editing the film opening. I went through some obstacles such as having to restart a couple of times due to my computer crashing and not understanding how to use the program well. After multiple attempts, however, I was finally able to edit the clips together. 

    As of now, I'm currently waiting on the music that I will be using in the blog. Like I mentioned before, a friend of mine who is a musician agreed on composing an original "score" for the movie, which in reality will of course just be the one song for the opening. I'm really excited to see how it turns out, but just in case I will be planning on looking into royalty-free music available online as a backup. 

    Today I focused on finding a font for the title as well as the credits that will be included in the opening.

    At first, I thought it would be a cool idea to go for a font that looked like paintbrush strokes but after looking through a couple of different ones I realized it didn't match the genre of the movie, which is drama. It felt like a font perfect for a coming of age movie or something along the same lines. Overall it seemed too joyous and it would not meet the target audience that our drama film is reaching for. 

Paintbrush by Darell Flood on DaFont

Sweet Paint by Darell Flood on DaFont

    In order for my font to properly cater to the target audience, I began researching and looking at the fonts in the drama films I had mentioned in my blog post, Drama Research, as well as the ones listed in Shots and Angles Research. By looking through these movies I gained a better understanding on what type of fonts are most commonly used in drama films. I also referenced a website called Creative Market which had an article on a variety of fonts used in films.

    It was on this website that I found a font called The Artist, which was both clean and matched the content of the opening. I soon found out, however, that this font was only available for purchase through the creative market, and though it was very tempting, I decided against purchasing it. I was sure that I could find something similar for free. 

    Still, I held on to a small string of hope and went back to DaFont, searching for The Artist, and bam I couldn't believe my luck.  

The Artist by MadeType

        After deciding on the font I proceeded to use it in the opening and failing to do so multiple times before heading to my friend for help. I'm very excited about how the project is going and I can't wait to be able to finally complete it. 

I Am Running Out of Editing Titles

      Speaking of titles....... I am still not entirely sure what to name my film! At the moment the running two are "Catharsis" and "Painting in Red" which were both recommended by two friends. I have always been terrible with naming things, whether it's an artwork or a book or even naming pets, I spend hours and hours on end thinking about what to name things only arrive at a dead end. I'll most likely be mulling over this thought for a large portion of the remaining time we have to complete the project. 

    Thinking about title ideas also reminded me of the fact that part of the project requires us to include the title as well as cast list in the film opening, which is something that I, once again, have no clue how to do. And so I referenced this video by Jordan Dueck on youtube for more information, where he edited the word coffee on top of coffee beans. 

    I also tried to look into fonts and font ideas however If I'm being completely honest I'm still not entirely sure how to change fonts in premier. I read this article on Rev which explained how to do so but I definitely will need more help further down the line.

    During the following week, I will continue editing and (hopefully) finish the main sequences so that I have time to give to my musician or a friend that agreed on writing a song for the opening. I will also be looking into fonts as well as title ideas to include.  

More editing conundrums

    Today I managed to sort the order of the recordings (or at least some). Because I didn't have an extremely detailed storyboard/shot list I ran into the problem of not being able to decide what order some of the shots should go. In hindsight, I probably should've put more time into the planning of each shot however it's too late to go back now so I'll have to start thinking and deciding quick, 

    This week I also got the chance to talk to my teacher, Ms. Stoklosa, where she gave me some pointers when it came to editing the opening. She referenced a photo I had included in a past blog post of my friend and actor Nicole holding a paintbrush, wherein the background, my bedroom window shined. She mentioned that the light coming through the window could be edited so that it didn't affect the video as much and with that thought, I went back into researching, 

    Searching up on youtube "How to edit backlight in videos" I came upon this video on youtube by Tony Lee Glenn where he teaches viewers how to reduce backlight in videos using Premiere pro. This video definitely helped and I'll be sure to apply the tips during editing. 

Promenading with Premier Pro

 

    With all this time editing I'm not sure what exactly I can record on here besides what I've done overall, so here it goes. Like I mentioned in a previous blog post I managed to import all of the recordings into premier after hours of trying with the help of friends. Today I spent my time managing and going through each recording to see which ones I'd like to use in the opening and which one's I didn't. I also tried to organize the order of each clip but if I'm being honest I completely gave that up after half an hour as there were too much lag and too many recordings to sort through. 

     Because my computer gave in after a couple of hours and physically couldn't handle running premier any longer I sadly wasn't able to work for as long as I wanted to and definitely was able to make a dent in all of the editing. I was really hoping to be able to finish at least the majority of the editing this weekend in order to give my friend some time to write the song or give myself some time to find another song to play over the video however looking over everything now I don't think it will be possible. I most likely will be finishing during spring break as I will have more time then.

Editing Research

    In order to get straight into editing properly, I decided to research, and by research, I mean watch videos. on tips on how to edit using Premiere Pro. 

    First I began by looking into the videos that Adobe itself has on their website on editing tips using Premiere, In the website, there are tons of videos ranging from sound editing to colour adjustment and even animation.

    These videos really helped me remember some of the tools I had learned to use with past Media projects from this year. 

    I also watched some youtube videos on the basics of editing such as this video from YouTuber Tutvid as well as this video by Parker Welbeck which both went into great detail on the process of editing using premier. 

    My first week's editing didn't go as well as I hoped as I wasn't able to get much done. I kept encountering the same obstacles such as not having a lot of time due to the quarter nearing and also technical difficulties with premier, My computer has taken a toll recently with online school and hasn't been running as smooth as it did before we started using Teams and it basically blue screens every hour or so. I'm hoping that this weekend I'll be able to make time to work on the project extensively.

The Beginning of Editing

     Because I wasn't entirely sure if I had gotten enough shots yesterday, I decided to start editing or at least try to. I've mentioned this before, but besides what we've done in this class my experience in filming and editing is a flat 0, and so it's no surprise that with my first day of editing, there were some problems. 

    The first obstacle was that I had no clue how to transfer my videos to my laptop other than sending them to my phone and then email. This process would've taken me ages as I'd have to practically export and send one by one. With this, I turned to my dad who let me use his computer to transfer directly the videos from the sd to my email. To send it to my email I used a website called WeTranser that allowed me to send multiple files rather than just one. 

    This however presented its own obstacle as I was unaware of a process called "unzipping files". Like I said, I have zero experience when it comes to this so I spent around an hour and a half trying to upload my zipped files into premier to no avail. After researching and trying multiple times and still arriving at a dead end I asked my peers who are taking the same class for some help. These are times that I'm very glass that class group chats exist for a couple of my classmates, including past group members Sabrina and Logan, were able to teach me about zipped files and how I can unzip them. 

   After thanking them for their help I went straight into editing, however, because I had a busy day today that included a 3 hour of SAT tutoring, I wasn't able to get much done. In the end, I was able to only import my files and choose which of the recording I would be using. 

    During the following week, I hope to at least edit a base of my film opening in order to gain a better understanding of which shots are or are not missing. 

Here are some pictures I downloaded from my camera, my amazing friend and actor Nicole, and the masterpiece we created:

Follow along Nicole's own journey with her Aice Media Project here.

Filming Day

     Today was the day we've all been waiting for... filming day! The day began at 9, where I spent the majority of the morning organizing my room to fit the theme of the film. I set up my light, the easel, charged my camera's batteries, and rearranged my room to make it seem more "sophisticated" instead of a teenage girls room, (there wasn't much to do here as my idea of an artist's room doesn't strive too far off from what my room looks like).

    At around 12, I walked over to my friend Nicole's house, the one I mentioned in a past post, to help her with her won film opening. There, I acted as her cameraman as she acted and directed the shots. The whole thing took around 3 hours, and I believe it turned out really well. Her shots came out great and her storyline is really solid as well as her set design. 

    After this,0 we came to my house where we began filming my opening. There was a slow beginning as I wasn't sure what to film first but after just picking something and going for it everything went smoothly. I was able to film the majority, if not all the shots I planned, which were the ones that featured the artist in them. Now, everything boils down to editing. 

       During the following week, I will edit the film. I'm hoping that I got enough footage to reach the two minutes we need, however in case I didn't, I'm planning on filming close-ups of me painting as fillers. I plan on finishing editing this weekend so I can give my musician friend a long enough time to write a melody for the opening. 

Here are some photos I took of our filming day

Full Props and Materials

     A couple of blog posts ago I mentioned some of the materials and props I was planning on using for my film opening. Because tomorrow is the big filming day, I am back here giving a newly updated and accurate version of my materials and props that I will be using tomorrow afternoon. 

Materials

Canon Rebel T71

17-50 mm Sigma Lens

55-250 mm Canon Lens

Tripod

Ring Light Tripod

Props

Meeden Easel

15 x 20 Canvas

An Assortment of Paint Brushes

Handy Art Acrylic Paints

12 x 10 Glass Pane

Scrap Paper

The Kiss Painting Decoration

Storyboarding +Shot list

     After researching shots and angles by watching and sketching out scenes from films that featured artists, I began with my own storyboard. This process actually served to be quite difficult for me. I can practically imagine the film opening in its entirety in my head, but translating it on paper felt impossible. This has been something that I've had to deal with for a while, whether it comes to art or even writing, so in order to combat this, I did my best to keep my drawing simple. Instead of focusing on lighting, shading, and details, I stuck to drawing simple linework in order to show shot types and angles. I also decided to simplify the opening shots. capturing only the main ideas that I know I will include in the opening. I also did this because, for me, it felt like some of the shots were very similar and others were too motion-oriented to draw. 

  

Shot List

First (around) 1 min 30 of the opening 

    -Establishing Shot of the studio, artists setting up

    -Backshot of the artist at canvas 

    -Multiple shots of artist painting, 

        -close-ups

    -Close up of paintbrush, artist messes up (music abruptly stops)

  Last 30 seconds

  -Close up of artist's eyes, zooming in

    -Full shot of studio, artist throwing things around (song starts again)