We are pretty much done with the project! Today I added all the sound effects listed in the drive and added a couple more (room tone, music, heart beating, risers). Here is what the timeline is looking like:
All I need to do is add a couple audio effects and make the graphics. My team and I will final critique the video in class tomorrow!
I wrote down the questions for the 2nd CCR. I decided to make questions from the questions given. It would be odd if I just kept talking during the interview with barely any questions. That is unrealistic. I made the questions listed bellow:
Questions:
·
How does your product use or challenge conventions and how
does it represent social groups or issues.
o How does
this film opening represent social groups
·
How does your product engage with audiences and how would
it be distributed as a real media text?
o How does
this bring the viewer in?
o How will
this product be distributed?
·
How did your production skills develop throughout the
project?
o What
hardships did you face during the project?
o What is
something new that you learned during the project
·
How did you integrate technologies-software, hardware and
online-in this project?
o What did
you use to film the project?
o How was
the post production done?
As I was waiting for the sound effects and audio recordings, I color graded the film opening. I decided it would be cool to have a cool tone in the beginning, and a warm tone in the end. The warm tone helps establish the waking up and morning tone. The cool tone helps establish the intense night.
Here are some of the night time shots after color grading:
As said in my previous blog, I wanted to do the idea of a street interview. I decided to start off in the street also. I made the script for that as shown bellow:
What is up everyone I am Zain Vidal and I recently made a film opening titled “circles”. This film brings out representation of young women working under men in the industry. Tina is a 22 year old girl who is expected to do a difficult job without any guidance. Tina works day and night to finish writing this book. Showing this represents how women are just as good as men, even though they don’t get the same credit. According to linkedin, Globally, it is estimated that less than a third of leadership positions are held by women. In the United States and Canada, the situation is not much better, with only 37% and 35% of leadership positions being held by women, respectively, despite women comprising 47% and 46% of the workforce. This film shows that a women can be just as good as a man, despite the less opportunities they have.
This production is part of the mystery genre, having a target audience of 18-24. This target audience was chosen based off a couple factors.
1. The young representation. Tina is a young women who is struggling to keep up with all her work. She tries her best to stay organized but it is hard. According to the National Library of medicine, The prevalence of disorganized/controlling patterns was 15% among 20 young adults with no current psychiatric diagnosis. This gives the audience something to relate too.
2. To add onto this youth representation, is the seeing youth in power. Our film has both a young boss, and young women doing an extremely important task. This sort of representation influences the youth’s motives. It makes them think “I can do that too” According to the National Library of Medicine, The studies reveal the influence of films on people’s beliefs and opinions, stereotypes and attitudes. Movies can have a significant impact on gender and ethnic stereotypes, change attitudes towards certain groups of people and cause newly formed opinions on various issues. With this being said, Circles shows that anyone can do anything, and it surely influences people to believe so.
I went around to see how our target audience feels about this project.
(target audience hypes up wowwww)
Along with this representation, circles had lots of pre production, with many failures.
It took my team and I awhile to come up with an idea. We wanted to do a mystery, just simply because we thought it was an interesting genre. After many failed ideas, I decided to look up the exact definition of “mystery”. Here I found the concept of pseudoscience, and the rest is history.
We had many struggles when producing this film. Such as busy schedules, corrupted footage, and lack of setting. We were able to get past that and get a film opening that we are all proud of done.
The film is show on a Sony A7III one of my favorite Sony cameras. With the two lenses used being a standard 50 mil and a 18-35 mil lense. The camera was placed on my personal tripod. The dialogue audio was recorded with these super cool wireless GVM Mics. These mics automatically sync into the camera. Most of the sound effects were either foley, of artificial.
Circles is available on youtube, Instagram, and tik tok .Circles will soon be submitted to local student film festivals and award ceremonies. So, check it out.
I plan on making the interview part vertical but the rest horizontal. I recorded how long it would take me to say the script, being around 3 minutes. This gives me 2 minutes to add credits and the public interviews.
In class, we discussed that part of the opening submission is a critical reflection of the film opening. We have to answer 4 questions, in 2 videos. Each video needs to cover all 4 questions. The questions are as listed bellow:
o
How
does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social
groups or issues.
o
How
does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a
real media text?
o
How
did your production skills develop throughout the project?
o
How
did you integrate technologies-software, hardware and online-in this project?
For the second video I am going to do a sit down interview but make it look super cool since the idea is really basic. I want to have two chairs facing each other with a table in the middle. Dressed professionally, with a garden in the background.
At our trip to Panera, we also decided to start the line edit of the film opening. Here is the edit
I later texted them the sound effects needed bellow:
My group and I met up to sort through footage and discuss the post production. Here is us at panera!
I realized I never really went into enough detail on our character development and style.
Tina: Her personality traits is that she is extremely intelligent, mysterious, secretive, hard working, professional, overworks herself. For the way she presents herself, she always matches and wears nice, fitting clothing. We decided to put her in silk pajamas. We had Vanessa wear matching silk pajamas. Something about silk pajamas feels professional. We also picked this because she had to rush to put a blazer and pants on. The silk pajamas do not look bad with the blazer and pants.
Boss: Although the boss is only in three scenes, we still wanted to develop his personality so the actor knows how to portray him. The boss is sassy, funny, intelligent, and professional. We wanted to develop the boss to have a quirky style. Something like Elton John came in mind.
Filming- As said in my previous blog, the audio did not collect during our initial filming of the news story. We refilmed it at Vanessa's dining room table. We had a picture in the background. We decided to put me in the middle third, the middle of the table, and the middle of the picture. This was just to look appealing to the eye. I said the begining and end lines in a standup, and the middle as a voice over.
Editing- We filmed the audio like this because in post production, we added pictures of the book into the story. We added these by putting a 2 layers of the photos over eachother. Then, expand the underlying layer to fit the entire screen, adding the gausion blur effect (blurs out the background). With the top layer, we first added keyframes, one at the begining of the image, one at the end. We then expanded the scale (size) of the image at the last keyframe. Mis added more motion to the photo and gave it more of a news look. We then put a layer with the graphic over all other layers.
To start off, the misc-en-scene in the office scene-
As shown there are papers EVERYWHERE. This is used to develop the personality of Tina being extremely busy and overworking herself. We also placed a history book clearly in most of the shots, and had Tina interact with it. This was used to reveal that the book she was writing had something to do with history, but not clearly stating what about history it is. Adding the mystery effect. We also needed to develop the mathematical part into the office. We did this by popping up stocks on the desktop. We found a layout that looked like it was just simply graphs.
Misc-en-scene of the couch
We then developed the misc-en-scene of the couch. We filmed this scene on a couch instead of a bedroom to emphasize the overworking that Tina does. she does not even care where she sleeps, she just plops down anywhere. we also decided to not put too many pillows because our character is basic. Just a couple pillows and a blanket. We decided to have a phone next to her to add onto the overworking character trait of tina. Sleeping with your work phone next to you is not normal, unless you're a "workaholic". We decided to maket the phone a cell phone. Many work phones are this, so we used it to develop that more. Her life is work. Her phone is only work.
Misc-en-scene of the office-
We did not have an office building to shoot in. It was just too hard with our busy schedules to fit ihto the office we were planning on filming at, since the office building has a closing time, and is not open on weekends. We decided to film inside Clara's home office. We had to hide that this is a home office. We did this by closing the window halfway so you cannot see outside of it. We framed the desk in a way that it did not show the bathroom attached to it, or the closet infront of it.
We also placed a history book clearly in most of the shots, and had Tina interact with it. This was used to reveal that the book she was writing had something to do with history, but not clearly stating what about history it is. Adding the mystery effect. We also needed to develop the mathematical part into the office. we did this by popping up stocks on the desktop. we found a layout that looked like it was just simply graphs.
News story-
Not much misc-en scene development here. It was not needed because news stories are typically shot on the spot, without much development of the background. We did not want to over do It.
We used the wireless mic to film our audio. This mic has a close range of audio. This made us be able to capture audio up close such as breathing, whispering, and noises of the pen. These noises will be extremely helpful since we do not have to add as much foley and artificial sound anymore.
We also filmed some foley on the spot. We basically just brought the mic closer to the pen to get a closer up shot. Here are some pictures of the filming process of it:
During the shot on the couch, we put a mic on Vanessa's bra strap. This was so the audio was hidden.
As said in my previous blog, we checked out a three point light kit, Sony a7III, 50 mil/ zoom lenses, and a wireless mic.
The main thing I followed for the 3 point lighting is using a fill, back, and key light. I used the fill light as a refraction. This is basically facing the light towards the ceiling so that it fills the entire room. This light composition is only possible to use on white ceiling, which Vanessa had. We used this during the office shot. It was more successful because the ceilings were low and the room was small. We used an extension cord to plug two of the lights because the outlet only had one free outlet. We plugged another light into another outlet. Here is what the plugs looked like:
The final outcome of the gaffing is bellow:
Setting up the camera shot we difficult at times because the room was so small. We were overall able to get it done. most of the shots are close ups, some examples bellow:
Due to the large number of close up shots, we need to get a good establishing shot. I was not happy with the establishing shot that we got, shown bellow:
I was also not happy at first about how high we needed to put the ISO, because it can become grainy after you pass a certain point, but it was not noticeable.
Yesterday my group and I started to film our film opening. We went to our groupmates house, Vanessa to film. Vanessa wound up being our actress. We used our shot list as a key, which me made the day before. We wanted it to be simple and easy to follow, since we all already knew our film. The shot list is bellow:
We crossed out the shots as we went, so we could stay more organized. We are filming the rest of our scenes on Friday after school. We are going to film until dark so we can get the night time shots (walking to couch and going to sleep) easier.
Yesterday, my group and I filmed our news story. This did not go as planned to say the least... We had to rush it because we did not know we were doing something in the beginning of class, so we had to wait. So it was rushed, and we were not able to use the CBTV studio.
We were able to finish filming and basically had to run back to class. We were overall not satisfied with the outcome. We wanted to refilm, but we were not sure with the time circumstances. We looked at the footage a couple minutes later, and the audio.... There was no audio. NOT FUN! I originally was not on camera, I was behind it. The audio was working before hand, I even tested it with a recording. I switched with my groupmate who was going to do it because she had never anchored before, and we were in a rush. When we switched the mics, it must have unplugged. We are going to refilm it tomorrow.
We had to work around this incident filming today, but overall filming was still successful.
Yesterday, I stopped by BEACON afterschool with my friends to get equipment.
As said in my previous blog, we were planning on filming the news story on Friday in class. This wound up not being able to be done because our teacher was unexpectedly absent. The substitute did not allow us to leave the classroom to film. Therefor, we had to figure out when we are going to film this. We would film it next class, but we will be filming. I will most likely film the news story during my 7th period, which is my television production class. We need to start filming so I am just going to do it on my own.
The other "things" we need to do next class is film. We plan on renting equipment from BEACON, which is our counties school news station. I have rented equipment from this studio before and they have super high quality equipment. The guy in charge, Jim, is super nice and helps you get the equipment that is perfect for your project. I was planning on getting a 3 packs of GVM RGB lights, some sort of Sony camera, and mics. I texted the Instagram account am swinging by after school to get the equipment tomorrow.
After texted, my group and I decided to start filming either Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on how prepared we are. We decided to spilt up the shot list and finish it by Monday. We spilt it up as listed bellow:
DESK (Vanessa)
WALKING TO COUCH AND GOING TO SLEEP (Clara)
PHONE CALL AND NEWS STORY (Nadia)
LEAVING AND OFFICE (Zain)
On Wednesday, we get out of school early since it is SAT day. We plan on getting most of the house filming done then, but if we don't we have Thursday, Friday, and Monday.
Today, I went over the script that my team had started while I was absent. I changed a couple things to make the film flow a little better, and also develop Tina's personality more. Bellow is the script:
office
Scene 1- TINA (40s), a woman with intense eyes and messy hair, hunches over a table piled high with history books. She scribbles furiously in a notebook, muttering complex equations under her breath. Her brow is furrowed in concentration, scratching her head.
CLOSE UP: Tina's hand circles a specific date in a book, then connects it with another date with a red pen.
Scene 2
INT. TINA’S APARTMENT - NIGHT
Tina paces the room, surrounded by whiteboards covered in intricate mathematical formulas. She gestures wildly, connecting lines and circles with markers. Papers with calculations litter the floor. Exhaustion is etched on her face, but her eyes sparkle with excitement.
TINA: 23 days, 28 days, 33 days... It keeps repeating throughout history!
CLOSE UP: Tina's finger traces the sequence "23, 28, 33" written on a whiteboard. A triumphant smile spreads across her face.
Scene 3
INT. TINA'S APARTMENT - DAY
Sunlight streams through the window. Tina is asleep on the couch, her notes and drawings scattered around her. The phone rings, jarring her awake. She scrambles to answer it.
TINA: Hello?
VOICE (O.S.): Tina, what the hell did you do?
Tina: what?
Boss: Have you not seen the news? Get to the office!
Tina changes the channel, that’s been on and playing the news channel the entire time.
NEWS ANCHOR: Breaking news! Earlier today we got intel that a “pattern” has been discovered throughout history. (hangs up phone)Cycles of 23, 28, and 33 days seem to keep repeat- (Tina turns the TV off) Tina's eyes widen in realization. A close-up shot of her face shows a mixture of fear and dawning comprehension.
Scene 4
Close up of tina grabbing keys
Wide of her slamming the door (WITH PANTS AND BLAZER ON SHOLDER)
SCENE 5
Wide of her pulling in
Tilt up of her getting up and putting on pants then putting on blazer
Medium of her walking out of frame
INT. TINA'S OFFICE - DAY
Anna stands before Mr. Thompson, her boss, who is pacing back and forth, his face contorted in anger. Papers are strewn across his desk.
MR. THOMPSON: How could you do this, Tina?! I specifically told you not to share those findings with anyone! Now the whole world knows!
We still need to put it into script format. Although, I added the walking to the car and arriving to make it a little less abrupt. I also added the bring the clothes with her because she is very professional. I wanted to emphasize how important the issue was, so it had her rush with her clothes in her hand. This shows how Tina is always very professional, which is something we really wanted to portray with this character.
After discussing with this interesting substitute we had in our AICE Media class, we decided to change the text of the news graphic, and the story written on the script. Our story is a mystery, so not developing what the book exactly pertains adds to the sense of wondering. This will also keep the viewer wanting to see more because "What exactly is so important about this book?" The finalized graphic is bellow:
