FINAL PRODUCT...

 Sunday, April 2, 2023

Hey guys,

The journey has come to an end… It will definitely feel odd in the next few weeks to not be able to upload any more of these blog posts updating you guys on everything!! But, it is over now. Looking back on the first few days of this presentation, I never would have thought I would be at this point and able to produce this project!!

What a rollercoaster, I did my best and was truly able to find a balance between this class and all of my other commitments. Although there has been a fair amount of ups and downs, I am proud to say that it is all done!! I feel like I was really able to find time to prioritize this project while not avoiding other commitments. 

At the beginning of this course, I would struggle to even capture decent shots, now I am able to hone my new skills and create projects like these!! Although, it is far from perfect I have to say I have grown a lot as a student, especially in this course, and I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to participate in this course.

Get your popcorn ready and enjoy ... I had a blast! Anyways, thank you, guys, for coming on this journey with me :)

American Nightmare... enjoy :)

Saturday, April 1, 2023

Hey guys, 

We are done :) The wait is over and the final product is here and ready to be viewed... We are so happy that we were able to finish this and we proudly present...

Longest project ever but so much fun and I am so excited to finally share it with you guys!! I hope you all enjoy it and I can't wait for future projects in college :))

American Nightmare- AICE Media Studies AS

Second Group Meeting...

  Monday, March 27, 2023

Hey guys,

Today I met with a new group of students to collaborate and discuss more where we are with our projects. We were able to share where we are with our groups and ask each other any questions as this is the last week for us to work on our projects and finalize everything. I truly felt the two group meetings I have had with different classmates have given me the ability to ask anything I was unsure about and have honestly prevented me from running into more problems as I was able to use other students' feedback to help guide me along the way. 

Mya, Nico, Taylor, and Miguel were able to all pitch in and answer my questions about the CCRs requirements which I will be working on this entire week and over the weekend. I still was unsure of the requirements of it since I missed that unit when it was taught by our teacher, so I needed some clarification on specific things to prevent missing any important information and to prevent running into additional issues. 

Of course, it is realistic to say that every group had its struggles and ran into a few obstacles. It would not make sense to say the project flowed perfectly. Since my partner and I did run into a few obstacles throughout the entirety of the 8 weeks working on the project, and had some trouble meeting up to edit together, it was a bit delayed, however, we were able to work over the weekend to pretty much finalize everything and to work individually doing the best we can on opposite sides of the project. The only thing left to do is include the credits such as director, producer, writer, cinematographer, editor, and major acts which were one of the questions I had asked my group today during our meeting to ensure I do not leave any key things out.

In order to really combat struggles when working on a lengthy project, communication is key. Without the patience my partner and I had with each other, we would not have been able to finish this project. We both have very busy lives and so many different responsibilities, but as a group and with communication we were able to adjust our schedules to be able to work things out and combat the obstacles together, as a team.

Thankfully, we just have to edit the credits to our project opening and work on our CCR and then we could finally say we are finished!!

1 week left

Stay tuned...

The Struggle Is Real...

 Sunday, March 26, 2023

Hey guys, 

Today my partner and I pretty much finished editing the entire film opening!! It was a long process but now that we figured out how to overcome obstacles and used google to help us navigate through Premiere Pro, we were able to do it and figure out how to fix our mistakes!! We only made about 65 mistakes, but that's okay! It is a part of the process and it was really fun to be able to edit together and figure this out as a team.

So we began by editing the clips, finalizing the order, and adjusting the speed to some of them as some went by way too quickly and others were way too slow. When we did that, we um... accidentally deleted the entire project which was in one word scary! We released it on auto-save thankfully and were able to access the project. Scariest 5 minutes of our lives...

For example, the shot below when Carinne (me) was opening the closet door was too quick at a speed of 100% so we edited it to 80% to make it a tiny bit slower. 

We realized that some of the sounds we made when filming just were out of place and did not sound right so we went on google and decided to look up royalty-free sounds to prevent using any sounds that were protected or not able for public use. See below :) We added in sounds such as heartbeats, footsteps, and opening and closing doors.

Additionally, we layered several sounds to ensure that the flow of the project and the sounds were synchronized and were all edited to make sense with each movement and clip we inserted into the film.

Through Canva, we have been trying to find the best font to match the theme of our film. We came up with the film name "American Nightmare" !! We felt it makes the most sense since Carinne is having a nightmare in the opening and since she was coming from another country as an exchange student, we felt it made the most sense!!

Here are some more photos from today :)))

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We are working on the portion of the credits now...

Saturday...

 Saturday, March 25, 2023

Hey guys, 

I just got back from touring some schools so it has been a pretty crazy week. This post is going to be short and sweet and in tomorrow's post, I am going to walk you guys through the entire editing process and exactly what my partner and I did and how we approached it. It took a long time to arrange all of the footage into one clip and move clips around to flow throughout the opening. 

Now, we have to cut down some of the clips to make them less lengthy and long which will help us ensure we meet the requirement of the necessary length required for our assigned opening. The video will be done being edited tomorrow and then my partner and I are going to do our CCR this week!!

Since the footage was all over the place, we put them in the order that matched our storyboard and now we will trim them tomorrow and add effects/soundtracks to create a sense of horror and fear in our target audience. Thankfully, everything was sorted out we now are ready to finish this project and begin the other portion of our project :))

 We will have everything turned in by April 3 and since my partner and I filmed early we truly were able to have a lot of time to edit and plan. Anyways, tomorrow's post will be lengthy and will contain a lot of awesome information, so stay tuned for that. See you guys bright and early tomorrow!!

Editing Day One

Tuesday, March 21, 2023

Hey guys, 

Happy Spring Break!! This week Sydney and I officially began our editing process!! I wanted to blog everything yesterday but we were really focused and had to really get as much as we could do in the spam of the 2 hours we had available yesterday together. Since it is the week of spring break and we both either have family in town or errands to run, we did the most we could yesterday. Continue reading!!

Sydney and I looked through all of the footage in the folder that we made, the folder I talked about in my previous blog posts on google drive. We ended up using Adobe Premiere! After the research, I had conducted and the time I spent trying to learn, I was able to finally do something with what I learned!! Yayyy. It took forever to put all of the clips in order on premiere pro because we wanted to ensure the clips went in the proper order of the story so that when viewers watched it they would have an idea of what they were watching and that they would become more invested in our opening. 

Below are a few screenshots of us editing our shots into Adobe Premiere Pro !! We dissected all of the footage and since we had duplicates for certain shots we chose the one that set a better tone and felt like it was in the right place. We ensured that if there were any shots we were missing, that we noted it so that we wouldn't miss important parts of the opening but the good news is that we had pretty much everything we needed to do it!!

Overall, my next post is going to be a bit more detailed with the effects we edited, and the sounds we incorporated but that was day 1 of editing with the time we had... 

Stay tuned...

Blog post for today...

 Sunday, March 19, 2023

Hey guys, 

Tomorrow is the day my partner Sydney and I are going to edit! We are going to begin editing at 11:00 am and I will be driving over there. I did some research on Adobe After Effects which will possibly be what Sydney and I will use tomorrow. 

Adobe After Effects is an editing software that allows people that are in the post-film production process to create digital effects and motion graphics. I learned that there is a free 7-day trial which would be great so we can test it out to see if we like it and in the future if I take some film courses in college I can subscribe and use it more often!

Aside from being able to create digital effects with its motion graphics, I am able to create 2D and 3D animations while importing pieces of physical media into my animations which is really really cool. Honestly, if it weren't for this project or taking Media studies I would probably have no idea at all what to do or what any of this is. So, I am so excited for tomorrow to finally be able to utilize this software and experience what it's like to actually edit what we produced.

I know this post is short and sweet and this week was a bit too chaotic, but next week most of the project will be completed as we will hopefully finish editing in the next 3 days!!

Stay tuned...

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