Re-edit Blog: Working With What We Have

       A lot can happen in just a couple days. Since the last blog school has now been canceled until April 15th. My dad has basically quarantined me and doesn’t want me going out in fear that i could get the coronavirus. I understand that so that means I won’t be able to reshoot my film. I’m the main actor for it so without me there’s nothing we can really reshoot. I’m now stuck at home and our movie is due on April 9th. What I can do now is try and perfect the film with what we have. I luckily have the movie saved on my phone and my laptop. I still have the other footage we filmed saved on my phone so I went to work with what i had.
         First I imported all the extra footage onto my laptop. I had deleted it from my laptop after the first draft was finished because I assumed I wouldn’t need it anymore. Since my group and I can’t reshoot anything this extra footage might be useful. After it was imported I compared the footage with the clips I had put into the actual movie. I checked to see if any of the extra footage seemed better than the footage I used for the first draft and replaced any that I thought should’ve been replaced. I trimmed down some of the new footage which was placed into the first draft. I then readjusted the titles to make sure they were present on the new scenes and visible throughout the whole movie. I then readjusted the music onto the new scenes that were added. My group and I now have two drafts of our movie and seeing that we’ll be confined in our homes past the due date of our project we can make more drafts and finalize our final movie. For now I’ve worked with what I had and this is how it’ll be like working on this project for the foreseeable future. This all may affect the quality of our film but there’s nothing we can do about it, we’re advised not to go out so we can’t reshoot so we don’t have new footage to reedit.

Reshoot Blog: COVID-19 Delays

       This week we were supposed to reshoot our film. Unfortunately, that’s on an indefinite hold due to the COVID-19 outbreak. It has recently been upgraded to a pandemic and there have been cases in our state and county. As of right now school has been postponed until March 30th. We were planing on filming sometime during our spring break but my dad doesn’t want me going out due to all of the madness that’s happening. If everything is sane and we get back to school March 30th my dad said he would let me go out and do some filming. Social distancing is also an issue since there are recommendations on staying at home and not coming into contact with people. Since I essentially can’t go out to film dude to social distancing and my dad out schedule is ultimately pushed back. There’s nothing that we can do but hope for the best.
       This virus is affecting other productions as well. The latest James Bond movie titled No Time To Die was supposed to come out on April 10th. Due to COVID-19 it’s been pushed back to November 25th in the United States. This is a major example of this virus affecting movie production. It isn’t happening on a small scale with just our movie but happening globally with almost every film. I can’t reshoot and they can’t release their film. The James Bond team had to adjust their whole release schedule unexpectedly and so do we. The difference is that we have a specific deadline to meet. Our movie is due April 9th and we have to get it done with what we have. This whole pandemic going on is very unfortunate timing for something like this. We have to fight through it and figure it out.

Editing Blog: Finishing Up

       We have now peer reviewed. We have decided that we’ll take their ideas they had and implement them later. We want to finish and thought we’d the titles first before we start reshooting because we want to see a full form of our finished product beforehand. My group members Madeline and Brooke had decided what they wanted our titles to look like beforehand. I looked over them and gave my input. I liked the idea they had so we decided to use the concept they had. Brooke and Madeline put them into the film and I gave my input into where they should put each title. This process took us about 30 minutes. This was because we wanted to make sure there titles were visible and were shown for a decent amount of time.  With the titles put in we had everything that was essential for our video in.
         After that we went over our film to make sure everything seemed right. I checked to see if it was long enough. I saw it was at 2 minutes and 10 seconds so i took out some footage I thought we wouldn’t need. This messed with one of the titles but we quickly changed it since it wasn’t that much of a hassle. My group members checked to make sure the music wasn’t too loud and the background noise was heard properly. Once that was done we exported our first draft so we could all personally have it. My group members covered that seeing that I didn’t want to mess it up. After they got it on a flash drive I got them to send it to me personally. Now that we have fully finished our editing we will take into account our peer reviews. In the coming days we will reshoot and reedit our blog to make sure it’s to the quality it needs to be.

Peer Review Blog

      We have now done peer reviewing. My  group and I were in charge of looking over another groups video and assessing it. His movie was about him and his family going out in the water and him getting attacked by a shark. His film was very well done and was very easy to follow. His titles were also placed well and were very visible. There were a couple things I preferably enjoyed his film. I really liked his choice of music. It fit the then hid most was going for which was suspenseful. It wasn’t too loud which is good and it didn’t take away from the plot.  I also enjoyed the ending as it leaves you on a real cliffhanger and actually makes you want to watch everything after the first two minutes.
        His film was pretty well done but I would give some suggestions so that it could become even better. The main issue and really the only issue was the size of the shots. The shots constantly kept changing sizes. In one scene a portion of the scene would be filled up while in the next scene the whole screen would be filled up. So if i were him I would fix it so that each scene was all the same size because it distracted from the plot a little. The first time I watched I didn’t really notice it but after a couple of rewatches it became evident. He also filmed a little too much of the water which I think he should replace with more scenes of him so that he can fill the criteria of shots and angels needed. The fact that he didn’t have all the angles and shots but his film still looked amazing really says how good of a filmmaker he is. With a little bit of reshoots to fix the tad bit of errors he could really make this project incredible. Overall, his plot is incredibly interesting and there are little to no problems.

Editing Blog: Finishing Touches

        Now is another day of editing. We had to ask much as we could seeing that pretty soon was our peer review. We all got together and started getting to work. Once we met we tried getting back to where we started but got distracted. My group member Madeline searched for music, my group member Brooke thought of where and what transitions would fit best, and I continued to try and shorten the film. Before all of this though we loaded up the editing software. I made sure our video was still there and was the way we had left it the day before. The video is currently at 2 minutes and 10 seconds and honestly I couldn’t think of which scene to cut out. Trimming wasn’t an option due to the fact that all the excess was already taken out previously.  I decided to change my focus to help my other group members.
       While Madeline looked for music, I gave her my personal feedback on it. Our movie is suspenseful so we focused on that section of music. I told her to make sure the music was free for us to use seeing that’s what we’re allowed to work with. After we found portions of music we all went and looked over it. We effectively looked over it and put it into the film. We worked worked the scenes to see where the music would best fit in. I changed the volume of the music and the actually videos to make sure one wasn’t overtaking the other. I wanted to make sure we still had diegetic sound so I didn’t completely mute all the videos, only the ones that were necessary. Sadly, time up  for us and we couldn’t add our titles. This isn’t a major problem because we’ll jsut we’d them after the peer reviews take place. This is far from how we want our final project to be but we have plenty of time to re-edit and do everything that’s needed.

Editing Blog: Adding it all Up!

        Today my group and I have officially started editing. Once we all got together we started to do as much as we could. I told them that beforehand I had chosen the best scenes to use in my opinion. Much to my surprise, they had done the same thing. We looked over our opinions together and ultimately decided as a group on the best scenes to use for our editing. After my group and I choose all the footage we started to import it into our editing software. While this was happening I thought of some transitions we could possibly be use. This was a slight thought since my role was mostly to put the scenes together and try and make them flow well. I would say I normally do the best in my group when it comes to editing. Once the footage was imported i started to put them together in order.
        I double checked to make sure the forage we wanted to use was the correct footage placed. I then out in each scene in order one by one. I started with the house scenes and made my way all the way to the alley scenes. After all the footage was placed the movie was around 2 minutes and 40 seconds. I started trimming down certain scenes to try and get it all to fit under 2 minutes. Luckily, a lot of the scenes had some excess in them which allowed us to lower the time. Once the trimming was done the final time was about 2 minutes and 20 seconds. We then thought about any scenes we could take out and ended up collectively deciding on one scene. This cut it down to 2 minutes and 10 seconds but after that we all had to leave to do our own things. Hopefully the next time we edit we’ll get it under 2 minutes, add music, and add our titles.

Editing Blog: Choosing The Footage!!!

       We have finally finished filming. Since we’re done filming that means now we have to edit our movie together. Unfortunately, today we aren’t able to meet up and edit due to certain circumstances. I have to help my mom take care of my sister but that doesn’t mean I still could’ve have contributed. When I had spare time I made sure I could try and do some things that would make our editing process smoother. When we filmed we all made sure that each of us had every piece of footage. Seeing that I had everything we filmed I decided to looked over every single thing we shot and decided what I thought would be the best to use for our movie. There was about 213 separate videos of footage to go through. As you can tell, this took a while. Luckily, some of the footage were just scenes we had accidentally recorded.
        I started off with all the scenes that were filmed at my house. These scenes were short and not that complicated so I choose the best ones in my opinion pretty easily. Next, I looked over one of my personal favorite scenes involving our trunk shot. All of them looked nice but I ultimately chose the one that had me doing more with the bag put in the trunk. After that I looked over all the park scenes. Most of them were very straight to the point and we had a lot of excess film in this section however these scenes took me the longest to choose between. After that we’re the scenes filmed at my friends Aarons house which I enjoyed picking from cause I think he’s a great actor. Finally, I looked over the alley scenes which had the most footage and was a pain to look over because it’s essentially our climax so I want the best of the best to be used. That’s all I was able to do today but now I have some information I can present to my group once we start editing. Hopefully the project comes together the way we all hope.