Birdcage

This is it guys! We have officially reached the end of the project! With no further ado, here is my film opening "Birdcage". Hope you enjoy :)))

Click here to see: Birdcage

Birdcage CCR

Here is my Creative Critical Reflection for my film opening "Birdcage" :))

Click here for Birdcage CCR

Stick around for the actual film opening! I am so excited to finally share it with you guys!!

Let's reflect

So here we are, at the end of the project. This end that I have been talking about so much has finally arrived. This will be one of my final blog posts as I will be posting my CCR and film opening for you guys all to see tomorrow! 

I'd like to start this by saying thank my amazing partner Sofie. We worked so well together and this project definitely would not be anywhere as great without you. <33 I would also like to thank my two actors Katie and Vicky, who did amazing. More <333 for you guys too. Now I will reflect on some key moments from this project. 

Coming up with the actual idea and plot for the film was probably the hardest part for Sofie and I. We kept bouncing back and forth between different genres and ideas before landing on our final one. We just knew that we wanted to do something focusing on sound, or the lack thereof. So we created this idea focusing around a deaf teenager who is tired of the controlling life they live and are finally living freely. We were able to also incorporate music just like we wanted. 

Once we got our idea, the rest of it seemed like a piece of cake. We quickly created a storyboard and script, then we casted our actors. It was all going according to plan until it came to us actually filming. Either we had issues, the actors had complications, or it would just start raining out of nowhere (typical Florida). However, we filmed in one day and we gained our momentum back and started editing. 

Overall, this project has taught me so much about planning, producing, editing, and everything else it takes to make a decent looking film opening. I am very happy to say that I am finished with this project and I am even happier to say that I am actually very proud of what we created. Thank you guys all for joining me on this experience and I hope you guys like Birdcage!! :))

The home stretch

I have officially finished my script, so that means the last thing is to actually film and edit the CCR. It is currently very late at night (don't question my choices), so I can't film because my parents are asleep in my house. It is also dark outside and I want to use the Sun as a light source when I film because the light in my room does not always look the best on camera. Right now, I am deciding where I want to film in my room. I think I am going to film in the corner of my room because it is a simple background but there are two different color walls to make the background not completely boring. Another decision is whether I will film using my phone or just the camera on my computer. I took sample pictures, but I still can't decide so I will ask my Mom tomorrow, because mothers always know. 

A small part from the end of the script 

The camera on my phone

The camera on my computer

One important part of the CCR is that we must cite our sources. My plan is to put them all at the end of video and scroll through them so that it is not just a boring black screen with random sources on it. I am going to credit all of the websites I used to conduct my research about the coming of age genre and of the deaf community. I am planning on adding different pieces of visual media, so I will also be citing these at the end. It is the weekend, so I have tomorrow and Sunday to film and edit the CCR. I plan on finishing it all tomorrow, but Sunday is there just in case I need it. We are almost done guys!! See you later!!

Let's get creative... critical reflection

For my CCR, I have decided that I am just going to make it very casual and make it as interesting as possible. I will be sitting there talking about information, but I am trying to make the information more digestible and make it seem like I am catching up a friend on my project. I am also going to include different pieces of media throughout the video to break up the "talking head" appearance. I will include clips from coming of age films, or other films featuring Deaf characters. I am also planning on creating graphics that I will also include throughout. My main concern is that I don't want this to be a boring video. 

Therefore, I will try and break up the presenting of information by showing the clips and making small jokes. For the graphics, I will try and make them interesting by showing off some of my personality in them. At the beginning of the CCR, I am planning of signing a sentence before I start speaking. This will hopefully hook the audience and make them interested in my video. For my little title cards between segments, I am going to include pictures of what the words would look like finger spelled. I am hoping these little characteristics will make my CCR seem interesting and not just be a boring video that a person is counting down until the end of the video. 

This is obviously just my name, but this is just an example of what I am planning to do for each of the title cards in between the segments. I think it looks cool and it also relates my CCR back to my film opening in a creative way. 

I have not completely finished my script for the CCR but I would say that I am like 3/4 of the way done. It is not a traditional script, it is more just a collection of my information that I will be saying. Instead of writing in the normal script format, I just wrote the information in paragraph form. This is just the information that will be spoken, but I am planning on added a lot of visual media. I am going to finish up the script in class tomorrow, but here is what I have so far: 

Research for the CCR

In class today we learned more about the CCR (Creative Critical Reflection), which is the final part of our project. The purpose of the CCR is to reflect on the production, respond to some questions, and just to express our personality. We learned that this should not be too long of a video because no one wants to watch a 20 minute video about someone's AICE Media project. The best strategy is to keep it short and concise, while still meeting all of the requirements. Throughout our CCR, we must answer 4 different questions about our specific project. 

1. How does your product use or challenge genre conventions and how does it represent social groups? 

2. How does your product engage with the audience and how would it be distributed as a real media text?

3. How did your production skills develop throughout this project?

4. How did you integrate technologies-- software, hardware, and online-- in this project?

The majority of the time in the video will be used to answer these questions in a creative way. Then at the end, I can say my "thank yous" to the people who helped out with this production. In the ending, I will also need to say what I would do differently next time in order to make the project even better. All in all, I just need to remember to be creative, have a plan, and to incorporate my research in some way. 

Right now I am going to look at more examples of CCRs of previous students to try and think of what I should do in my CCR. I'll keep you guys updated!! 

We finished (editing) YAY!!

Ok, I am going to say this for the last time (hopefully), but this is so crazy how far we have come. We completely finished editing, which basically means that we are done with the project. We don't submit it anywhere until the due date, but today is a very monumental day because we actually finished. My partner and I were joking about how this project feels like our baby at this point with all of the work we have put into it. Overall, we are so proud of how it turned out and all that we have accomplished in this project. We think that our opening is true to the coming of age genre. Considering our budget of literally nothing and our lack of film making experience, we are proud of our project and truly believe we made the best opening that we could. 

We faced some issues during the last part of editing, but it was nothing major that we couldn't solve. First, after we put all of our clips together, the time was over 2 minutes, so we had to shorten some of the clips to meet the requirement. Another issue we faced was that we had to download our title font from a different website, freebestfonts.com. We did not realize before that on the original website you had to pay in order to download the font. Lastly, we recorded the audio separately on a microphone, but it sounded bad in some scenes when we listened back to it. To fix this, we just used some of the original audio from the camera itself in some clips. If it was completely necessary, Sofie would add the recorded audio as well, which was a little time-consuming. 

Here is the last screenshot of our opening, can't show anymore because it needs to be a surprise for you guys!

Here is a quick little story about our production company. When Sofie and I were thinking of names we could use we just looked up a random object generator and the word "sketchbook" just stood out to both of us. We thought it sounded cool and could easily be a company that makes indie coming of age films.