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. 

Editing!!

We are finally editing!! I know I probably sound like a broken record at this point, but it truly is so crazy that we are almost done with our project. It honestly does feel like we just started, but I am very excited to see the final project, and I hope you guys are too! Anyways, back to what I was saying before, we have made a small change but nothing major. We decided to switch over to After Effects. Sofie tried on Adobe Premiere Pro but she said that it was a little confusing since it has been so long. Like I said before, she learned editing on After Effects more recently so she feels more comfortable on this program. I can also still help her with anything on this program if she needs any help. 

So far editing has been a smooth process and there has been no major issues. The only thing is that Sofie is on vacation so she has been editing either on the road or in hotels. Obviously the service is not the greatest in those circumstances, but Sofie makes it work because she is amazing (this is for you sofie <3). On a positive note, we were able to download the music we needed from uppbeat.com with no problems, and for free! Sofie has a flight back home tomorrow, so she is planning to finish editing tomorrow on the plane. This would be great because then next week we would be able to focus on doing research and creating the CCR, the last part of the project! 

A screenshot from the editing process

Time to start editing

We have officially finished filming, which means that we must switch our gears and start the editing process. This week is spring break so there is not a lot of free time for us, but we planned for this at the very beginning of our project. Editing will start either today or tomorrow. Not sure when because there were some issues with importing the clips from Sofie's camera onto her computer due to lack of storage. However, she cleared things off of her computer to make room for the clips so she was finally able to import everything that is needed. This is a very lengthy process so it took almost the whole morning to complete, but now all the clips and audio files are imported so it is time to start editing!

Sofie and I both took film classes in middle school and we were taught how to edit on Adobe Premiere Pro. Sofie has also learned special effects editing on Adobe After Effects since our time in middle school. Sofie already has all of the necessary apps downloaded on her computer (and is a better editor, I'm not afraid to say it), she will be the main editor while I will help to make any important decisions and offer any help or support that she needs. Our specific project doesn't require many visual or motion effects so we will primarily use Adobe Premiere Pro and since it is a program we have both used in the past, I can also help with editing. This program is also great for coloring and audio effects, which are necessary for our opening. 

Adobe Premiere Pro, which will be our
main editing program

An example of editing on Adobe Premiere

Filming day

Thursday after school we were finally able to film our opening, which means we are one step closer to being finished. We had complications trying to find a day we could all film and we decided on Tuesday, but the weather was very bad so we wouldn’t be able to film the scenes outside. We finally decided on Thursday after school because it was an early release day and the weather was nice. Sofie was the main person with the camera recording the scenes and I was taking more of the director role to make sure the scenes looked the way that we imagined.

Filming went very smoothly, there we no major issues and our actors did an amazing job. Communication between my partner and I, and also to our actors was carried out very well. The first things we shot were the scenes outside, which are the ones of the girls getting in the truck to go to school, just in case the weather changed out of nowhere and started raining (because Florida is crazy like that sometimes). Then we shot the scenes of the characters getting ready for school showing their contrasting personalities. Like I said before, the actors did very well and shooting these scenes had no issues and we were able to finish fairly quickly. 

Here are some behind the scenes pictures of us filming.

Group meetings

Today in class we met with other students in our class to share our ideas and help each other with any questions we had. We didn’t really have any questions for the group because we already finished everything necessary for the planning process and are ready to film. However, the meeting was a good opportunity to talk to our peers and get other peoples’ opinions about our project. 

We shared the plot for the film, our plan for our opening, the storyboard, and the script. Everyone loved our idea which is great thing to hear! In fact their favor thing of ours was our storyboard, because Sofie’s drawing are so well done(go Sofie!! <3). I shared the website that we are using for our music, since we found it very helpful for our own project. One of the other students said that she needed to find music and said that this was a perfect website. Overall, it was a very positive experience and gave us confidence in our project. Excited to film and see the film come all together!!!