Filmmaker Reflection

From this class, I've learned about both my strengths and my weaknesses of being a filmmaker. Pre-production aspects seem to be what I am weakest in. I often had trouble creating storyboards for the narrative projects I worked on for it was difficult to imagine the scene. That may have been mostly due to not visiting locations beforehand but, I really struggled during pre-production. Post-production, however, seemed to be my strength. I have always loved editing since I got into filmmaking back in high school, but this semester, when editing projects I would really get into the zone and lose complete track of time just trying to create the absolute, perfect edit.

For filmmaking, in general, I learned that it takes a lot of patience. It takes a lot of patience to work with others and collaborate and agree on ideas. But in the end, we were all working for the same outcome and I was really proud of each project I was a part of this semester. This class has gotten me, not only prepared, but excited for my future production classes and I could not have asked for a better class of talented peers and one awesome teacher! :D

Visions 4

Video Race Screening Block: 
     I didn't realize beforehand that the people who participated were allowed to use their cellphone so when I did find out, moments before the screening, I didn't expect the videos to be all that great. Once they started playing though, the creativity of some of them took me by surprise. I loved the different techniques of covering over the lens to create "takes" and the imagination that went into such a time-constrained project.

     Seeing these videos, surprisingly, inspired me as they showed me just how easy it was to not only make a video but to create a piece of art, despite the limited equipment you may have. They went by so quickly but the ones I remember the most, and remember enjoying the most was the one where the narration was all in French, the one where Spiderman had a cameo, and the one that had something to do with fireballs (the candy) being dumped onto a table. All of the videos were so humorously and uniquely put together that it was hard to vote for just one at the end.

Film Block 1:
     I knew I was in for some really inspiring films after watching what my peers could create with just their phones. I was most struck by the documentaries that played, most especially, "Win or Lose." It was interesting to see a student documentary that went through so much effort to record every event along the way, especially when the outcome was unknown before he began recording. The animation (that I have forgotten the title of) of the bird and old woman was extremely impressive since I know how much work goes into just a single facial expression of a character when working with 3D computer animation.

     All of the films in general inspired me in different ways to begin thinking of my own ideas that I could potentially turn into short films of my own. The Q&A afterwards asked the director of the Alice animation about the difficulties that went into his claymation - from him I learned the problems I could face if I ever was to make my own claymation (which I really, really want to), but after seeing his film, I know that it would be a lot more work than I initially anticipated.

Wild Card Assignment

In our Wild Card assignment, we have chosen to recreate a song sequence from the musical, "Little Shop of Horrors." I am the cinematographer for this assignment and am pretty excited to finally get to be right behind the camera. Some of the shots we have planned are going to be pretty interesting ones, including close ups/extreme close up, tracking shots of our main character's feet as she runs. I'm rather excited to see how we will pull that off. We have a couple of other tracking shots that should be pretty interesting to pull off as well; most likely we'll be using a chair with wheels, haha. I also plan to use this opportunity to get more aquatinted with the camera as I have had very little experience with the ones we are able to check out. Overall this should be a fun project to shoot and I can't wait to see how it all turns out.

Experience Editing 3b

Editing 3b was, in my opinion, the funnest editing we've had to do yet. Just the fact that the visual and sound didn't need to make sense, not even the slightest sense for this experimental project made the entire editing process that much easier and funner.  As a group we sat at the computer, listening to our two soundscapes. Every now and then one of us would chime in and suggest adding a certain image in one part of the scape or place a still image over a moving one. In all, I think this project turned out the best because the possibilities were endless.

Even though we were all in the editing lab until 3 in the morning, I really enjoyed the process. Perhaps because we were all so delirious, we were able to compile an even better project than we would have been able to had we not been sleep deprived. Regardless, it was fun and really got me interested in the possibility of making more experimental films like it.

My Experience Sound Recording

Recording sounds for our sound library was a lot easier than I had originally anticipated. Our director for the project brought a bunch of props with him and we stepped into the cramped whisper booth to record the sounds of dice rolling, the top of a pill bottle being twisted, and tissues being pulled from a box, just to name a few. I then took the sound equipment home to get the sounds of my cat purring and meowing. And every time I realized there was a sound occurring (like the dishwasher running) that I usually paid no attention to, I rushed to retrieve the H4N and start recording. Just listening to the sounds without seeing the source of them helped me to realize the way in which sounds can be deceitful. We saw in class how a bottle cap could be used to make the sound of a skateboard but I really didn't start thinking about how sounds of one object could be manipulated into sounding like other objects until I experienced it hands-on. And I love the idea of having to use one's imagination to create a sound or see what the source of the sound is.

Editing Experience on Master Shot Project

At first, editing was a little difficult because we had a lot of footage, a lot of takes and bloopers, and we actually forgot to record sound on the whole first half of the shoot. Mike and Alex worked diligently to get the sound all synced up though and did a great job. Editing became easier and easier as we just sat down and concentrated on what shots we needed, what take looked best, and where we needed to add sounds for clarification. On the whole, I didn't personally do any editing but I helped to choose what looked best when we had multiple takes. We had two endings to our short as well: in the alternative version, the "serial killer" looks to the camera right before putting on her mask and makes sure the person behind the camera is ready to film...in the end, however, it didn't look good at all. So we decided on the ending that is seen in our final cut. It's funny how good ideas seem at 4 in the morning!  I am so thankful though that we took the time to do as many takes as we did so that we would have plenty to chose from when things went wrong.

Previsualization Materials for the Master Shot Sequence

My job was to create the overhead for our group's master shot sequence. I've never made an overhead before so I was a little confused at first, but with the help of the group (and the textbook), it became really simple to figure out. The storyboards helped me out a lot as they conveyed angles that I could group together into different camera setups. The most difficult part was showing movement of one of the character's. In our sequence, one character (the victim) doesn't move at all while the other (the serial killer) is constantly moving around. I was afraid the arrows I was drawing would be confusing to others, so I tried to make sure the arrows were as straight-forward as possible. And hopefully I succeeded with that?

This is actually an outdated version of the final overhead, but just to show the confusion of arrows I was working with...

These previsualization materials definitely helped me to get a better idea of what my group and I will be filming and how we will set up and prepare for the shoot. And now I can't wait to start!