Music = MANY Problems

For our film, having a song integrated into your opening sequence was mandatory. A couple of problems came with that though. Many songs that could be found on YouTube or that my partner and I were familiar with all were copyrighted. Copyright is the exclusive legal right, given to an originator or an assignee to print, publish, perform, film, or record literary, artistic, or musical material, and to authorize others to do the same. This meant that we had to find a song to use that went with our genre. There were two ways that we could’ve gone about this: we could’ve contacted an artist that we knew and ask permission to use their music in our film or get royalty-free music. I preferred the latter. Since I did most of the editing I had to look for the music. The first thing I did was go on YouTube and try to find some royalty-free music that would go with our film. When I first started this we had not filmed yet. This made it harder to find a song that was not only royalty-free but would go with the scenes that were taking place. After searching for some time, I found a song called tense suspense alternative mix on Spotify. I found it on a playlist that solely had copyright free music. To double-check, I went through the description and even emailed the owner of that playlist to make sure that the song was royalty-free. After getting a confirmation I planned on putting it into the film after we edited. When it came time to insert it into the film I ran into some problems. The main problem was that I was unable to get the track from Spotify and into the film. While editing I found that I have very little patience and absolutely no idea how to get the intended track into the film therefore, I decided to find another song. In turn, I went right back to YouTube and look up more royalty-free music. I ended up finding a website named FesliyanStudios.com which, allowed me to download any track that I wanted from the website. The website made it very clear that it was safe and okay to use the music in my film, seeing as it’s not an ad or anything to gain money. I then downloaded the track dark fog onto my computer and then transferred it into my phone, where I was editing the film.  I decided to play the track throughout the whole film; for scenes where I wanted it to be more prominent, I lowered the ambient sounds of that scene. If I didn’t want it to be heard at all I would just cut the sound out for that specific section of the film. While the journey to getting the track was tedious, it was very easy to incorporate it into my film. 

Missing Actor

This weekend we managed to film more clips to improve the quality of the original film. The first problem that we ran into was that Michelle was going out of town. My partner and I both work so this was the only time we could’ve filmed. So we ended up filming at my partner's pool. Instead of it being at Michelle apartment complex with two floors and a more open layout, it was at my partner's house. We knew that our film couldn’t be very different from our original script so we improvised a lot to make everything fit. the original plan was to just have Michelle and Naelys act while my partner and I solely film and direct. That wasn’t the case though. When we found out that Michelle was not going to be available we immediately started scouting different actors but none of them were available. In that case, I ended up playing Michelle and my partner played Jackie. Since we weren’t fully prepared to be playing these roles we weren’t equipped with different clothes to switch into. This created some difficulties when filming. We’d have to be positioned in uncomfortable ways to avoid catching noticeable features. Seeing that it was only three of us and I had majorly worked on the visual aspects of the movie it was a bit aggravating to not have things come out the way I wanted it. Not to mention, we had to film on our phones because of our missing actor. While we could’ve still filmed with the tripod and camera it would’ve taken entirely too much time to do so. We were filming at night so the time period we had to film was very little. As much as I wanted to get everything right that night it was nearly impossible to do. We are planning on filming the car scene one more time because it was quite confusing because you could see that I was playing the mother even though I was playing Michelle originally. If we get lucky, we can get Michelle to come film with us and it might come out better. 

iMovie over Pinnacle Studios

For this blog, I took the original clips and edited them together. I used the software iMovie to edit my clips together. When filming both my partner and I filmed certain scenes. seeing that I am usually the one in charge of editing I asked her to send the scenes to me. The first thing that I did was put all the scenes in a folder in my photo album. After that, I imported them into the iMovie app. I tried to put them in chronological order when inserting them. I followed the storyboard that we made when inserting the clips. I had a lot of difficulties doing this because I had to do all of this on my phone. However, it was still far easier than using pinnacle studios. So as I put each scene in I cut them down to the necessary length that I needed and just combined them all. My main goal was to have the clips put in chronological order. The first thing that I noticed was that the ambient sounds were very loud. So using the sound section of iMovie I was able to control how loud the sound of the scenes was. At this time there were no transitions put in yet so I tried to make the sound flow as smoothly as possible.  For scenes that had no dialogue, I let the ambient sounds be at the forefront. They usually stayed in between the 30% and the 50% mark. Because we filmed so late at night, the crickets and katydids were very loud and could clearly be heard throughout the film. In scenes with dialogue, the voices easily drowned out all of the ambient sounds.  For specific scenes, like scene 13, I had to record a voice memo of the dragging sound and then placed that memo on top of the clip. To do that I also had to detach the original sound on the clip. I did that for certain scenes where I really wanted specific sounds to be heard. 

Final Task Re-shoot

For this blog, I took the critiques that my peer reviewer had and re-shot some scenes. One problem that the peer reviewer noted was that some scenes didn’t go together perfectly. For example, in the scene where Michelle was finding Naelys, it was filmed twice. One by myself as the actor and the next by my partner as the actor. When going over the clips, the beginning of my partners was better than mine. The ending of mine was better than hers therefore, I put them together there were some parts that needed to be edited together better. another problem that my peer reviewer pointed out was that the car scene was too dark.  that makes sense because we initially just used the light of A streetlamp. When we re-shot the same scene we decided to use the light that comes from the car and the flashlight on the phone to help brighten up the location.  after seeing how well this turned out, we decided to reshoot some other scenes using the same method. we had a scene where we show the bat being dragged across the floor. to put more light on the bat One of the actors and I flashed our light on it while my partner dragged the bat across the floor. this helped with our overall visibility. I decided to transfer the video onto my computer and to test the visibility of the scenes I watched it near a window. after re-shooting a scene I would do this so we could adjust the lighting as we go. another thing that we focused on was improving our sound. When initially shooting all the dialogue was recorded through voice memos on our phone. when putting together the scenes I put the voices over the take. However, when listening to it later it ended up sounding like voiceovers, Which makes the scene sound artificial and a bit tacky. therefore when we started re-shooting we made sure that we spoke loud enough so the dialogue would be heard over the ambient sounds and the soundtrack that was going to be put over the film.  I said before we did avoid filming with a tripod. However, after speaking with our peer reviewer, they mentioned that for certain scenes it would be better to use a tripod purely for steady purposes. so for one of the scenes where Michelle is walking out into the darkness, instead of it being a handheld shot we shot it on the tripod. Well, this didn’t really do much to help our storyline we didn’t notice the difference it made in the film. however, because the rest of the shots were handheld shots that seem to be still wouldn’t really match the rest of the scenes that we had already filmed. 

Final Task Peer Review

For the peer review, I reviewed group 15. The first thing that I noticed about the film is that there is really good sound. The dialogue was never covered by any background sounds and the sound that they wanted to be heard was heard clearly. Even background sounds seemed intentional in the storyline. The lighting of the film was also done very well. While I’m not completely sure about the genre of the film or the story that they are trying to get across, for the actions taking place within the scenes; the lighting is appropriate. However, a drawback of this can be that the lighting is too drastic. While yes, every lighting that I saw matched the setting however, having the screen constantly switch from really bright to really dark isn’t the best thing. Now again, I am only saying this because I’m still not completely sure of the genre and this may be a convention of your genre and if it is, it was done well. At the moment, because the genre of the film is not explicitly clear, I can’t come to that conclusion just yet. For example, one scene is of an actor walking outside, it was very sunny and bright. The audience was led to believe, in the previous scenes, that this film is taking place in the morning therefore, the lighting was appropriate. Another aspect of the film that I noticed immediately was that it lacked titles. The film was one minute and 14 seconds long, which is below the correct length necessary, so I assumed that they maybe did not finish. This would explain the lack of titles. I also noticed that it lacked a clear storyline or genre. While watching the film I was trying to guess what type of movie this would turn out to be however, I never figured it out. Those aspects of the storyline may be in parts that I haven’t seen yet, however, with a time limit of two minutes I would expect to see at least some of the intended genre embedded into the film already. I am not sure if this editing was rushed; some shots just seemed to be put in there without meaning. While they did check off the boxes of 'shots necessary for the film they didn’t seem to have significance in the film. An example of this is at around 57 seconds into the film there was an establishing shot. The shot makes sense for the change in the location however, right after, there was an extreme close-up that flashed for a couple of seconds and didn’t really seem to make sense. Transitions like these come off as untidy and choppy. It does not help the storyline seem cohesive.