Ramirez Ceballos Kapiniaris Vanegas storyboard

Another Teenage Story

CCR

Final Project

At the beginning of this class, I was unaware of all the things that go into a project from producing, distributing, and promoting it. I am now more conscious of how important the little things in movies are such as lighting, camera angles, camera distances, props, and settings. I am now able to identify that Dutch angles add suspense or that dark lighting is mostly used for horror genres or that the male gaze is prevalent in many shows and movies. Simple things are then used to figure out the overall genre or mood of the moods as well as adds to the professionalism to the movie. I also learned how time-consuming producing a movie is. You have to give your all in terms of time, creativity, and patience.  This was not something someone can do overnight. This class and project has changed the way i look at movies forever.

There were many different ways in which we could present our CCR. I thought the most convenient way was simply sitting in front of a camera and talking. Although I may have believed this was the easiest form of getting my information across, there were still many difficulties that arose. Although I wrote a script of what I wanted to say so that there would be awkward silence while I was thinking there were still a lot of “likes” and “ums”. It felt as if after every other sentence there was another “um”. In order to fix the issue, I had to move my CCR to iMovie in order to attempt to edit out the unnecessary voiced pauses. Transporting my video to iMovie also came in handy when a family member walked in during the middle of my recording. I then had to record another video and put the 2 videos together. Although it looked choppy the video overall sounded better without the pauses.

Before filming my CCR I thought it would be to my advantage to write down a script to outline what I would be talking about. Our instructor gave us an outline of what should be mentioned in our video. Such questions included “How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?” While outlining this question I spoke about how we both use and challenge the conventions of a drama by incorporating some comedy conventions as well. In terms of the social group, I decided to talk about how are movie is directed towards a teenage demographic. Another question included “How does your product engage with audiences an how would it be distributed?” When talking about how the movie would be distributed I decided to touch on Synergy and Cross Media Convergence and how these could help promote our movie. In terms of how we integrated the use of technology, I spoke about how we used cellphones that were disguised as a prop in order to capture the audio for the movie. These were some of the topics I touched about and explained in detail while writing my script.

After sitting back and reflecting on the finished project it is evident that there are several things we could have improved on. One of the biggest issues with our movie is the shakiness of most scenes. Because we forgot the stabilizer for the camera we were depending on the steadiness of our technical director  which in the end failed.  The consistency of the scenes was off because one scene was stable and the other was shaky. Another issue that is evident is the issue with continuity. In one of the first scenes thee is a jump cut that does not match up with the scene before it. As much as we attempted to fix the issue of continuity we struggled at the end. Towards the end of the movie the continuity improved but I felt as if starting off the movie with continuity issues put a bad taste in the audiences mouth. Another issue that I noticed when watching the final scene was the audio. In some scenes the audio was louder than the voice over or vice versa. Although there were many issues with out final product there were also things that were good.

One of the biggest issues we encountered while filming this project was procrastinating. We started working on this project very late in the game. We didn’t pick up the camera until the beginning of the month in which it was due. This caused unnecessary stress and complications. Because we were so short on time meeting up became harder. Many of my group-mates have jobs and are involved in extra curricular activities which made picking a day harder on such short notice. Alongside this we didn’t get to incorporate all the scenes we wanted to in the movie because of fear we would run out of time. We planned to make our movie a solid 2 minutes but it ended up only being 1 and a half minutes long because of all the footage we were unable to film. This also caused tension within our group, changing our group dynamics. If I had the ability to change something it would be starting this project earlier in time so that the final project would be more professional and less rushed.

After editing the majority  of the videos it was time for the voice overs. The voice overs are an essential part of our movie. The voice overs explain whats happening throughout the flashbacks and during the frame freezes. We met up at a coffee shop to record these voice overs. We brought a microphone to connect to the Mac along side a dead cat in order to block out the outside noise. When we first started recording with the dead cat there was soft music playing in the background of the coffee shop which was still audible in the recording. We thought the dead cat would do a better job at blocking out the outside sound but once we recorded the music in the background was very evident. In order to fix this we grabbed our material and moved inside of a quiet car so that outside noise such as the music or even wind wouldn’t get in the way. After recording the voice overs in the car is was a lot easier to hear what the protagonist is saying.