Creative Critical Reflection

     All good things must come to an end, and the end of the journey I've spent the last 9 weeks writing about here has reached its end as well.  I'm happy to present to you my Creative Critical Reflection.

Enjoy the show.

     I'm sort of surprised to find myself thinking about how much I enjoyed writing this blog.  While it was something I didn't mind doing at the time, I haven't realized until now how fun I found it to type out my thoughts and feelings while working through a project.

     I hope you enjoyed keeping up with my blog, watching as our project progressed, and finally getting to see the culmination of all our work.  See you around!

Flame: Short Film Opening

    It's finally here.  After 9 weeks and half a pandemic, the penultimate blog post has arrived at last.  I'm proud to present to you our completed short film opening!

     I spent about 7 or so hours today editing audio, and I'd be lying to you if I said it was enjoyable.  But art requires suffering, and all that time was spent ensuring (with Sil's counsel) that all of the sound meshed perfectly with the video.  Formalities aside, I'm just really glad we're finally done with this.
     My next and final post will feature my Creative Critical Reflection.  It should be published on Friday unless I'm able to finish it sooner than I anticipate.  See you then!

Week 9: I Realized I Needed Another Post So Here You Go

     So funny thing.  I did not realize that our short film opening was no longer due tonight, but is instead due tomorrow.  This misunderstanding led to Sil accidentally stressing me out of my mind as I was afraid I'd have to work down to the wire on finishing up editing.  It also led me into thinking that my second blog post for this week (April 6-April 12) would be our completed opening.  Since it's not, that means that I still need another post for the week.  Here we are now.

     Fortunately, I have plenty of stuff to talk about anyway since I've spent this time doing editing.  

Adding Audio to Video

     I've mentioned this a few times in the past, but let me bring it up again as a reminder: all of the audio in our opening is added in post.  Lucille's, even with barely any customers present, is a noisy place due to the music and people in the kitchen.  As a result, all the audio, including the dialogue, is being added to silent footage.  This means that Sil, Sil's friend Danna and I have had to read our lines into a camera and I have had to take the audio from those videos and add it to the opening, syncing it up with our mouth movements in the opening.  It's not as bad as it sounds, especially considering the video I'm getting Danna's lines from is just the video Sil used of her for the holograms, which makes syncing up the audio way less of an issue.  I'm just hoping against hope that our lines are being read after the fact at the same speed we were speaking when we filmed.  Other than that, I've added in some sounds for background noise such as diner noises, electricity buzzing, and air conditioning humming since the scene takes place indoors.

My Computer Does Not Like This

     There's been a tiny bump in the road that's made this process just mildly more annoying and time consuming.  I'm using my laptop for editing, and let me say, it and HitFilm do not like each other.  On one occasion, my computer froze up while editing and needed to be restarted.  On another occasion, HitFilm "encountered an error" or something and had to shut down.  The most annoying part is that when trying to play the video in the little preview window, it's so choppy that you can't even watch it.  Now to be fair, HitFilm warned me as soon as I installed it that my hardware was out of date.  However, I'm not gonna install another software.  I don't have the time or patience.  I've simply been forced to watch the cut in my Google drive and then place the audio files based on the timestamps where the lines are spoken.  Desperate times call for desperate measures.

     Anyway.  My next and second to last post (for real this time), which will be coming out tomorrow, will include our finished opening.  My final post will be published by Friday at the latest and feature my CCR.  See you then. 

Week 9: Final Thoughts and Reflection

     The final week is finally upon us.  In these last few days, I'll be adding the dialogue and sound effects to our film opening since Sil is finishing up on the visual effects.
     If you recall, in the last post I did as a sort of outline for my CCR, I did not include my final thoughts as is required for the video.  This is because we were still not completely finished with the project yet and I figured it'd be a little premature to give my "final thoughts" before the actual finale.  However, due to the time restraints upon me and the fact that we'll be done in the next three days anyway, I figured I should just give them now.

     This project has definitely, without a doubt, been the longest, most complex school assignment I've ever worked on.  No project I've ever done has required this much planning, communication, or time dedicated to the post-production process.  Everything we've done over the year in class has helped build toward this, and even after that there have been new things that we've had to learn to do after starting this assignment. 
The first 2 weeks were dedicated entirely to research.  Researching genre characteristics, researching films from the genre, researching mise en scene elements, all that good stuff.  A lot of it was sort of fluff to have work to log before we came up with an idea for our film's story, but it ended up being relatively helpful in the long run.
Weeks 3-5 were all preparation for filming.  Script writing, story-boarding, contacting Lucille's to ask to film there, and finding actors was all done during this time.  That last part about the actors got up-ended by this whole coronavirus thing as our actors were no longer able to show up, meaning we had to fill the roles ourselves last minute, something I'm still not pleased with as I hate acting, especially on camera.  This problem led me to lose faith in the final product of our project for a bit, which is very ridiculous in hindsight considering it didn't really have an impact on anything in our post production process.  Just goes to show what a negative Nancy I am.
Weeks 6-9 were dedicated entirely to post-production.  Sil worked on editing visuals (including her success in figuring out how to edit in a hologram) and I worked on doing the audio.   Due to the environment where we were filming, all of the audio had to be added in post.  This included the dialogue, meaning I had to sync up separately recorded voice lines with the mouth movements and correct timings in the videos.  Having to do this on top of adding sound effects was very time-consuming, but you've got to do what you've got to do. 
A year ago, I never would have imagined being able to help produce something of this quality, even if it's nowhere near that of professional productions.  I can say that at the end of the day I'm very proud of the opening that Sil and I have produced.

Week 8: Reflection Questions

     For today's post, I'll be addressing the questions we're required to answer as part of our "Creative Critical Reflection."  This will serve as sort of a rough draft for the answers I'll be giving in my actual CCR video that I'll be making this week.

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

     As discussed in the article "What is The Current State Of Diversity in Science Fiction Film" from A Plus, while the science fiction genre has begun to see more diverse representation in its casting choices, it is still a genre that is dominated by the presence of white men.  This is reflected in the genre's traditional target audience, which, when looking at the audience demographics for most science fiction films, seems to consist primarily of young men between the ages of 18 and 29.  However, as the audiences of these productions have become more diverse, the representation in the productions has become more diverse as well.  So, our choice to have a female main lead joins in with the current trend of defying the old genre conventions of representation in science fiction.  However, our choice to have a female lead was not meant to be some kind of statement of defiance against the traditional norms of the genre.  We just sort of decided to have a female lead.

     Our opening and the following short film are meant to serve as a critique of modern dating culture, in which people rarely form any meaningful relationships and just hook up with a bunch of randos they'll never meet again.  In our short film, the dating culture is not so much revolved around sex as it is just around meeting as many people as possible.  It's something of a numbers game in which people will compete against their friends to see who went out on more dates.  The overall message is that dating has devolved to a point where there's no real romance or emotional investment involved, which is a viewpoint held by many when looking at the rise of hookup culture and apps like Tinder.

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

     Our short film is about dating, something people in our target audience are either a) looking forward to, b) starting to do, or c) have some experience with.  Since films relating to dating and romance are typically more appealing women and girls, we could possibly also draw in a female audience for the dating aspects while drawing in a male audience with the sci-fi aspects.  

     The traditional audience for sci-fi as previously mentioned is males in the age range of 18 to 29.  According to YouTube demographic numbers, 62% of users are male and 81% of 15-25 year olds in the US use YouTube.  This makes it the perfect platform to release our short film on as it is frequently used by a large number of people in our target demographic.  YouTube is also frequently used to upload sci-fi short films.  One good example of this is the channel DUST, which regularly uploads CGI science fiction productions.  Beyond digital distribution, we could also show our production at popular short film festivals such as Aspen Shortfest and HollyShorts Film Festival.  These would provide an opportunity for our production to get some acclaim and build up excitement before a release to the general public.

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

     The first two weeks of the project was comprised almost entirely of research.  I looked up sci-fi genre conventions, analyzed film openings, and looked at examples of small-scale science fiction films.  After that, most of my research was planning or planning for the planning.  I made an outline for the scene, an outline for the storyboard, the actual storyboard, and I helped Sil write the actual script.  

     When it came to production, we had to adapt suddenly when our actors were no longer able to show up due to this whole coronavirus situation.  We ended up having to fill in the roles ourselves, something that I was not and am still not happy about.  It also meant that we needed more outside help in the form of Sil's boyfriend, Gus, who did the filming.  

     I feel like all the projects we've done so far have contributed to this one.  The one word film taught us about editing and shot composition.  The Foley sound project taught us about the importance of sound design.  The film pitch project taught us about researching genre conventions and target audience.  The music marketing project taught us about appealing to a target audience through marketing and distribution practices.  All of these assignments contributed to some extent in helping us work on this project.

     We started off this project with a somewhat ambitious idea for a unique project and have ended with a product that I don't think I'm personally quite satisfied with.  However, considering how hard I typically am on myself when it comes to my own creative productions, I doubt anything short of actual movie quality would satisfy me.

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

     The two big pieces of technology we used the most in this project were an iPhone for filming and computers for editing the visuals and audio.

     We didn't use much hardware in our filming other than a tripod for filming.  Since our opening was filmed in an open restaurant, we couldn't really do anything with the lighting or have any large-scale filming equipment even if we had some.

     When it comes to software, the first big one is of course Blogger.  I've been using it since February to log pretty much every single thing that has happened in the process of working on this project.  The second is WhatsApp, which I've used to communicate with Sil for the purpose of scheduling and discussing how to allocate work.  Third is HitFilm, which is the software I'm using for adding the audio into our opening.  Since we couldn't record good audio when originally recording our scenes, I'm using HitFilm to add in our lines after the fact.

     I originally planned on using WeVideo, a website we've used for past projects, when doing my work, but Sil didn't think its audio features were that great, so she got a recommendation that I used HitFilm Express.  Since it was a new software, I obviously had to spend some time learning how to use it.  Fortunately, their website had a reference manual for new users and I only had to know how to use a few features to work on audio editing, so learning to use it was pretty easy.

     I won't be including the final reflection on the project in this post since we're not quite finished with it yet.  I'll make some notes on that once I finish working with the audio.  I expect my next post will be about me doing said work on the audio editing.  See you then.

Week 8: Test Run

     In order to make sure that 1. I know how to use HitFilm, and 2. that my computer can handle the software, I decided to do a little test run with adding sound effects to a video.  So, I filmed this short video of me walking my dog:

     It's very short and doesn't have much background noise other than the crinkling of leaves.  I added in some Royalty Free Music from Bensound and the sound of an airplane flying overhead.  This was the result:

     The reference guide I talked about in my last post proved very helpful, as a lot of the features I wanted to utilize were not that easy to find on a first glance.  I lowered the volume of the music so that it wouldn't be so overwhelming and raised the volume of the airplane sounds to make it more noticeable.  While editing, the program shows a timeline of your video so you can see how long it is, and it kept playing after the video ended for up to 5 minutes, so I was a little worried since I couldn't find out how to make it stop doing that.  Fortunately, the edited video was really only as long as the original, so I was worrying over nothing.
     Since this project will be over in a little over a week, my next post will be dedicated to giving some basic answers to the reflection questions to help me prepare my CCR video.  See you then.

Week 8: Get With the Program

     As mentioned in my previous post, I downloaded a video production software called HitFilm Express for the purpose of editing the audio for our opening after Sil finished with the VFX.  Since this is a new software that I've never used before, I expected there to be some kind steep learning curve like I usually experience with these things.
     Fortunately, I seem to be mistaken.
     First off, they have a nice little reference manual for new users.  Or, "little" may not be so accurate.  Take a look at it if you want.  It is quite extensive.  This was initially very intimidating, as, while I have plenty of free time right now, I don't really want to spend an entire day reading a manual.  However, this isn't as much as an issue as it originally appears to be.
     There are about a hundred feature sections to read through, but due to my job here, the only one I need to worry about is audio.  Out of the entire manual, there were only a few sections I had to look at in relation to audio.  To sum that up, it tells you about audio tracks, syncing up audio with video (I'll get to that in a second), and audio effects.  The audio effects section will mostly just be relevant to me trying to make the audio sound like it wasn't recorded in someone's living room (which it might be, who knows).
     HitFilm has a pretty nifty feature that allows you to sync up separately recorded audio with a separately recorded video so long as the video was also recording audio.  The program then uses the video's audio to sync up the footage with the new audio file.  Very convenient stuff.  However, I believe I could run into a problem with the video being sped up.  If the lines are just spoken at the same speed as the mouth movements in the sped up video, then there probably won't be an issue.  On the other hand, there may be a situation in which I also have to speed up the audio, which could lead to it sounding abnormally high pitch.  To be honest, this sounded like a bigger issue before I started writing this, but it'll probably be fine.
     I'll have more updates on my work with HitFilm and I expect Sil will be done with her VFX work somewhat soon as the final week quickly approaches.  See you then!

Week 7: Looking for some sounds

     As I've gone over several times in the last week, Sil is going to be editing and adding affects to our footage.  I would show the clip here, but apparently the file's size is larger than 100 MB, so the site won't let me upload it.  I digress.
     The video speed was increased to 120% since she realized that our footage may have been a little longer than intended, but it's always good to have more footage than you need than having less.  My only issue is that it looks a little chopper, which I think is due to the slight movements of the camera while Gus is walking also being sped up.  Sil said she'd try stabilizing the footage while editing.
     In the meantime, I'm looking for a bunch of sounds that you would hear in a diner, but one that doesn't have many people in it.

Diner sounds: https://freesound.org/people/AllenStacy/sounds/240652/

     This one is just some all encompassing diner noises.  The clinking of glasses with some barely intelligible chatter in the background.  I think it's pretty good, but we need more than just this.
     The last time we needed sound effects for a project, I made sure to find a bunch of ambient noises to make it clear that the scene was taking place indoors.  Here are some such sounds:

Buzzing electricity from lights: https://freesound.org/people/lukaspearse/sounds/149734/

Air conditioning: https://freesound.org/people/mikevpme/sounds/273620/

     The volume of those sounds will be adjusted so that they're audible but still not too loud.  We'll also need some asynchronous sounds such as Sil walking and her sitting down at the booth.

Steps in high heels: https://freesound.org/people/anagar/sounds/267933/

Sitting down: https://freesound.org/people/jpkweli/sounds/154785/

     I can probably find some better sounds to use later on since we still have a lot of time left in this editing process, but these are just some examples of what I'm looking to use.  I'll have more updates in my future posts.  See you then.

     

Week 7: Editing Software

     In preparation for editing the sound for our opening, I've had to find a free program to use since I don't like spending money on things I'll probably only use once.  Per advice obtained from one of Sil's friends, I'm going to be using HitFilm Express.

     Just from looking over their website, it seems like they have a lot of really good materials to use for video production and editing.  I may actually use this in the future if I decide to start my own YouTube channel.  The program is free, but there are paid options available to help support the creators and I guess get more tools for the program.  They had some emoji line chart to show how each purchase makes them feel and getting the free one makes a crying emoji.

     I respect the hustle, but that sort of emotional manipulation is just really gross to me.  Especially because I'm such an empathetic and that stuff gets to me.
     Complaints about marketing strategies aside, I plan on using the next day or so learning how the program works in preparation of having to work on the sound.  I'll also be searching around for some royalty-free sound since I really don't like having to ask people I don't know to use their stuff.  Anticipate updates on these efforts in the next post.  See you then.
 

Week 7: Relatively Important Update

     First thing, I have confirmed that we have an extra week for this project.  Turns out the update was on Canvas of all places.  Who would've thought.  You can find my thoughts on this in the previous post.
     Second thing, which is not that important to this production process but more so to this class over all.  Due to the corona virus, Cambridge has cancelled all AICE exams.  This is a very big move considering the exams are what all the AICE courses, including this one, spend the entire year preparing students for.  So I guess that means that this project is just a class grade now?  Okay then.  My primary concern with this project was how it would affect my class grade since it was only half of the exam, so these developments don't really affect me personally all that much.  Although I am quite happy about not having to take any exams at the end of the year.
     Third thing: I need to find a free editing software to help Sil put together the opening.  I originally planned on just using WeVideo, an online program that we've used for editing projects in the past, but Sil thinks that it's not very good when it comes to editing audio, which is going to be my major contribution to this part of the process.  I don't know of any free editing software, I don't have any money to buy a program, and I have no intention of ever spending money on a grade, so that may make this a little difficult.  Sil said she'd ask some people from A Level if they know of any programs, so we'll see if I get any help there.
     I'll be back with an update on my progress in the next post.  See you then.

Week 6: Lights, Camera, No Actors

     I probably should have made this post a few days ago right after we did this, but I kind of forgot to.  It is what it is.
     At last, we finally got to go film at Lucille's on Thursday.  We couldn't have had better timing for it either, because the governor just ordered that all restaurants not let people inside.  So it seems we pretty much lucked out.  Or you know, as much as we could luck out while not being able to have our actors show up for the scene and have to fill in the roles ourselves.

     On the bright side, I don't look terrible in this greaser outfit.  I would perhaps go so far as to say I even look good.
     Filming lasted a little under two hours.  Sil brought her boyfriend Gus to do the filming and it was a big help.  He's in Media Studies A level, so he's got a lot of experience with this stuff.

     I really don't like acting, especially not in front of a camera, so it was very fortunate that I only had to be in the scene for two shots, only one of which shows me talking.  Due to the music playing in the restaurant and a few other factors, Sil said that we're going to have to dub over our lines in post.  That's fine I guess, since it means that we won't be able to forget our lines.  Something great though is that we're apparently getting an extra week!  Now I have not had this confirmed, but Sil told me this, and she is fairly trustworthy and seems to know a lot of people, so I believe her.  I will edit this post if I find this to be false in the future.
     This means that we have an extra week to do editing (yay)!  What to do I think of this?  Well...

     To be entirely honest, I'm not sure it will really help improve the final product of our opening.  Over the last 5 days or so, I've been losing faith in this project.  Prior to this whole corona virus thing, I thought everything was gonna go really well.  But now that we weren't able to use our actors and had to do last minute changes, combined with the uncertainty caused by this whole situation, I don't think that the opening we're going to produce will be very good.  I mean, c'mon, dubbing our lines?
     Who knows, maybe I'm just a very negative person.  Actually, I think I'm generally regarded as being a cynical person, so I'm probably over blowing this.  We won't know for sure until we're done.
     Now that filming is complete, we can start editing.  That means we'll be working on color, sound, editing techniques, all that good stuff.  My future posts for the next week or so will likely cover these topics.  See you then.