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.