Movie: Creative Critical Reflection

 My CCR is attached below

The Red Carpet Premiere: Life of the Party

Here is the final product. I hope you enjoy it.

Finishing Touches

 With all the feedback we got from showing off the project, the first job was to go through it all and see the trends. The biggest trend we noticed was the audio. The dialogue was too low while the music was way too loud. We also noticed the audio clip at the end was very poor quality so we found a new one. All of these issues were easily solvable by adjusting the audio levels of each clip. Whenever someone would talk in the shot, we would lower the music and bring it back up when they were quiet. We also added fades into and out of each of the portions of music. By doing this the audio was significantly better. When we showed it again to the people who initially had issues with it, they now though the quality was a big improvement. The other bits of advice we needed to do was changing where the title was. Two people pointed out that the title was hard to read with the font color chosen. So we had to either change the color of the title or move it somewhere else. We decided to move it because after trying both ideas, it came out much better. The last advice we got that we liked was changing the lighting. Juan told us about a feature on iMovie that allows you to match the lighting of one shots to the others. So we made the transitions between shots smoother by making the color palate of the shots the exact same. Initially the bathroom scene was darker on one of the actors and lighter on the other. This change corrected that since we didn't notice it at the time when filming. With all of these done we started to export the project one last time. And With it exported at maximum quality, Bliss and I watched it one last time before uploading.

Showing Off My Project

The first person I showed my project too were the people who sit around me in media studies. They all gave mostly positive feedback. Juan said he was a big fan of the way we did the titles. But he suggested we changed the lighting of the shot to try and make the different shades of red less distinct. This was something Bliss and I hadn't considered yet and we definitely planned on adding this to our project. Monzur, the next person we showed mostly had comments on the audio. He wasn't the biggest fan of the song we choose and though the dialogue in the first scene was too quiet. He suggested dialating the quality of the audio during the bathroom scene to mimic how it would be in real life. This was also something Bliss and I noticed but didn't change just yet. After showing everyone near where we sit, we showed some of the people who passed Media Studies last year. Both Alexa and Oscar said this was one of the better projects they've seen. Oscar thought the sound effects in the last scene needed to be louder. But they both thought once we make the changes we talked about making that it will definitely be worthy of a good grade. Lastly we showed it to our peers that didn't have the class. This lead to a lot of conflicting feedback that didn't help us too much. Some people liked the titles. Others said that it didn't look good. Someone even called the song we choose a "roblox song". What we noticed is that most of these people didn't fully understand what the project should look like. As a result the feedback they gave didn't help us too much so we decided to ignore what they said going forward.

Putting it all Together

So with Bliss and I finishing each part of our editing, we both had each others portions reviewed. I sent her my montage and she had  a couple bits of feedback. The first thing she pointed out was that it was supposed to be 47 seconds and not 57. So I had to trim a lot of the shots I added at the end. The other feedback she gave me was that she thinks the transitions should be faded rather than cuts. So after adding all of those the montage looked a lot better. So we inserted it in the scene and started to line up everything. We wanted to line the beat drops of the song to big parts of the montage. And this took us a while. The scene where somebody breaks the cup pyramid was the first one we tried. After 30 minutes, we finally did it. But it took so long we didn't even try to do any other shots. We left space for all the titles I that weren't going to be integrated and hit the 2 minute spot perfectly. We planned out who we wanted to show the project too in the next class to get feedback on our movie. And once we do that we will edit the project with the finishing touches.

 

Uploading Videos Without Wifi

 With the filming finally done we started to edit the movie. But before we can edit the shots, we had to go through them all to see which takes we are using, especially for the party montage. We split the editing into two parts, I would put together the party montage and Bliss would work do the other parts of the editing. So I asked Bliss to send me the videos she recorded and tried to download all the videos my friends also took that night. But since I tried to do this during school, the WIFI and internet would not allow me to start this process. The messages weren't sending, the videos weren't downloading and the music wasn't loading. After about an hour of downloading, the videos finally were loaded onto my iMovie project. I went through every shot and favorited the ones I liked the most. I had to trim most of the shots which were over 15 seconds to 2-5 seconds each which took a while to do. And then I put all of them in the video and started shuffling it around until I liked the order and had a nice distribution of shots. This was mostly trial and error but eventually I did it perfectly.  Bliss told me to hit the 2 minute mark we needed 57 seconds of the party montage. I added a couple more shots, trimmed a few and made sure it was perfectly timed. And once this was done I started the exporting process. 2 hours later It finished and I sent it over to bliss where we would insert it into the rest of the project and put on all the finishing touches.

Plan Goes off the Rails Pt. 2

 Bliss and I both slept through our alarms the next morning and had to cancel the filming plans for the opening and closing scenes. So we decided to reschedule it the next day we were both available. 

Ten days later...

On the day we were supposed to be wrapping up editing, Bliss and I finally has 2 hours of free time to get these scenes done. So we met up at my house after I picked up Sean and filmed the remaining scenes. We went in reverse order and filmed the final scene first. Prior to the scene me and Sean found every random item we could find to put into this shot. We used a beach chair, an alligator inflatable and a fire extinguisher with red solo cups sprinkled around us. We split this scene into 2 long takes. The first panned down from the sky to reveal me and Sean passed out on the lawn with the random items we found on the ground. This shot took about ten times as long to set up than it did to film because we nailed it on the second try. And the 2nd shot was about the same time because after our 3rd take we liked it to much we didn't think we needed to film another. Upstairs we went to film the bathroom scene. We first started by filming the scene we forgot to the first go-around. This was the knocking on the door from the outside. The rest went about the same as the first go around just without Future playing in the background. We triple checked that every scene we needed was finished and checked every box on the story board. We finally put an end to the filming process and enjoyed a glass of orange juice to celebrate. Bliss got picked up and I drove Sean home. That night we called to start a plan for the post production which ill get into the next blog.