Organizing my Idea for CCR

        The Creative Critical Reflection is the part of my project that I was truly anxious about. I am not one to be speaking in front of a camera because ai am extremely awkward and cringey. I was not built for the YouTuber image. But I have to do it otherwise my grade will suffer, so here are my ideas. 

         Here is a little sneak peak at what I am going to be saying for this video. 

      I don’t just want to be standing in front if a camera and speaking. Rather, I am going to use Canva and Video Star to make the video a but more interesting. 

      Here is a screenshot of my Canva project. Some information I will be presenting through a Canva animation. 

  

Editing Day 2

     Another day another breakdown. Editing is never easy and when it comes to sound, it makes it ten times harder to make sure the pacing of our song and the cuts of our clips go together in a way where it won't look bad. 

    All of our editing had been done through DaVinci Resolve except for the creation of our title. Because of my experience using Video Star for editing personal projects, I had more confidence in myself with doing the title credit through this application. 

    It had taken long only because each letter, even the 'typos', had to be created on its own so the separate keyframes can work as if it were being typed letter by letter. The spacing of each letter had to be measured perfectly so it wasn't looking off. The keyframes had to be concise and times well so it wouldn't look uneven in a way. Creating the sound that went with the visual wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. 

    

Editing Day **Attempt** 1

     The day has finally come, I am editing! DaVinci Resolve has been kind to me and hasn't given e a hard time which I appreciate. Editing my part is very particular especially because we shot the same scenes in different angles. The way I had imagined this scene is by cutting it at the different parts so it is obvious that it is all once scene but just different angles. The cuts have to be specific and done in a way where it will not look choppy. Below are some screenshots of some cuts I made in order for the angles to be represented nicely. 

Long Distance Editing

      No one ever told me that editing together would be a bit difficult considering we are currently in two different states rights now. With the way we managed our time, our editing schedule fell on Spring Break. Because of that, we have decided to split the parts and edit it separately and then edit those two parts together to make the final opening. This is the inly way we can both contribute fairly the editing especially because this is pur vacation time and it is unfair for only one of us to do it. 

Davinci Resolve Walkthrough

       Our days of editing have started despite being on vacation and I have taken it upon myself to use my free time to watch some useful videos of tips and tricks for Davinci Resolve. I don’t use this application often and I am nowhere near an expert nor do I know a lot, so I found these videos incredibly helpful for future references when I really sit down and fully start editing. 

Song Choices

        Our opening will never be complete until we decide what song we want to put as it is quite crucial to Malia’s narrative. We had searched up some copyright free music that we could use and came upon a couple. Two of them we debated on for a bit. 

      While we liked this one, we didn’t think it would fit our opening so we eventually decided on this one below. 

        This sound in general seemed a lot more fitting for a coming-of-age film opening and the content we are showing. 

Filming Day Two

         Day two of filming was surprisingly not as bad in terms of weather. It did rain but we worked around it enough to be able to film when it was no longer a problem. A lot of our filming took place inside except for the moments in the car scene which isn’t our main scenery. A lot of problems with our camera not focusing occurred and it got quite aggravating but we worked through it. We could have used our phones for the cinematography aspect, but we wanted to be aesthetic and used my camera as well as Carolina’s tripod for shooting. 

       Here is a picture of me being an actress. After this experience I realized I should probably stick to my day job and never pursue acting.

Filming Day One

      Filming can never work unless there are some setbacks and setbacks there were. Today was pur first day of production to which we successfully got some parts of our film done. We planned more but because of the poor weather and a lot of unwanted background noise, it was pretty difficult to work around it without there having to be major sound editing later on. We still have multiple days of filming in which we can get a lot done so we did have to push back some scenes due to these unprecedented events. 

     Other than that, I present some pictures I took of our official set up of the bedroom we are filming in. 

    

Scriptwriting

     I have to be honest, writing a script is not my strongest suit. I had to search up a format on how to write a script because it was not doing it for me. I got to organizing my script a bit and I came up with two different ones mostly because our opening is not largely based on dialogue, if anything it is mostly on visual content and that is where most of our representation is coming from.

    The first one below is a copy of what I had in mind from the beginning. This one shows our original idea of a teacher conversing with Malia. You can see that I don't have a good idea of how writing a script or screenplay entails (and I am still learning). 

        Scratching that idea out, we changed the script up a bit and matched it as well as possible to our storyboard draft. 

Storyboard [Final Draft]

     The time is here (it took a while). Our storyboard is done and ready to be shared. I want to emphasize an apology towards my drawing skills as they were lacking throughout this process but I think my mind had a much better image. 

A Few Changes to Our Narrative

       This last class we finally finished up our final story boarding to now begin our production. We are a bit behind schedule but setbacks are what makes us grow no? At least that’s what I want to believe. Anyways…The changes we’ve decided on isn’t necessarily on our opening but it is involving the extra thirty seconds that roll over after the actual opening to our film. Instead of having a teacher speak to our character about entering into a writing festival, we decided on creating a scene where our character is more by herself in her discovery. We created a scene where Malia will be in her car and she receives an email from a writing program that she had got into. 

       We’ve decided on this change because we believe that this part of our narrative continues on the idea of her future and how it’s going to look like versus how she want it to look like. I believe this addition will also create the realistic idea if college life and how while even if you get the opportunity to go somewhere especially out of state, it is not always in your best interest to go along with it in terms of money. I know many seniors now and even college students who go through this struggle and it’s a difficult choice in high school going on to college. Malia will be represented as one of these students who have a difficult choice to make for her future. 

Scheduling for this week

       I think that it is time I layout a plan I want to abide by during this next week. This will allow me to see our milestones and whether we have completed them or not. 

      Monday: Finish storyboard and figure out when we want to start filming. 

      Wednesday: Make any changes necessary and go over materials we may need to create this opening correctly. 

      Friday: Create a plan on how we want to tackle the week we have off for Spring Break as we both have plans to leave town. 

Part One of Our Storyboard

       Our horrible time management and busy schedules has lead us up to here. A storyboard that is not at all finished. While we have every idea we want in our film engraved in our minds, we haven’t been able to organize it down on paper. It’s not a fun spot to be in. 

       Here we have some parts of what we know we want to film for our opening. We do plan on getting our storyboard done and ready this week and hopefully it will happen. We promised ourselves we would not slack. 

I am BLANKING

        No one ever told me blogging would be hard. Did I think blogging for AICE Media Studies was going to be easy? No, not at all but then again it shouldn’t be this hard to come up with things to write about especially because I’ve said a lot in my other posts that basically sum up our updates so far. 

       Anyways… Now that I finally know what I want to talk about… We have our idea for the opening to our opening! We want to emphasize Malia’s interests right away and therefore, our very first scene will illustrate our character typing on her laptop. First it will be a black scene where only the sound of typing will be available for the audience and then the image to go with that sound will show. I think this idea immerses the audience right at the beginning as they are waiting to see what is going to be shown, even if that question is lingering for just a second. 

      Another thing that I thought was a very good idea and am quite proud of is how we are going to introduce the title of our film, ‘Unwritten’. First we came up with the idea that it would be introduced as if it were being typed. I loved that idea and then I kind of just thought, ‘hey, how about we create it as if she is writing it but makes some typos and then deletes it to write it out correctly’. And at first it was quite a random thought that I believed would just make the moment more ‘cool’ but then I got thinking. The idea that she messed up on typing the word in the first time kind of represents not only her life, but that of other teenagers. Of course, not everyone is perfect and people make mistakes, especially teenagers who are only learning to become adults in the real world. Adding the concept of Malia messing up on something so simple as our title feels important to the narrative and what we want to convey to the audience as a coming-of-age film.