Creative Critical Reflection

After finishing my film opening, I decided to reflect on my creative process. I thought it was so good, that I'm posting it, so you guys can see it too. Here are the links: 

Creative Critical Reflection 1

Creative Critical Reflection 2

Sources:

https://www.gao.gov/blog/hispanic-underrepresentation-media

https://www.similarweb.com/blog/marketing/seo/top-google-searches-most-searched-keywords/

Unite

Today we had our second group meeting. We were placed with random people to review our progress, discuss, and make edits. It was very helpful. We begun by explaining what each of our openings is about and how far along we are in our project.

Ace’s film is about a brother taking care of the other brother who has powers. It's of the coming-of-age genre. He’s done editing, but he is noticing problems, so he is going back and tweaking it. Dani’s film is “a dude that raps and stuff with a mean producer.” It’s similar to whiplash and he’s halfway through editing. He also shaved his head, so he can’t reshoot anything that’s wrong. Camila’s film is about a teenager who is currently grieving the loss of her brother, coping through meth. She finished editing and is going to start her CCR. Gaby’s film is about a girl that gets transported into a book. She finished editing and is working on CCR. She has three of four questions done and is filming it today.

Then we watched everyone's film openings and gave critiques.

Ace's film had dialogue that was hard to hear, Dani's film needs to be edited still, Camila's film did not get any critiques, and Gaby's film needs to fix the sound for the alarm. I was also told to fix the alarm sound and to add the credits.

Overall, it was a great meeting. I loved the groups energy, we worked well together. Here's a picture of us!

   

Brooke's group had more comments about our opening, so we decided to get together after school to make some of the changes. Here is us adding the suggestions: 

I also scripted my CCR today. Here is my script!

All I need to do now is film it! I'm so excited to see the final result!

What on Earth is a CCR?

You miss one class...

I don't miss T-Stoks class, but the one day I did, she explained the CCR. I remember she said it stands for creative critical reflection, but that's all I know. Thankfully Brooke sent me her notes without me even asking. Literally such a good partner. Anyway... here are her notes. I found the big note she left me very funny.

From this, I understood that we need to make two videos that are no more than 10 minutes long and answer the four questions listed. Brooke and I got together to start answering them. Here is a picture of the Google Doc:

Now all we have left is to write an official script and film them. I'm thinking of doing a PowerPoint with a voiceover and an interview with the star of our film AKA me!

Mari the Musician

As we began the editing process, she realized the cleaning shots at the beginning were too slow, so we need to go back and film more. We had expected this would happen from the beginning, but we wanted to make sure before we went back to film. 

Today, Brooke and I got together to film some more cleaning shots. We had the idea of filming Amelia dusting the fan which turned out to be tricky. Both Brooke and I are short people, so I had to find Brooke a tall chair to stand on. As for me, I found a chair, but it still wasn't tall enough, so I had to balance it on the bed. We were both scared for our lives, but we were already in too deep to stop, so we took our chances. Here's a video of us balancing:

After being scared for our lives we decided to take a snack break. I made chicken and french fries!

Me being a master chef

We spent most of the time filming, but we also discussed music for our opening. Brooke and I have been putting off picking out a song since... well... day 1. After we started to edit, we realized we needed to get on that ASAP, so we began to look for non-copyrighted music. We found nothing. I jokingly said to Brooke that I could make the song for our opening and started playing some random chords on my not so tuned guitar, but Brooke actually liked it, so we stuck with it. She recorded it, so here it is:

After this, we added the audio file to our editing software. Here's a picture of our editing process after adding the sound: 

Yikes... Editing

AAAHHHH Editing

Brooke and I had never edited anything before taking AICE Media, so it's been a struggle. We can only do basic things which will work fine for our opening, but it'll be a slow process. Here's a picture of us tackling the challenge:

It's been a while since I've edited, so it took a while to import the videos. The picture above shows the beginning of our editing process. We know we need to film more cleaning shots, so we're going to edit together the inn...spiration shots first. Hopefully, it turns out to be something we're both proud of. 

BROOKE ANSWERED!

Break!!

Brooke and I have been spring breaking it up, so we haven't had time to meet or call to work on the project. We've been entirely reliant on texting. It isn't ideal, but it works. We won't be able to start editing until our trips are over, but we've been working on what we can. 

My last post was about fonts I liked. I asked Brooke which she wanted and luckily we both had the same favorite. CMU Serif it is!

Font conversation with Brooke

Fonts: My Worst Enemy

Fonts

Coming up with a title and choosing a font are the things I am worst at. Thankfully, as you saw in my last post, Brooke came up with the title, but I'm very picky when it comes to fonts, so this job falls on me. We decided early on that we would be using a serif font. https://www.dafont.com/ is a great resource for choosing fonts. Here are a couple I tried out:

Here are the ones I did not like AT ALL.

Fonts I liked

I don't want to make any decisions without Brooke, and she's on a trip right now, so I'll update when she has time to look at them and decide. My personal vote is the first one on the list of fonts I liked. It's called "CMU Serif."

Phases of the Moon

We came up with a title for our film!

In our film Amelia is trying to open her own inn "The Crescent Inn." The opening shows her and the phases she goes through as she works toward opening her inn. 

As we were filming we were looking at the inn...spiration board and Brooke just said "Phases of the Moon." I was confused as to what she was talking about until she followed up and said it should be the title of our film opening. She explained it the same way I wrote it above. I liked the idea, so there's our title. Now for the font.

Spilled Toxic Chemicals

TODAY WE FILMED! 

Brooke and I knew from the beginning we were going to film our entire opening in one day. We planned last class to film all day today and we did. Once Brooke begins to edit, we'll see if we have to go back and film, but otherwise we're done filming! Here is how production went:

Cleaning it Up!

I had to wake up at 9AM to start cleaning my VERY messy room. 

Before

After

...then Brooke came over.

Last Minute Purchases

We remembered we needed to print pictures for the inn...spiration board, so we took a trip to CVS. I'm glad to report I made it through Brooke's questionable driving.

Me ordering the pictures at CVS

Setting it Up... Part 2!

Once we got back to my house, we began to set up the inn...spiration board and Amelia's room. I reorganized my furniture, changed my bedding (to make it look more adult and match the board), and put together the board. Here are pictures of the results.

The changed bedding

Inn...spiration board

Spilling Toxic Chemicals 

After that, we began to film. Our first shot is Amelia taking her cleaning supplies out of the car. I kept making mistakes during this first shot, so we filmed it about six times, one of which I may have spilled some cleaning supplies in Brooke's car. The same things happened once we got inside and started dropping the bucket onto the ground. That definitely wasn't the smartest idea we've had, but we learned from our mistake. On the bright side, some authentic cleaning was going on! 

Brooke trying to put the seat down to clean

Me spilling the sponge liquid everywhere

Bibble Interruption

My dog, Bibble, was really trying to be the star of the opening. Unfortunately, his paws don't work great for cleaning.. or holding.. or sweeping, so he did not make the cut. 

Me holding Bibble after he ruined the shot

The Fall of Inn...spiration

So the inn...spiration board arrived without a way to attach it to a wall, so we had to improvise. There was a small space between the board and the border it had, so we used that to hang it onto the wall, but it wasn't sturdy. It kept falling during filming which was really annoying, but we managed. Here is a video:

The Final Shot

We don't want to reveal too much of our opening yet, but here is our final shot!!

This shot is going to come after the title. It's Amelia going to grab her keys (because she has more houses to clean), but stopping to look at her inn...spiration board. It works to solidify her want for the inn to be real. 

Setting it up!

Ready to Film

Now that we are done with our storyboard we are ready to film! We decided to film this Sunday, so we began to put together our mise-en-scene elements. We ordered a corkboard and started setting up the living room that Brooke and I designed in a previous post. This is the living room.

And here is the corkboard! We still need to wait for it to ship, but once it does we will add the pictures to recreate the one we designed in posts prior.

OUR STORYBOARD!!!

Finally we are in a committed relationship with our storyboard!

Today during class Brooke and I worked on completing our storyboard during class. We are happy with our idea and the shots we came up with. We worked for a while to determine how we were going to represent our characters desire to open an inn without relying on dialogue to explicitly state it. This is mainly accomplished through the use of our inn..spiration corkboard. Amelia is going to interact with this prop by adding her check from work onto it and taking a flyer off of it. The flyer is something she designed for her to use when she opens her inn. She looks at it a lot to represent her deep desire to open the inn. Our storyboard goes into more details about our shots. If you want to take a look it is pictured below.

Inn..spiration Cork Board

Designing Amelia’s Dream Board

As I discussed in my previous blog, we decided we were going to have a cork board in Amelia's room, so I designed one for us to replicate. Here it is. It will include a variety of pictures of inns she uses as inspiration alongside flyers she has made for when she opens the inn. We are also including a check to show she is working toward her goal. The dream board is meant to establish that she is a hard worker working towards opening her own inn.

Meeting with T-Stok

Ms. Stoklosa makes it a priority to meet with all the groups in our media class to ensure we are making progress on our portfolio project. Today was our meeting. Brooke and I were very nervous before our meeting. We thought we were behind on our project as it took us so long to find an idea, but Ms. Stoklosa said we were on track.

The meeting began with Ms. Stoklosa asking if we had finally come up with an idea and we were glad to be able to say yes. We explained to her that we’re doing our opening on a hardworking woman who has a dream of some day opening an inn and is saving up.

She asked how we were going to establish that she wants to open an inn. We told her we wanted to have a flyer on her wall for the inn, but she suggested we take this to the next level by having a corkboard with inspiration pictures in her room. Here, she can pin her check (from work) onto it.

As of right now we are developing a storyboard. We were able to finish a scene of her working and transition it to her room before the meeting, so it was helpful to flesh out ideas for this next setting. 

We will be creating our storyboard next week as I am on a competition trip right now and we want to do it together.