Creative Critical Reflection

View the CCRs below:

Goodnight Stories for Young Princesses:

Youtube- https://youtu.be/jhaB5RItAeA

GoogleDrive- https://drive.google.com/file/d/1P_UdlsKlCtGIJImQKiMd8quC6Z-nAb18/view?usp=sharing

On Your Shoulder:

Youtube- https://youtu.be/m_1gbhWffY4

GoogleDrive- https://drive.google.com/file/d/1P3d0mNUgPm2r66NnsA9v7aTooLU_ORGL/view?usp=sharing

FILM OPENING

View Borderline below:

YouTube- https://youtu.be/EftZqx5arRk

GoogleDrive- https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sVFVaStzy3zoEipQeXFcZ0ZykGOXF8gX/view?usp=sharing

 :)

It's been a wild ride

I can't believe its actually over. Nine weeks and now we're completely wrapped. As I reflect back on my time on the project, I guess the only thing I wish is that I didn't have to go through some sleepless nights over these past final days. I definitely was rushing to get everything done before the deadline, but honestly, it all worked out alright and that's what matters. 

As someone who has never studied or practiced film before taking this class, I'm so thankful for all the knowledge I learned, not only from the lessons but from the experience of working on the opening. I had the skills needed to create something like this, but I didn't have the wisdom or conviction to bring it to life until this course. I'm hoping this is the start of more films to come, and of course I hope to be back for A-level.

While we got a rough start on the project, Faye and I really pulled it together. I'm really grateful to have worked with her because two minds are really better than one. We were able to bounce ideas off each other, teach one another, grow with each other, and support each other throughout the whole process, and we came out better because of it (and our film opening is beautiful). 

To whoever is reading this, I hope you enjoy Borderline's film opening. We worked our booties off on it.

Editing the opening

Alright. Faye did the heavy lifting by line editing the film opening. I'm adding the final touches, like coloring, titles, credits, and effects.

At first, we had said to each make our own version, but ultimately, there was no point in doing the same thing twice, so Faye made the draft and handed it over to me. Before that though, we went back and forth between the sound design, whether to use static or brown noise or anxiety inducing music, or silence.

This original draft of the opening included creepy music underneath the scene of the large painting, which we deleted from the timeline because it sounded too much like horror.

Faye and I trying to come up with something else.

In the end, we opted for silence, hoping that it would contrast with the rest of the opening because each section has sound elements (footsteps and natural sound in the intro, diegetic music from the record player, non diegetic music during the anxiety scenes, water during the fridge scene). We think the lack of sound will create an isolating feel, and feel separate to the rest.

Once I got the draft in my own timeline, Faye and I looked through fonts. Faye liked fonts with a handwriting feel to it, but wanted it to be more simple and clean. Some of the fonts we tested are pictured below:

 

In the end, we chose the font Monotype Corsiva. I then credited Faye and I as creators, Camila as our lead actress, Fesliyan studios for the music, and David Renda for the song. 

Then I worked on creating the title graphic, which we finally named our film Borderline and used a masking effect to reveal the text. I did this by keyframing an opacity mask frame by frame so that the text would reveal from behind her hair. 

First version.

After showing this part of the opening to a friend, we both thought it needed something more, like perhaps a special effect, to understand that the main character is hallucinating. I decided to add a directional blur that would blur the edges of the painting, and increased the exposure while adding rotation key frames to the directional blur, so the final effect looks psychadelic, and in this way we hope the audience understands even more clearly that it is a hallucination.

Final version with effects and the title in ALL CAPS.

The last thing I did was color correct the shots, which was fairly simple with Premiere Pro 2024, because the lumetri color panel has an option to automatically help correct shots; however, I would always have to fix the coloring anyway when the "auto-correct" would often over expose shots, leaving them looking worse off. A mix between my own eyes and the computer intelligence resulted in the final coloring job. 

One cool thing though that I learned was how to match the coloring effect from one shot to another, by usng a tool called Comparison View. I used an official Adobe Premiere Pro tutorial and was able to match the coloring from a warmer shot to a cooler shot, creating the same warm tone throughout.

The shot before comparison view and color match vs after color match.

I exported different drafts and sent them to Faye, then went back to editing, sent another draft, until finally on the 5th attempt, we had it. Our film opening was complete. We now had our final draft. It was time to go to sleep. I can't wait for everyone to see it.

Cooking up a CCR

Okay so with the deadline approaching, and after viewing projects from older media students, I realized that my "bedtime story" idea was good, but my poetry idea wasn't very strong and would be quite difficult. Poetry would likely restrain my answers from being as clear as they need to be, which is very important for the answers. The whole point is to tell a story of reflection and show the amount of thought and effort that was put into this whole nine-week process, in a creative way of course. TStok said to keep it under 10 minutes, and that 7 minutes is the sweet spot, meaning each CCR would have to be around 3 minutes. Thinking of it at first, the spoken word poems I write for the competition are actually 3 minutes long in length, so I wouldn't be a stranger to the challenge; however, the current spoken word I'm using to compete in Louder Than a Bomb took me about 2 months to write... and I don't have 2 months to write a poem as a CCR as there's only about a week before all these elements are due. 

Therefore, the spoken word CCR idea: scrapped.

Luckily though, through utter coincidence, I was scrolling through the chat history of a conversation between my best friends and I caught myself saying 

"you guys are like my little angels debating with the devils on my shoulders." 

The gears started turning, and an idea popped out of whatever little machine I had running up there in that brain of mine: it would be a skit of myself arguing with myself. Starring me as me, and me as the devil on my shoulder, and me as the angel on my shoulder. How? Well, this would take a little bit of green screen magic of course.

I mean it it when I say everything happens for a reason, because recently my long-time friend sent me a video of myself back from 2020, because she was clearing up some storage from her phone and stumbled upon the funny vid. In the video, strewn up on the wall, was a green blanket. 

I had completely forgotten about it, but in 2020 when all our classes were moved to Zoom, I totally made a makeshift greenscreen in my bedroom to use for my middle school TV production class. With this memory fresh in my mind, I was able to craft the idea for the new CCR; I could totally pull off homemade greenscreen because if I'd done it before, I could do it again!

Problem: I couldn't find the green blanket.

I have no clue where it went, however, I did find a solid-colored deep-blue blanket that simply was screaming "USE ME, PICK ME!" so I guess bluescreen it is!

Said Blue Blanket. See how it's perfect?

I've worked with Chromakey before in premiere, as I've mentioned before, meaning I know that really all that's needed to key out a background is a solid color, that contrasts what you don't want to key out, and even lighting. I don't have my ring light back from Faye yet, but I have a pretty strong desk lamp that will have to do the job (which is giving major deja vu because that's exactly what I used to do in middle school). All that matters now is that I don't wear blue. So I looked in my closet for some costume design, and I seriously think this is the best idea I've had yet because everything was right there.

I had an angel's halo from Halloween which I paired with this white romper.

And I paired these red bunny ears I had as a souvenir from homecoming with a red shirt. Mischievous.

I'm already imagining these mini versions of me arguing on my shoulder, a conversation something like:

Normal me: Did I improve my skills throughout this project?

Devil me: Are you kidding? You still suck and you didn't learn anything!

Angel me: Don't listen to her! Of course, you did! You studied genre and audiences and learned what it takes to develop a film idea, as well as what the word mise-en-scene means, prop creation, and set design!

Or something like that.

My "bedtime story" idea would be me telling the viewer a bedtime story, and at the end, I reveal that it was me Nyxed Media, all along. A little bit corny but in my head it parodies of some sort of program made for kids. I'm thinking of wearing my most "pajama" looking pajamas and filming it with low lighting while sitting on my bed, lit by some of the cute lamps I have above my bedframe. It'll be cute I think. 

Anyway, I'm gonna start writing down my answers to the questions so I can record, because I don't have a lot of time left, and I need time to edit. Peace out.

Screaming and Crying

 WHYYYYYYYYYYY. ℗ smoking frog media you are now my enemy.

So the Breakfast for One people never responded. As in, the piece of music we kinda based our whole first half of the opening to be based on. But its okay, because we will just have to settle, I guess. 

The move was now to look through royalty-free music to use, which is a bit unfortunate because it can (in some ways) take away from the realism of the character if it sounds too... boring. Royalty-free music tends to repeat itself annoyingly or sound very generic, and since our character is a teenager, this might go against the genre, if she's listening to some random song no one has heard of. 

Granted, Breakfast for One isn't the hit song of the summer either, so maybe we were already breaking coming-of-age/drama stereotypes anyway. That's the thing, our genre is coming-of-age but only because the plot of our film would hypothetically deal with themes of young adulthood that the character will face. However, only mental health is taken a brief look at in the opening, and it may not be too clear to the viewer what is actually happening in the beginning (which is intentional). I'll talk about this more in a later blogpost, but I guess I'm realizing that Faye and I are mostly breaking the genre rather than following it. 

Anyway, I suggested a couple websites for Faye and me to search through below, which I really just lifted from the Soundscape project assignment links our teacher gave us earlier in the year, as well as some wesbsites I knew from over the years (Bensound). Ultimately, we chose a song from Fesliyan Studios, a website I learned through working with my Silent Film team at STN.

The song is called Smoky Lounge by David Renda.

Anyway, Faye suggested that we edit our own version of the opening and then pick which one is better, but I'd prefer if we share the workload according to our preferences and strengths (for example, I'm the one with the vision for the credits and knowledge on how to do the graphics effects). Though, I guess I'll get started editing anyway in the meantime. "It'll be okay" is what I just have to keep telling myself.

ITS OKAY! Hopefully...

Things worked out in the end! Well, not without a big scare, however...

I came back from my trip and checked up on Faye and whether we would be able to film the last shots we needed. In our heads, our opening is split into 5 parts:

• The introduction
• Peaceful Painting sequence
• Anxiety Painting sequence
• Title scene
• Fridge scene

The first day of filming, we knocked out 3/5, aka the intro and all the painting scenes. We needed the giant prop to be done to get the title scene, so that is what we filmed last. On Tuesday after my return, I went over to Faye's house and we shot the fridge scene, which for us is the device we use to indicate there's more to the story in the film, the "dot dot dot" of the film opening. 

Said fridge scene, to be used for about 10 seconds at the end of our opening.

We successfully got what we needed, and began to set up the shot for the title scene, with the painting looming over our main character. However, we were going to have to reshoot the scene anyway. Why? Well, my amazing, beautiful, lovely partner Faye worked on painting the 6ftx9ft canvas with all the paint and colors we imagined; however, she left it outside to dry and Tuesday morning, it rained.

The photo Faye sent me Tuesday morning, in distress because she thought it was ruined.

However, once I was at Faye's house, in it's dried state it was evident it was salvageable, and although it wasn't exactly what Faye envisioned, I believe it still captured the abstract art that I imagined. We didn't have command strips to hang it by the ceiling like we imagined, but Faye's mom brought out these tripods and clips used for a movie screen for projecting, that we were able to use to hang up the painting. 

The painting in its Tuesday state. Not perfect, but it works.

Ultimately, I had to go home, but I left my equipment with Faye so she could finish filming the next day. In the end, Faye didn't touch up the painting, so I think we could have finished filming on Tuesday, but our actress (aka Faye's little sister) was sleepy and tired regardless, so Wednesday it would be. 

Wednesday after school, I wasn't available to help Faye film, so I gave Faye the equipment, put my faith in her and God that she understood how to use it now that we had spent hours working with the equipment for the majority of the film opening, and hoped that nothing else tragic would happen.

And lo' and behold. We were done filming. Faye sent me over the takes she got and we had completed everything we needed. I got the equipment back from her the next morning, went about my school day, and we were officially out for Spring Break. We did it. 

Transition scene for the title graphic. Painting looking... good I think at least. 

I hope the people get it...

That's a wrap on production. Now it's time for post-production...

Nervous

It’s the end of the quarter and everything is falling apart except for my things that are media related. My competition went really well, my team is now nationally awarded, and I think Faye and I are on schedule for our film opening. However, if we don’t finish filming what we have left to finish this week, there’s potential that we fall behind; so I am nervous.

For filming, we used a Cannon DSLR T-8i, which I borrowed from my school’s TV program. However, we are not allowed to use those cameras over spring break because they have to stay in school. I received a message from Faye asking if we could use the cameras for more days because she has doubts that we are going to be able to finish filming in the time we planned. 

There’s another place we can check out cameras from called BECON TV but from what I’ve heard, a lot of their equipment have already been reserved for the break and it it might be too late to ask Jim Guarasci, the manager of the Short Cuts program , for equipment to check out. I also do not want to risk asking and looking unprofessional in front of him as he is someone I hold a lot of respect for, and hope to impress one day.

I’m hoping things turn out okay and we finish filming this week with the Canon DSLR as planned, but the backup plan is that we can finish filming with my own old personal camera, which isn’t as high quality but it will get the job done. Still nervous though.

Trip

As I mentioned earlier on this blog, this week I finally left for my trip to Long Beach California to compete in the Student Television Network (International) Convention. I went with my TV program and it was great being surrounded by media students and professionals from all around the country, as well as competing to prove the skills that we have been training for the past 6 months. 

I attended a workshop about transmedia storytelling, which expanded upon a topic we briefly mentioned while studying media contexts.

One of the competitions I competed in was Silent Film, and my team and I came up with a silly idea to reveal that the mysterious character was going a date with a monkey, as the plot twist for the ending. However, we needed a couple props to accomplish this that we didn't have, so under the time constraint, I rushed over to the nearest dollar tree to buy utensils, plates, and a bouquet of flowers; the dating essentials. We tried out best to transform the hotel room into a romantic setting, and this sort of effort reminded me heavily of what we had to do for our film opening (where we had to completely destroy and reorganize Faye's living room according to the plot of our opening and the nature of our main character). 

The props I bought at the Dollar Tree.

The living room transformed into a romantic date setting with DJ the Monkey.

I was pretty grateful for my experience in AICE Media this year coming into this competition because I felt more capable of being able to pull off creating what is essentially a one-minute short film in under 6 hours.

Edit: We placed 4th in the nation !!!!

Learning about the CCR

Since some of my classmates and I are leaving for a trip soon, T Stok decided to address the CCR so that we could start planning and thinking about what we want to create. The CCR is a super important part of the project as its 20/50 points of our score. 

As I was sitting in class I already started coming up with some ideas, and I'm planning on potentially asking some alumni for their opinions, especially since our teacher even showed their CCRs as a good example to follow. Since we have to answer four questions and make two different media products, I was hoping one could be a poem since I frequently write poetry, where I can incorporate images from production as I reflect upon my development and the process, while another idea is to pretend to read from a storybook and tell the reflection as a fairytale or fable. Both of these will allow me to specifically write a script for its success, which is something T Stok highly encourages (because if you don't the response will not be as effective as it could be.)