Critical Reflection Questions

Final Opening

Final Opening Touches

After hours of tedious editing and re-fixing scenes, our film opening is finally coming together to it’s finished product. My group and I have just completed inserting all our necessary music to give the video more personality. It was quite difficult to find the right soundtrack to put while the climax of our opening was occurring because we wanted to find something intense and sudden, but everything we found was either too calm or too similar to music that would be more reserved to an action genre film. It was also difficult to transition smoothly from each music piece. For our video, the music in the very beginning is nice and cheery, but as it progresses the music becomes more suspenseful. So,  it was harder to edit these very differing genres of music flow smoothly together. Besides that, all we have left to do is add in the titles and the project will be complete.

Editing Difficulties

It turns out that the second half of the film opening is a lot harder to edit than I expected. We happened to run into a bunch of additional problems. For example, on the camera we filmed the clips have good quality and are dim but bright enough so that the viewer is still able to see everything clearly. However when we transferred those clips into the editing software, somehow they managed to decrease in both quality and brightness. We tried multiple times to re-download the clips in hopes that the videos would fix themselves, but we couldn’t figure it out. So, I just started working around the issues instead by trying to manually increase the brightness through the editing program and by adding filters. One thing we managed to insert was a security camera overlay on one of the dark and blurry clips as a way to make the clip seem to be bad quality for intended reasons. (Because security cameras usually have terrible quality footage). It wasn’t the most ideal route we could have took for our film, but despite our mishaps we still made it look pretty nice.

Continuous Process of Editing

Because our filming is officially complete, all we have left to do is to finish up the tedious editing. We’ve gotten a little less than halfway done so while I do believe the process is going a bit too slow for my liking, at least some progress has been made. It’s just been harder to put this project together than the others because during our filming we added and changed a bunch of the scenes we originally had in our storyboard. So now since I don’t have an exact outline that follows the footage we have, it’s been a bit more challenging to reorganize the scenes that would best make the film opening flow. I’m still making changes as I go along, for example, I used to want to integrate some dialogue in the opening, but now I’m thinking that it would be best to leave the dialogue out.

Filming Day #2

During the group’s second meet up for filming, we managed to film the rest of the scenes that we had left. The second half required much more preparation than the first couple of scenes. For example, we had to buy ropes and chains as necessary props and to make our film more realistic, we used makeup to create fake bruises and marks to clearly indicate that the characters have been abused. The filming process itself went much smoother than our first day, but I will admit that we did have lots of trouble with our lighting. The scenes we wanted required a very low, almost dark lighting in a small room. Because the light in the room was too bright, we had to use our own artificial light (fortunately supplied by Rosana). However, apparently our own light wasn’t low enough because on our camera, the video was still quite bright. So what we had to do was have someone hold the light all the way against the door in order to block the majority of the illumination that was emitted. It was inconvenient, but we managed to make it work. All that’s left is the tedious editing process which will most surely take a long portion of time to get done.

Beginning Our Editing Process

After Rosana had brought in her computer, my group and I finally started the editing process. We got a good portion of it roughly done, however we did observe that some of our beginning shots, especially our establishing shots, were filmed in low video quality. Because our group is going back to film later in the week we could just easily head back to the train station to re-shoot those specific scenes, so it’s not that big of a set back. In the meantime, I just added some filters and lighting effects to enhance the quality. I’m still not fully statified with the layout of the scenes that I edited, so most likely I’m going to eventually change stuff around to make the video run more smoothly and efficiently.

Filming Day 1

During the weekend my group and I got together for our first day of filming. Everything went fairly smoothly and we were able to film about half of our scenes, which was intended to be our goal by the end of the day. We weren’t able to film the final half because one, it required us to be in a totally different location, and two we didn’t prepare our props for those specific scenes yet. Of course some things were changed around during the actual filming process. Our script was rewritten to make the dialogue between characters shorter, some scenes were added, and others were removed. For example, we originally planned to have a scene that focused on the kidnapper’s wallet but we ended up scrapping that and including a text message scene instead. Not to mention, there was some struggle with filming on the train because we had to account for the time the train would arrive at the station and the time the train took between each stop. The times between these would be 10 minutes at most so we had to film our shots at a rapid pace. Our next filming day is planned for next week, which will hopefully cover the rest of the scenes left.

Debates and Discussion

Not much progress was made towards the production of our film opening. However we did discuss some important topics that were in need of debate regarding this project. One in particular was about whether we should find a different person to fill in the role of the kidnapper instead of Rosana’s father so that we would be able to have someone that’s closer to our age. But in the end we decided to just keep everything the way it is, mainly because we don’t know many other potential male candidates that would be willing to participate in the film. We still also have yet to determine what the permanent name for this opening is going to be. Personally, I believe that “Caught by Surprise” would make a good title, but the other members have their own versions of what the ideal title could be as well. Again, lots of things are still a work in progress that we will eventually have to figure out.

Film Opening Progress #1

Unfortunately, scheduling for my group’s filming days got pushed back. Originally, we were going to film the first portion of scenes on the eighth of March, but because Rosana can’t make it on that day anymore, we decided to just postpone the first day for filming to the tenth instead. It is incredibly important that she is with us on the days we meet because not only is she our makeup artist, her dad is an actor for this opening as well. Luckily this still leaves plenty of time for us to complete our project by the due date. It’s especially handy that our storyboard is complete because now we at least have a solid outline for the scenes we have to film.