Reediting Blog

Last Sunday, my group and I met up to reshoot some scenes that our peer review group told us we should reshoot. Yesterday, I edited the new parts into the film and erased the parts that were kind of choppy. Editing the new parts into the film was getting a little bit confusing for me because I am not very familiar with the iMovie app. I had some trouble erasing the old parts of the film because I would make the mistake to delete more than I was supposed to, for example I had to take out a clip that was four seconds long but I don't know why my computer kept taking out a three extra seconds. The first time it happened I didn't even realise until I was done, I was rewatching the film after I thought I was done editing and I saw that there were three seconds of  black screen while there should've been a clip instead. Once I was done adding the new clips, I had to fix some of the titles that we had. Fixing titles was pretty easy because I just had to fix what I typed it wrong. I had to fix my name because when my group member wrote he misspelled it on accident. I also had to change the position of some of the titles because some of them where positioned on the actors covering their face. I thought that if I left it like that it wouldn't look very acceptable. I am very glad that my group and I have been working on the film a lot because I think that the more work, time, and effort we put into it, the better the final movie it is going to look.

Reshooting Blog

After doing the peer review assignment in class last week, my group and I decided that we needed to reshoot some scenes. The group that reviewed our original video told us the parts of the film that we should retake so that our video would be good to turn in. So my group decided that we should go out and film some of the scenes that the peer review group suggested. We all decided that the best day to film was Sunday because on both Friday and Saturday there was too much wind so it would have made the filming process a lot more complicated and also the dialogues would have been covered up by the wind. On Sunday Ryan picked both Camilo and I up from my house and we went to film the scenes at the park. Unfortunately as we were working it started raining very hard so we had to wait for the rain to stop and to kill time we went to eat. After a little we came back from the restaurant it finally stopped raining so we got back and quickly started working again because we didn't have much time before it got dark outside. The peer review assignment made our filming a lot easier because they told us the things we were missing in our video and also the things we did wrong so once we knew what we had to fix it was very easy to fix it. I think that now our video looks very good and it is ready to be submitted. I had a lot of fun and I learned plenty of new stuff working on this challenging film project with my group.

Peer Review Blog

I personally enjoyed the film very much. It was a horror movie and you could obviously see that it was. It was very suspenseful. Most of the scenes were scary and interesting. My favorite part of the movie was when the girl called 911. She called 911 and directly after the man came into her room. This scene was very suspenseful and scary. The group worked very well, considering they only had two people. One thing I would critique about the film is the story. The story is hard to follow at some points. For example, there is a scene where she unites herself. The next scene was her untying herself again. Along with that there are some title problems that are easy to fix. For example, at the end of the movie they had some titles missing. They had all the labels but some had no names assigned to them. Some of the cuts and scenes were a little choppy. The movie was still very good and well put together. I think this group was very successful in creating their horror movie. I think the group will take the critiques into consideration. They will probably go back and fix the titles and some of the cuts. Overall the film was very good.

Filming Blog: Filming the Kidnapping Scene

On Tuesday, February 25th, my group and started the filming process for our movie. After school we all went to eat at iHop and we got free pancakes since it was National Pancakes Day. We didn't just eat and hung out, we also talked a lot about the plan for the day for example what we were going to start recording from and all the props we needed to in order to make our film more realistic and more professional. After eating at iHop we drove to the park which was pretty close to the iHop. The weather was perfect yesterday, it was a very nice sunny day which helped us having an excellent lighting for our film. As soon as we got to the park we took and establishing shot that will probably be the first scene of the flashback. We started having a little bit of trouble when we started acting because at first we would always start laughing and messing around. I am not the director of our film but I am the leader of the group so I needed to get everyone to work on it and be serious. 

We finally started working seriously after we had some fun and we recorded most of it. We made a little campfire where we toasted the marshmallows and recorded the scene that we all hang out around the fire and talk. We had to retake this scene a couple of times because the fire kept turning off. I took care of it and took some branches and poured some more rubbing alcohol that we had just bought. After we were done recording this scene we started recording the kidnapping scene and it came up pretty good. We just needed to record it a few times to make sure everything was good and there weren't any mistakes. For example in the first kidnapping shot we took, everything seemed perfect but when we rewatched it you could hear some of us talking in the background. We finished basically most of it, we were just missing a scene, but we ran out of time because it got dark outside and the shots started looking bad so we just decided to call it a day, we will go back to finish it on Friday and we'll make sure to wear the same clothes and have the same things as last time. We had something we had to change from our original plan that we wrote down in the story board and that was the amount of people we brought to help us record and to be part of our film. We originally thought we were going to have around ten people coming but only six ended up coming which actually was better because it was easier to keep under control and it was also easier to stay focused.

Filming Blog: Challenges of Filming

Although I really thought my group and I were going to film this weekend, we didn't even have the opportunity to meet up. Our original plan was to film on Saturday morning and Sunday night. We had everything ready to film, we had the permission from the cemetery to film there Saturday morning and also Ryan's mom was going to let us use her car for the day. Unfortunately, we ended up not meeting up because it rained very hard all day and Ryan's mom wouldn't let her drive under that rain. Saturday morning we all face-timed and tried to come up with a solution, for example to film later that day if it stopped raining, but we couldn't because the cemetery would've been very busy for a big funeral they were hosting. We had to cancel the plans for Saturday, and tell the other people we asked to come to be a part of our film, to stay home because we weren't filming anymore. My group and I agreed that we were still going to meet up on Sunday to get the other part of the movie filmed.
Sunday we were supposed to meet around 19:00 and film the part of the movie where I get kidnapped while we are camping. This time we had to face some new problems that prevented us from filming again. Camilo was called up by his team to play a game at 17:00 so he would've came later but we needed him for basically the whole thing. Another problem we had to face was that some of the outside people coming to help us and to be a part of our movie ditched us last minute. We started looking for new people to help us out with the movie but almost no one could come. We only found one person that was available to come and stay for the whole thing. Our group made the decision that we weren't going to film on Sunday anymore because it was very difficult making a plan that actually worked and we also started to get annoyed by the fact that some people cancelled last minute. Camilo, Ryan, and I all agreed that since we didn't film two weekends in a row, we will film during this week and meet up during the weekend to edit everything.

Filming Blog: Beginning the Filming Process

Our group has been facing many challenges lately. We are having troubles with finding a date where we can all go out and film. All three of us play sports, so we have very busy schedules both during the week and over the weekend. Last weekend, although we had a four days weekend, we didn't find a day where we could all go to film. I had a tournament Saturday and Sunday, the other group member had a volleyball game on Friday and on Monday, Camilo and I had a birthday party for our friend. We decided that we will work on our film this weekend and get most of it done. We will be recording at the cemetery first thing in the morning so we can get good lighting and then later that night we will film in the woods so it can be more suspenseful.

Even though we haven't started filming yet, we still did work that we needed to do in order to start filming. I emailed the cemetery to ask for permission to film. We also needed to email Broward County because we needed permission to film in the second location, the woods. Luckily, they both answered very quickly and they were very kind and they gave us full availability any day of the week. The only limit we have is time, we can't go to the cemetery or the park before 8 a.m. and we have to leave before 10 p.m. I'm sure that by next week, we will be done with all the filming, so we will have plenty of time to work on editing.

Planning Blog: Storyboard

In the last two classes our group has been working on story boarding. Story boarding is one of the most fun things in the filming process. We all worked together and got our ideas down and drew them as good as we could. While we were story boarding, we thought about all the camera angles we were going to use, like for example we will use an aerial shot using Camilo's drone. Story boarding helped our group to organize the ideas we had in our minds and improve them while we were drawing them down. This will help us a lot when we will be filming because it will keep us on the right track as we will just be following the things we drew on the story board papers. Lastly I think that working on this part all together made us come together as a group and build more chemistry in between us, which is very important because it will help to keep a professional and a cooperative mood in the group.