Question 4 of my CCR!

My script/answer for this question is a continuation of my last blog post where I answered the third question. While editing my CCRs, I'm planning on adding clips in from my editing process and logos of the softwares and online websites that I used, I'm going to add them on here so they're easy to access. 

Mix everything into the bowl and begin to pour it into the pan

Elke; So the question that I'm going to be answering now has to do with the types of technologies that i integrated into my project. Before answering, I'm going to let the cake bake and cool down and we'll be right back! See you soon

Put pan into the oven - time passes

Elke: Hey so were back and I've cut the top of the cake and we're ready to put frosting on.

Elke: For this project, the main thing that we used throughout this process, software wise, was Adobe Premiere Pro. I’ve used Premiere Pro due to the other projects that we’ve done in this course, so I felt the most comfortable using it, despite my hatred for it. I also used Canva a lot to make templates and the collages for our mood board. Isabella also uses Canva to make our production logo and she used Procreate to create the animation. We also used Pinterest to gather the photos that we used for our mood board. Isabella is also planning on using Da Vinci Resolve to add in the text since we had a hard time figuring it out on Premiere Pro. I’m also in between using Da Vinci or Premiere Pro to edit my CCR, but I’ll let you guys know. We also used Adobe Fonts to find our font!

Putting on crumb coat frosting on the cake

Elke: For our hardware, the main thing that we used was Isabella’s iPhone 15 to film. We had checked our teachers' small microphones but we didn’t end up using them. I’m also using them right now to film this and my other CCR! Very exciting stuff

Putting on layer of frosting

Elke: For online, the main one is blogger obviously. That’s how I was able to keep you guys updated every week. We also used the website Premium Beat to find our royalty free song! All of these resources that we used really helped our film become what it became, and I’m really proud of us!

Writing "Watch 18 Before 18" on the cake

That's it! I hope you guys had a fun time watching me make my cake while also answering my questions. Overall, I learned a lot throughout this project, and I'm so glad I had the opportunity to do this! Yay! 

I'm planning on filming my CCRs sometime this weekend, and spending next week editing. We're almost at the finish line!

Question 3 of my CCR!

 Hey guys! So today I cooked up my response for the third question of my CCR and it was definitely the most fun and personal in my opinion. 

For the 3rd and 4th question, I think that I'm going to do baking while I answer the questions. I'm in between baking a cake or cookies, but I think that I'm going to do the cake since I want to write "Watch 18 Before 18" on it. I'll show you guys an inspo picture right now, but here's my script! Keep in mind that some of the instructions aren't going to be true to the script, and I'm planning on baking the cake while talking, this is just the easiest way I can divide it up, enjoy!

Scene opens up, all of the ingredients are laid out on the table

Elke: Hey guys, it's Elke! Today I will be answering questions 3 and 4 of my CCR. To make this more exciting, I'm going to be baking a cake! I'm not really good at baking so lets hope I don't mess this up. 

Elke: For the sake of time, I'm going to be baking a cake from the box, but I'm going to be elevating the recipe with a few substitutes. 

Opens the cake box and pours the powder into a bowl

Elke: Okay so the first question that I'm going to answer for you guys today has to do with how my skills developed, the problems that I came across throughout the project, and what I learned. 

Puts the milk in the measuring cup and pours it into bowl

Elke: When I first walked into this class, I didn’t know much about film editing or just filmmaking in general. I had done some amateur editing when I was younger so I knew how to work iMovie but I had never dealt with something like Adobe Premiere Pro. The projects that we had throughout the year definitely helped me get more comfortable using Premiere Pro, especially for this project since I am the editor for the film. I had a really good experience throughout the year since I consistently worked with my friend Isabella, and she definitely made me more comfortable with this new stage in my life

Cracks the eggs into the bowl

Elke: When beginning to plan this project, my group, Mariana, Isabella and I, quickly and collectively decided that we wanted to do a coming of age film. For the longest time, we didn't know how we wanted to expand the film more than just us wanting to do the bucket list idea. One day, we sat down at a Panera to work on it, and it just came to us. I personally had a lot of fun with the planning aspect of it since we got to create 2 new characters from scratch, and I really loved that. We faced some complications since we all just have busy schedules. We have to deal with school work, and since it's my senior year and I'm involved in a club called Model UN, I had to leave for a week to go compete in Washington DC. Luckily, this didn't really affect the filming aspect since this was before we had started filming. When we were filming though, we faced so many scheduling issues with our actors, but luckily we persevered.

Puts butter into the microwave

Elke: I learned a whole lot throughout this process. The main thing I learned is how important it is to make sure you delegate!! You can’t do everything by yourself and that's okay if other people do stuff too. During this project, I have to admit that I felt like I was taking charge of a lot of stuff besides the actual directing of the movie, and the fact that I edited the whole thing didn't help. I know that if I did this project by myself I would be able to be in charge of the whole thing, but I also know that I would be 10 times more stressed. I'm really glad that I ended up working with Isabella and Mariana because they definitely helped keep me sane sometimes, and it was good to have someone that I could easily talk to about the project and the stress. I also learned that I have a huge love-hate relationship with editing. Sometimes I absolutely hate adobe premiere pro and there are so many buttons and it's all really confusing, but i also love the feeling when something turns out good or just looks good overall. I really loved this project. I had a great time, and this project was so much fun.

Takes the butter out of the microwave and mixes everything in

Mind you, its going to be 10x worse but the text is the idea!

 

Group Meeting #2!

 Hey guys! Today we had our second, and possibly last, group meeting!

We talked about various topics, such as our CCR, how our filming is going, what we're up to right now, and editing. 

I showed them our opening, and they said it was really cool and creative, that they liked it, and that they would watch it! That's great news; we love to hear it!

But I did come across some problems. The biggest one that's bothering me is my CCR and my ideas. Before we began our group meeting, my teacher was going over the CCR aspect of the project, and she called me out indirectly soooo bad. She said that she had overheard some kid who was talking about doing a Hot Ones interview, and she said that it wasn't necessarily creative, and that's what I was going to do... She also said that she saw a lot of people doing the Google one,

And that's exactly what I'm doing. I'm going to have to come up with a different idea for my second CCR and not my first since I already did it, and I'm too far gone... I really don't know what I'm going to d,o and the rest of my group had an idea for the first but didn't know what to do for the second. At least we're all in the same boat!

When talking about how our film was going, we're all pretty much on the same page. Almost all of our stuff is finished and in the editing process, and we all shared our collective hatred for editing, and I shared my hatred for Adobe Premiere Pro. We did learn that using Da Vinci is a lot easier than using Premiers Pro, so I will definitely keep that in mind when beginning to edit my CCR. 

I really like when we get to do group meetings because we get to learn outside points of view and we get more feedback on the work we’ve done. 

This is my wonderful group! 

Question 2 of my CCR!

 Hey guys! So, for my second question for my CCR, I'm going to keep the same template as question 1, which is "Answering the web's most asked questions." I plan on filming it sometime this week, so stay tuned! 

Since it's going to be the same format, I don't have to worry about making an elaborate script since I'll just be answering the question that's directly on the board! Yay!

"This is a really great question! I’m not worried that our film won't do well or attract audiences since the lucky thing about the genre of my film is that it has a timeless audience. For decades, there have been countless iconic coming-of-age films that have come out, such as The Breakfast Club in the 1980s and Lady Bird in the 2010s. These two movies came out almost 30 years apart from each other, and people still love and cherish them both. But something sort of unique about my film is that our main character, Jordyn, breaks the fourth wall a LOT. This leads the audiences to get a different lens to get to know her and her inner thoughts, which makes the film a lot more interesting. The riveting events that happen throughout our movie bring a lot of excitement and plot twists, which will lead our audience to not know what happens next. To distribute our film, my partners and I have talked about different ways, and this is what we are going to do. We want to release the movie in small independent movie theatres and at film festivals! I feel like it's important to share our film in film festivals near us, such as the Florida Film Festival and the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival. We also think that releasing our film on YouTube will make it a lot easier for many different types of audiences to access it, which is also really important."

Our sound editing process!

 Hey guys! SO, I finally finished sound editing! (Well for the most part, we still need to add some clips, but that's okay...)

Since I was the sole person in charge of editing the sound, I felt a lot of pressure, and I still do!! I had to do some reaalllly professional stuff, but it ended up working out perfectly. Let me walk you guys through the process!

So this was me before learning the wonderful clip that I found on Google. I was actually so upset because having to voice over and match the voice to the lips was something that we as a group really really wanted to avoid because it just adds a lot of extra work. While filming, we had some interruptions in the sound thanks to the Sound of Thunder, our school's band. And in the clip, you could hear them SO easily, and we were NOT having it. I was freaking out because I really did not want to have to ask Mariana and Isabel to send a voice over. So, I went to Google and looked up how to remove background noise on Adobe Premiere Pro, and I found this beautiful and helpful website. I'll link it down below so you guys can check it out! But I successfully figured out how to remove the background noises, thank GOD, and it really helped make our video soo much better since you can really hear Mariana and Isabel talking. Now that I know this, I definitely see myself using it in the future.  

After I got this figured out, I looked far and wide to find a "school" background noise, and it took me so long for absolutely no reason. But then I did find it, and it sounds really good. Yay! Today, I also added in a bell sound effect to transition the scenes to alert the audience that we are now in a school. It took me a while to make the sound how I wanted it to, such as making it higher or lower at the right spots. 

That's pretty much all of the sound editing that I accomplished since we are not yet done filming!! We still need to film the establishing shots of the school on Monday since Isabella and Mariana forgot to do it, and I wasn't at school. Mariana is going to be filming the montage shots tomorrow, so I really am hoping to finish the opening scene of the film! Once I am done adding all the shots in, I can add the background music. Isabella and I looked for different options that we could use. I'm just currently waiting on feedback from them on which song to use! This is really exciting stuff; we are almost at the end of the project! 

WONDERFUL website that I used, and it can help you too! Click me!

Our video editing process!

 HELLO! So, I began editing our film opening, and it went really well! When I first acquired the clips, I put them all together, and I did very subtle editing, just trying to make it look neat and proper

My group and I met up after school one day to work on how we wanted to edit it and add clips in, and it went well! We got everything pretty much done with the video; we just have to do the sound, but that's another story. 

Due to our dilemma with refilming, we really had to make sure that we liked the clips we ended up with. We also had to make sure that Mariana and Isabel stayed REALLY still so we'd be able to match cut while editing. I thought that this process would be a lot harder, but it honestly was a lot easier than I expected. Something that I learned throughout this process is how much I HATE Adobe Premiere Pro. It's just so confusing, but since I'm starting to use it a lot more, it's not that bad.

Something that we figured out whilst editing is the font that we wanted to use! The one that we chose fits in really well with our genre and theme, so I'm really glad that we found it! This is what it looks like. I feel like this font perfectly grabs the proper characteristics of a coming-of-age film.

A little roadblock that we did face, though, was how we wanted to make our title sequence. We were really conflicted since we didn't have much to work with, and we wanted the title card to pop up right after Jordyn covered the camera with her hand. We decided that working with the black screen would be too difficult and boring, so we decided that we were going to use the black screen as a transition to the school, and we would do this by using a sound bridge with the sound of a bell! Really exciting stuff. Within the establishing shots of the school, we would include the title card and the credits, which is really exciting!!

All of the visual editing Is done, we just need to add in the montage and the school shots which shouldn't be bad at all. I'm hoping to finally finish up in the next few days! Yay! So close to the finish line. 

Our montage for Jordyn and Amelia!

 Hey guys! Something really important and fun that we are planning on adding to our project is an opening montage of our main girls Jordyn and Amelia. We want to add this to to visually represent the longevity of their friendship. But, one little problem that were facing is that Mariana and Isabel don't have a lot of pictures, so we've just been telling them to take photos whenever they see each other!

So, yesterday, we met up to figure out our editing for sound and video, and we also talked about our ideas for our montage. We went through a lot of different ideas, and we finally came down to one that we are all content with! We are going to make Polaroid pictures of them! To facilitate the images, we're going to use a Canva template and just add the photos in. To film this, we are going to glue the pictures on a door, so we don't go back to Lauren's house, and record them and add a voiceover of Jordyn introducing the scene. Here are the pictures that we are going to do and the Polaroid aspect of it

And I'll show you the process of filming! Stay tuned.

Also! Today during school, Isabella, Mariana, and I scouted places that we wanted to include in our establishing shot of the school.  We went during class, which meant that the hallways and courtyards are empty, so Isabella is going to film the shots during her lunch tomorrow to make our school look more active! Here are some of the shots that we want to include!

I'm a huge fan of this one, personally

Beginning to work on my CCR! Yay!

 Hello!! We have finally reached the point in our project where we are beginning to work on our Creative Critical Reflection. I can't believe that we are getting so close to the end of out project, it felt like just yesterday we were getting the instructions to this project. Time really does fly when you're having fun!! 

Anyway, I was brainstorming my ideas on what I wanted to do for my CCR, and I have dwindled them down to the ideas I'm going to do. For the questions "How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?" and "How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?", there is a trend on YouTube where celebrities are answer the web's most searched questions through the news outlet Wired. 

For this, I'm going to have to create a cardboard and cut out the Google logo and the search bar. I think that the making of this board will be frankly easy. To accomplish the peeling of the paper to reveal the question, I am going to lightly glue on a strip of paper to mimic the same motion. Here's an example of it! Click me!

Here's my script for the first question!

    Elke: Hi I'm Elke Gomez and today I will be answering the web's most searched questions! I'm really excited to be here and I'm so honored I was asked to come on today. So lets just jump right in!"

    "So our film is a coming-of-age that is geared toward teenagers! Like every other coming-of-age movie, it shares the same characteristics, such as our main character going through some type of personal growth. Our main character, Jordyn, faces the emotions of losing a friend and realizing that friendship is more important than other superficial stuff. I personally relate a lot with Jordyn and her behaviours, and this aspect really led to better characterization since Mariana, Isabella, and I knew how to make her like a real teenage girl. This leads to more empathy towards her character since I'm sure that our audience will also be able to relate with Jordyn. One thing that we did really have issues with was trying to avoid the stereotypical portrayal of teenagers in media, because we didn't want her to seem annoying or "chronically online", and we definitely didn't want her to be using abbreviations in real life conversations, because in reality, that's just not something that teenagers do. It was really important for us to make sure that Jordyn and Amelia's characters were realistic, and I think we did a good job at that. When writing our script, we were really worried that the dialogue would be cringey, but I think that it turned out okay. We also made sure to tell our actors to feel free to change up the script a little bit to make it more realistic, which I think helped elevate our film.

Hello again! Future Elke here. I made the board! It wasn't as hard as I expected, thankfully. 

I cut up a piece of cardboard around the size that I wanted, and I glued on white sheets of construction paper. Then, I edited a Google search bar on Canva, and it looks really good! The biggest issue I had was printing out the right size of the papers, but it all worked out. 

I'm really happy with how it turned out!

The Countless Issues that we Face

 Hello guys. To successfully get a product that all three of us were proud of, we had to go through A LOT. Let me walk you through the absolute mess that this week was just trying to begin and finish filming. 

On Monday, Mariana texted us saying that she had gotten really sick and that she wouldn't be able to play Jordyn. Isabella and I were panicking. We were scrambling and asking our friends who could play Jordyn. We had only one day to find an actor since we were going to film on Tuesday. I asked one of my friends, Hayley, if she could play our main girl, and she said yes! Isabella said that she bore the most resemblance to the idea that we had of Jordyn.

Tuesday came around, and filming went great! Or so we thought... This was Hayley's first time acting, and she was really nervous being around a bunch of theatre kids, but she did a great job! We had finished filming after two hours of being at school, which was EXHAUSTING, but I digress, and we had felt really content! Despite Mariana's absence, she was able to gather around 20 people to play background characters, and we honestly wouldn't have been able to do the scene as well as we did without her help.

On Wednesday, Isabella and I got together during our free period to begin editing! Everything was going well until we realized one huge issue. There were MAJOR continuity issues. Due to the time constraints of our background actors, Isabella and I took the executive decision of filming the scenes with them first, and after they had left, we did the scenes with just Hayley and Isabel. HUGE mistake. In some scenes, there would be no people in the background, and in the following scene, there would be people!!!! 

Scene #2

Scene #3

I was LIVID. I was so mad that we would have to refilm most of the school scene. I felt so bad for Hayley, Isabel, and our background actors since they volunteered their time to participate in our film and we messed it up really badly. When telling Hayley and Isabel that we had to refilm, Hayley told us that she had something after school and that she wouldn't be able to participate. So we then realized that we would have to find another actor AND refilm the entire school scene. Luckily, Mariana was feeling a lot better so she took her role back as Jordyn. 

On Thursday, we ended up filming both of our scenes in one day. Thankfully, it went really well and we had no complications! We went back in and made sure that we had all of our background characters in the back to truly make it like a school environment!

All of these issues definitely made me realize that these things happen, and there's really nothing you can do to stop them. I'm really grateful that we caught that, and next time, we will make sure that we double-check everything and to even keep things that seem obvious in mind. I'm really glad that we had to refilm it because I like the newer version a lot more! I'm sad that Hayley wasn't able to continue her role as Jordyn, but Mariana also did a great job.

Our Filming Journey! Part 2

 Welcome back! So, as soon as we finished filming our scenes at school, we raced on over to Lauren's house to complete our LAST stage of filming! Woohoo!

We were welcomed with open arms and we jumped right into filming. To fully grasp the right vibe for Jordyn's room, we took down some of the decorations that Lauren had, such as some of her records, to fit Jordyn's personality more. For example, we took down her Travis Scott Utopia album to make it Tame Impala's album The Slow Rush since it made more sense. 

One of our main concerns of filming at around 5 o'clock was that the sun was gonna go down. Our scene took place in the morning, the lighting made sense since it was around golden hour. 

Me sitting on the floor. 

On our storyboard, we were going to film Jordyn sitting at her desk, but due to the location of Lauren's desk, it was a bit of a problem. We decided to change the angle completely and have me sitting on the FLOOR and record Mariana at a specific angle. We decided that the chair was too bulky, and we didnt like it from that angle. SO, we had me sit on Lauren's desk and record Mariana and Isabel sitting on the bed. This angle turned out so much better. It looks a lot more natural which perfectly plays into our coming of age genre. 

Filming in Lauren's room didnt take a long time at all since we only had to film one scene. Overall, our filming day on Thursday went really really well. I'm so glad that we finally finished filming, but now we have to go into the grueling process that editing is. Don't get me wrong, we faced so much challenges before finally getting what we wanted, but honestly, everything happens for a reason! And I'm really happy we had to refilm. 

This is the angle we had originally.

This is the angle we decided to do! SO much better.

Our Filming Journey! Part 1

Hey guys! So today technically was our first day of filming???

In reality, today was NOT our first day of filming... I'll go more in-depth in another blog post, but we truly began filming on Thursday. We had stayed after school to film all of the in-school scenes, and this is how it went!

Our very talented background actors!

This is the HUGE group of people that we had to work with, and to be honest, keeping them quiet was honestly the hardest part about this. They would be joking around and a little loud while we were filming, but luckily, Isabel was able to control them. Throughout this process, I pretty much took control since Isabella wasn't able to raise her voice due to also being sick. It was almost like trying to herd sheep! But besides this little aspect, I feel like they really helped the project come to life and seem more realistic. One shot that we filmed was an establishing shot of the school and the hallway, and we gave these kids the simple instruction to just act natural and walk up and down the hallway, and they did great! It might honestly be my favorite shot of what we've shot so far. Due to the time constraints that some of our actors had, we decided that it would be best to record the scenes with them first so that the people who would have to leave could leave, and then we would be able to record the scenes with just Mariana and Isabel. 

Focusing our shots on Mariana and Isabel went pretty smoothly! Having the storyboard handy helped so much and made the process go faster. One small issue that we had was that our girls had to learn the script right then and there, so they had some trouble with that. Nevertheless, they did a great job of memorizing the script, and they both absorbed the characters. We had asked some of our people to stay behind to just linger in the hallways for continuity's sake! Enjoy this silly video of Mariana forgetting her lines.

With our production, we are planning to have a lot of match cuts for editing, so that was a bit hard, but I'm sure that I'll be able to figure it out during the editing process! During filming, we had to make sure that we were all in the same spot so our match cuts would come out as seamlessly as possible. 

Mariana and Isabel being upset over the band

Due to the time and location that we were filming in, we faced a LOT of distractions. Since we were filming in a hallway near the band room, you can HEAR the band rehearsing in the back. It was honestly so funny. It was frustrating because we just wanted to get it done, but it wasnt too bad. If they do end up popping up in our video, we're just gonna have Mariana and Isabel record their lines and we just dub their voices. 

Filming our scene at school didn't take as long as we anticpated thankfully. Isabella and I work very well together. Today we mainly split the work and I was doing all of the cinematography while she was being the director! I find that we are definitely more efficent this way and were very good at communicating with each other and our actors.But straight after we finihsed, we drove to Lauren's house to film in her room! Stay tuned for the next blog post with more in depth commentary for the rest of our filming journey!