Re-Filming Blog

Re-Filming Blog

   Today was the day we finished filming, and I mean re-filming by that. I just finished filming at around 11:37 pm. I am on the road on the truck with my brother and father. My brother and father both played key roles in this first half of the movie. The filming we did today covered the first half of the video, which was set at night. Bruno is getting robbed and the robbers escape the house. That is the basics of it. The robbers included my brother and Taylor's brother. They pretended to rob the house by putting Nerf guns into their bags. The robbers looked great and the filming is now finished.

   The filming of this first half of the video was not as complicated as filming the second half. It was a lot more organized and faster since we had to cut out some scenes from the storyboard like me peeking out of the window and such. Also the camera was not about to die like the other time. Now we were prepared to film properly and we did. Even Taylor's brother got a shot at helping to film. It took around 2 hours and 15 minutes to complete. My father was a key role in this film since he was the one driving the truck that was to be thought of hitting me. I tripped in front of the truck on the road. That was the climax of the first half of the movie and the ending of it as well. Overall this second part of the filming process was enjoyable and I am glad we are finished with it.

Re-Editing Blog

   Today was the day I was planning to finally finish the editing, what I mean by re-editing, and filming portion of the movie. However, Taylor said she could not film tonight. I told her that I do not want to finish the work at the last minute, however she still declined. She told me that we should film tomorrow. I agreed to this because it meant I had more times to do things tonight. I also wanted to include that I wanted to add a voice over to the scene where I am in bed. I felt that we should change the idea that Bruno did not know about his spirit beforehand so I asked her if we should make it that he knows about it. This would make sense since later on Bruno calls out his spirit, but how would he know how to do that if he didn't know about his spirit's existence? My idea fixed that little problem that may have caused confusion to the viewer. The voice over I wanted to include would talk about something that Bruno remembered, which was that his spirit was out last night and the car didn't hit him.

   I went into the bathroom and started recording my audio on my phone. I had to record different lines and in different ways. I started off small with a few words like, "Oh yea, I remember I pulled my spirit out yesterday". My final dialogue of the voice over I sent to Taylor by text and email was, "Oh yea my spirit was out last night, so the car didn't hit me, but my spirit phrased through it." She accepted and said before I sent it to her that she would edit it into the video. She also warned me that the footage we would record for the first half of the movie had to be shorter than the second half since we covered 1:30 with the length of the second half. I told her that the footage before proper editing was that long. She said, "even with all the cutting and such it was still 1:30". I told her to try making it any shorter. Tomorrow will be the day we finally finish the recording and maybe start the editing, and we will be prepared to do so since that is all we have left to do.

Editing Blog: Finding Missing Recordings

Editing Blog: Finding Missing Recordings

   In past blogs, I wrote about how some of our footage is inaccessible. Yesterday, I told Taylor by text to bring her personal camera to school so I can determine if I can take out the footage. Today, I asked her if she brought her camera, and she did. I then told her about the camera and its ports. She told me earlier that she used one of the cables used in the camera set given by the school to connect her camera to her computer. I told her that we should go get the camera set. I asked my teacher for it and she said she will give it to us. Before that, we went back to our seats and I tried importing the footage right off the SD card that was in the camera into the laptop. The files were there but they were said to be invalid for registry. I then thought that there must have been some sort of internal storage on the camera itself.
   Then, we went to go ask our teacher for the camera set. She gave us the cables and then we tried plugging them into the camera. The first one we tried was the AC DC cable. It fit well into the camera and into the computer. The files that were previously invalid for registry were still not working. Then, I tried opening them with VLC media player and they played fine. Now I started copying them onto my flash drive. Then I gave it to Taylor so she could copy it onto her SD card. She copied it on her desktop, then her SD card. The missing footage was now found.

Editing Blog: Mysteries and Elusive

   In the last editing blog, I talked about our editing problems. In order to edit, we need good footage and enough footage. However, by then, we did not have more than one minute of working footage and it was the second half of the total footage. This would have created confusion if watched without any background information or context. Over the weekend, I wish I could have filmed. Over the weekend, I had to go to a Model UN conference at Florida International University. The only day I had time to film was Sunday and that was after around two o'clock, when I arrived home from coming back from the Model UN conference.

   Now, there is no new footage that we can start editing on. Also, when I edited the footage we had for the Peer Review, I edited on Windows Movie Maker since there was not a lot of time left and Taylor did not actually edit. I told Taylor to edit however she probably thought editing meant to edit in class, and not at home. So I had to edit the footage really quickly to have something at least presentable. The edited footage will most likely not be used anymore since the proper title editing is on Pinnacle Studios, which are on the school laptops and computers. The mystery to our editing stage is when we will complete the filming stage. The filming stage is not yet complete for us and it is hard to get by. Filming took longer than expected, which was nearly four hours for just one minute of footage.

   Then, the editing stage is elusive. Whenever I have time to work on our project in class, I usually do other work for different classes. This makes me and my group not work directly on the video. However this is not proper a good editing stage. I feel we should redo the filming blog do the editing blog soon afterwards.

Peer Review Blog

On March 3, me and my group peer reviewed another group's movie. We also got our movie peer reviewed by another group as well, or rather person since her group was not here today. On the back of the peer review sheet, there were two questions involving my personal opinion of the film we were peer reviewing. One of them asked about what is one thing I really liked about the film. The other question asked about what is one suggestion I would make to the film. For the first question, I answered that I really liked the acting. I said in the same sentence that, "it was mostly believable". The acting in the film I peer reviewed was good since there was not much eye contact with the camera and out-of-place emotions. The child even acted well. One thing I really liked about the film was the acting.

The next question talked about one suggestion for the film. They were filming in the park, which can be noisy sometimes. There was sounds of children shouting and other small sounds that were not needed. My suggestion was to cut out the background noises. This could be done when they were editing. Another way to cut out the background noises was to get a microphone that focuses on recording your voice. During one of the scenes, you could faintly hear the main actor tapping on her phone with her fingernails. She was a few meters away and this was picked up by the microphone, which is not really that good. Making the audio cleaner and making it focus on the action is pretty important to get the viewers captivated. My suggestion for the film would be to cut out the background noises.

Editing Blog: Editing Problems Found

Editing Blog: Editing Problems Found

   This week I had so far two days to work on my editing part of the project. Since we only filmed half of our movie opening last week, we could only edit that much. We used two cameras to film our video last week, the one provided by the school and her own camera. We put the same SD card in both of them, which was owned by Taylor. When Monday came around, Taylor dumped the footage we had onto a school laptop with an SD card reader. That was the work we did for the editing stage on Monday. Two days later, on Wednesday, I attempted to retrieve a clip of me beating my brother from when I recorded. Taylor went to find it. She was also trying to edit on the editing software provided by the school on the laptops. I handed her my flash drive.

   After a few minutes of going on my phone, she told me she had a little problem. She could not find a few of the clips we recorded at her house on the files she had on her laptop. These clips were the ones she recorded on her own camera. She said she had no idea why or what had happened. Even so, on her laptop the rest of the clips could only be played through the editing software. I had figured that her camera had its own on board storage and saved the recordings by default there. She said she would check at home. I also had thought maybe her laptop does not allow her to watch the videos normally, so I tried watching it on my laptop. She copied the videos to my flash drive and the videos played normally. There were a few problems to start editing our film, but we are still working on them.

Filming Blog: Filming Half of the Movie Opening

Filming Blog: Filming Half of the Movie Opening

   Me and my group are now on the filming stage. In my other blog, two weeks ago me and my partner did not record. This was because she was busy over the weekend. Since then we arranged to have plans to film the next weekend. Now the next week after that, we agreed to film that weekend. Now that weekend has passed. We did film our movie, at least half of it. We decided to film only half of the film since it was day time and it was getting late on a Sunday night. When we were filming, we encountered some problems, but not too many that we had to change a lot of things. I went to Taylor's house yesterday to film half of the movie opening.

   I asked my brother Andreas if he would like to come and be an actor for the movie opening. I first wanted him to be a construction crew worker, but we did not find tank tops for him to wear that would not make him want to wear it. We then decided he was going to be the debt collector. When me and Andreas arrived at the house, he got the details and plans of the filming ready. We then started filming. However, the camera provided by our school died. We then waited for it to charge for a little bit. After a while, Taylor said we can use her camera, so we did. It had already passed nearly 4 hours by then. The filming at Taylor's house was finished rather longer than expected, but was completed.