Re-edit Blog: Why we couldn’t re-edit

After the peer review during class 2 weeks ago me and my partner decided to reshoot a couple of scenes in our movie. Our original plan was to reshoot those scenes the weekend of peer review day. Due to some inconveniences me and my partner weren’t able to reshoot those scenes and we had to postpone our reshoot to the week after. What we didn’t know was that the Covid-19 virus was going to have a massive outbreak in the United States that week. The outbreak forced schools to close and people to be stuck in their homes for a while. Because of the virus me and my partner weren’t able to reshoot the scenes making it impossible to re-edit most of our movie. I went over our movie and watched it a couple of times and tried to find any mistakes or things I could’ve done better when it came to the editing process. I couldn’t find nothing major but I was still able to fix some minor cuts to make them feel smoother. I also edited edited some scenes out of the movie to cut some time off of it since our movie went over the maximum time which was 2 minutes. Those were very insignificant changes and when we finally reshoot our scenes there will definitely be big editing changes being made. Our school is supposed to go back to normal on April 4th. Hopefully after that me and my partner can meet up and finish our movie once and for all. The situation we are living on right now is very scary. Luckily for us most of the assignments we have to do for this class are online and we are able to complete most of them with success. Currently my family and friends are safe and I hope we can make it through this without anyone getting infected. I really hope things get back to normal very soon we can get things back on track. Hopefully everyone will be safe and me and my partner can start working on our project again.

Reshoot blog: Why we couldn’t reshoot

 Last week me and my partner finished our movie and got feedback from it during the peer review in class. The person that reviewed our movie really liked it and pointed out some shooting mistakes we made. After reviewing the peer review sheet me and my partner decided to reshoot some scenes that needed fixing. We decided to film last weekend on March 8th. Everything was going well until I had a game scheduled on that day and my partner couldn’t film on the day before. We ended up deciding not film that day and postpone it to next week since we will both be free. The due date of our final project still far away so my group still has plenty of time to finish  everything. When we film next week, we will be reshooting 3 scenes that happened on the inside of the house. This is really good since we won’t depend on weather to finish our project. For the first scene we had some problems with the audio. When watching the scene we weren’t able to hear part of the scenes’ dialogue and that needs to be fixed as soon as possible. On the second scene we were able to see one of our friend’s foot when the letters fall on the ground. We weren’t able to crop his foot of the shot so we will have to reshoot that scene. That won’t be that hard of a fix since the scene is really short. The third and last scene that needs to be fixed is the scene where the main character is playing videogames. We tried to show that using a high angle. When we rewatched the scene in the movie the angle didn’t look too high so we will try to reshoot that scene and lift the camera more when we do it. If we have time we will also review some other scenes with more depth and see how we can improve on them if we can. Hopefully everything will go well this week and we will be able to film this weekend. I am really excited to finish our movie and see what the final product will turn out to be.

(Props used in the scene we are reshooting)

Peer review: watching another group’s film

One thing I really liked about their film was the storyline or the idea. I think that the movie was underdeveloped and hard to understand, but the thought process behind it was good. The film was about a girl being kidnapped from what I could tell. While this is a very generic thriller storyline, I think it could have been an interesting film. I have a few suggestions, but my biggest one would be the transitions between scenes. It was very obvious that there wasn’t any editing done for in between scenes. For example, you could see the actor walking back to the camera to end the clip. I think it looks unprofessional considering it’s not supposed to be a documentary type movie. Another suggestion I would make is making the kidnapping scene more realistic. In the film the guy just grabs the girl and puts her in the back of the car with no struggle and drives away. This obviously would not happen in reality. I think that to make it more realistic, she should try to run away or get tied up or get knocked out. Also, the scene where he locks her in the car and drives away is repeated. Another big issue was the lack of titles. There was not a single title so I didn’t know what the name of the movie was, who was in it, etc. In addition to all this the movie was one minute over the time it was supposed to be. There were quite a few issues with shots and angles as well. They only had about six of the fourteen we were supposed to have. I hope that this group will take my criticism constructively and adjust their film accordingly. I think that once they’re done it can be a great film.

Filming blog: Our issues with filming

When we were filming last weekend, we ran into a few issues. The first one began with our camera. We used a school camera to film the first few scenes, but the camera would not let us film more than a few seconds at a time and eventually didn't let us film at all. We had to switch to a different camera, so we moved the SD card to a camera that my friend had. However, for some reason the footage was not saved. We had to reshoot all of the clips we filmed, about 5 or 6, on the new camera. This ended up working out and we shot the first half of the film. Then the camera died, our second issue. We had to let it recharge for about an hour which wasted a lot of time. We also ate at this time in order to save whatever time we had. After the camera was almost fully recharged, we filmed whatever was left to film in the house. We then had to go to the airport to finish. The first issue here is that we had to pay for parking. It was around $10. This wasn't a big issue it was just more of an annoyance. We were at the airport for about 30 minutes. It was really busy so we had no way of clearing a path for us to film. This resulted in some people getting in the shot or walking in front of the camera, causing us to have to reshoot a few times. It was also really loud because of all the people. We had to talk really loudly, and basically yell over the noise. We also had to reshoot the talking scenes a few times in order to make sure the sound was perfect and that we could be heard in the video. Overall, these were the only issues we had.

(We made pizza while waiting for our camera to recharge)