Genre Research: Finalizing the Genre

The three genres that we chose to research were, epic, drama, and horror. In an epic movie it most likely will be outside or have to do with war. Fantasy also falls under an epic film, like Lord of the Rings. We also researched the drama genre, this one is probably the most commonly used genre for most movies. Finally, we studied the horror genre. In this genre you usually heavily rely on the lighting and the score of the film, without those it isn’t a horror movie. Out of those three we decided to choose the epic genre, as it perfectly fits our film. However, it still is a drama in some sorts.

Genre Research: Additional Genres

Our second genre is drama. In the drama genre there are some camera angles that are used a lot. One of these shots is the close-up, this can show the emotion in their face after something bad might happen. An example of a camera movement is a tracking shot, this will be used when two people are walking and talking together. Since the genre of drama is so wide range, so is its costumes, they can range from old raggedy clothing to futuristic solid colored clothing. Just like the clothing there is also a wide variety in the lighting department, as they can be fully fined outside or they could be completely filmed in on house. For actors it is a little different. For a drama movie they will usually cast a more compelling actor instead of just a comedian. For makeup; however, it will almost always be basic makeup so that you can’t see any face blemishes like a pimple or scratch. The same thing goes for editing, it is all dependent on the movie, it is most likely that they will use a flashback somewhere in the movie. Some examples of dramas are Moonlight and Dunkirk. The elements of the films that I like are the plot lines in many dramas you can see the growth and fall of a conflict, or you can see a really big twist. Some elements that I don’t like are the amount of movies that are drama movies, the lack of diversity (in genre) of the movies today.
Our third and final genre we selected horror. A common camera angle in a horror movie is the close-up and the extreme close-up. These are used to really display the absolute terror that the characters are in. In a horror movie it is also very common to use a tracking shot. It’s most used when the subject is running away from the beast or killer. Like in the drama genre there can be a very wide variety of costumes. Most of the time; however, the protagonists are usually in regular casual outfits. In a horror movie the lighting is one of the most important aspects of the entire movie. The little sliver of light shining on the face of the scared teen can represent the little chance they have of surviving. Most horror movie are almost always in the dark of the night. For props in a horror movie there tends to be two main running props. This would be the murder weapon and a mask covering the killer’s face. For editing there is usually one main edit, and that is the jump cut. These cuts are used very quickly to show you the different places that are being affected or the suspense building as it cuts between the subject and the door. The things I like about horror movies is the edge-of-the-seat feeling you get when watching. With that; however, comes the bad, which is the fact that these movies get overly gory, which gets annoying.

Genre Research: Epic

During our research we found that the majority of the the epic films fall under two categories. The first can fall under fantasy, such as Lord of the Rings. These movies spend a lot of their time outside in nature. The other category is war. Almost all war movies fall in the genre of epic. Some examples include  the brand new 1917 and the classic Apocalypse Now. These movies also spend a lot of their time in nature. The war movies also are historical movies.

Narrowing the Field

We have now narrowed the pitches to two. For our first pitch we have kept the documentary. It would start off with a random person we find on the street. We would get them to begin to tell us their life story. We would start it off with maybe the best story in his life. We would then have video of us finding him and getting to begin talking about his life story. Next we have decided to keep our second pitch, in which we have a man/boy sitting doing some sort of activity. Suddenly, the phone rings and he picks up and it is the army. It turns out he has been drafted to WWIII and he has to break the news to his parents. For a long time he has an inner struggle and is conflicted if he should even say. At the end he is sitting his parents down and begins talking to them. Finally, we have decided to eliminate our third idea to have a hit man mission. We would have a man roll in in a class I car, he would step out and get a grappling hook and rope. The man would throw it to the second story of a parking garage and he would leave it. He then goes and kills his target, put is caught in the action. He spends the time running away from a few agents. He jumps off the parking garage and uses the rope to catch him.
Pitch 1:
Like I said before the first pitch we narrowed down to was the real documentary. We believe that this pitch is outstanding, as it tests what really is going to grab your attention. Most people might do a horror or suspense movie, but we kind of wants to grab the viewer emotionally rather than scraing onto the edge of their seat. We are trying to do this by portray this person as not a random but somebody you can get to know. A lot of documentaries do the same thing at the end. They make you see the world in a different perspective in any way possible. This will be the same concept because it will demonstrate the overly used moral, “ Don’t judge a book by its cover.”
Pitch 2:
As previously stated, the second pitch we are considering is the one about the WWIII call. We feel that this will not be as ‘ out of the box’ as the first but it can still can be used in the same way. This clip will make you relate to him, you see him and pictures of his family. You will see the conflict stirring inside of him as he tries to figure out how to tell his parents.

After a lot of talking we have decided to go with the second pitch. We believe that the first pitch is very good, but what it has in originality it lacks in applicability. In reality we are not a large company that can persuade somebody into opening theirselves up to a few high schoolers. So for that reason we have chosen pitch 2, which still isn’t that bad of a plan B.

Starting Final Task

Hi, my name is Mario, I am 16 years old and I attend Fort Lauderdale High School. I was born in Brazil and lived there until 2016 when my dad who is a soccer player got a job offer to play here in the United States. Ever since I moved here I have made many friends and that is one of the main reasons my parents decided to stay after my dads career was over. In this final task I am working with one of my good friends Xavier. We have worked together previously in our music video and commercial. We had some trouble finding our group but it finally worked out. Our last two projects came out really good so I am pretty sure that this one will be great too. It will be harder to do a good job this time since we only have 2 people in our group but I believe that we are capable of completing this task with success. We are really excited about our new task. We already came up with our ideas and are ready to film as soon as we can. 

I have learned many things throughout this year taking AICE Media Studies. With the help of my teachers I learned many new filming techniques that I could put in practice when working on my projects. These techniques were not only used when doing projects for the class, they were also used on my everyday life when taking pictures for example. I learned how to edit, film, storyboard and many other things. This class helped me realize that I might want to do something movie related when I have to work or choose a college course about filming. One of the most useful things I’ve learned is editing. Editing is really important when it comes to a music video or a movie. A video that is well edited has a lot o potential to be great because it draws people’s attention. A movie can be really well filmed but mistakes will always happen and that’s when editing comes in. I use editing so much during my life and I’m glad u could learn how to improve it in this class.

Pitch is an idea where a film is encapsulated in 25 words or less. Usually with one sentence. My group and I came up with 3 pitches in total. They are all really good and we don’t know which we will use yet. The pitches are: 

1)  A WWIII draft call is made to a boy, he then has the inner struggle of telling his parents and he funnily he tells his parents.

2) A spy rolls in, he read a text, it cuts to him killing a target, he is then chased by several people and narrowly escapes.

3) We take a documentary on a random person, he tells us about his life and struggles. We play soft sad music behind it.

Editing Blog 3

We have now completed the film. I’m glad we were able to do it efficiently. We now move onto the editing process. As I have stated on previous blogs there a few points of interest in our video. These would all be different memories. There is a jump cut from when our main character grabs the book and the opening of the book. This will then play into the oversight of the memories. We will have him skim through the pictures, which is a POV shot. Then he finds one and zooms into it. This moves into the vital transition.

This is the zoom-fade. This is where the camera and the editing software with have to work in perfect unison. We will have the camera zoom into one of the pictures, this will be a picture at the beach. Then along with the zoom we will have sort of a minor light-out so that it appears that a picture is being taken. This is probably the hardest part of our entire video. As if this is messed up, then it will kill the flow of the video. Flow is one of our main objectives of all of our entire video. We are attempting to make this a professional as possible. This can be seen in our commercial, the result looked very professional. There are also a few other transitions that will need to be  perfect.

Most of these transition will be ditto to the first. They will contain a zoom in and a minor light-out. There are also; however, some similar yet different edits. This will be the zoom outs of these picture. This will be important as one picture will have to transition to another in the video. After the storyline is complete then the transition will come in. We will have the zoom out, but the picture will start off with the minor light out. Next, we will slowly reduce the light out as the camera zooms out. The final edit with have a jump cut to a wide angle of the husband sitting next to his now wife. Then finishing our editing for the video.

Filming Blog 3

On Sunday December 1st me and my group filmed the last part of our music video. First, we went to a friends house that is not in our group so we could help her film her video. She needed two more people for her video so me and Camilo helped her. The filming only took about 45 minutes to do. We finished everything and went to eat at a nearby restaurant. After eating we went straight to the park to film my part on the video. It didn’t take long since we had already filmed there the other parts of our music video. We had a small problem when one of our group members had an emergency and had to leave us. Thankfully we had filmed all his parts for the video. We collected all of our stuff and got into the car to film another scene of our music video. It was a really quick scene since it was just a video of us listening to some music in the car. We then cleaned everything and went to the beach where we would record our last scene.

At the beach we started filming a scene where we were playing soccer. It was a really fun scene to film because we all love to play soccer so we were having a lot of fun while doing our project. After that we had to wait until we filmed our last scene because it was sunny outside and our final scene is about friends on 4th of July using sparklers. Since it was sunny we had to wait until it was dark to film. While we waited we just had fun at the beach since we are all really close friends. We also discussed about the pictures we took on the first day of filming to see which we were using. It was a really hard decision because all of the pictures looked amazing. After we came with a decision, the sun started to go away so that was the perfect time to film our last scene. We made sure we were careful when messing with the sparklers since they are really dangerous. After we got done filming we decided to have dinner together and go over all the raw footage we had. After eating and going over the footage we decided to get started on the editing process using iMovie like our commercial. We finished part of the editing and I was assigned to finish the rest of it at home. After that we all went to our houses safely.

When I got home, I started the editing process. I made the proper cuts and added the song into the background of the video. It was really easy to make those additions because I got a lot of experience on iMovie because of our last project, the commercial. After I was done putting all the videos together I decided to take a break from editing. When I came back my phone was turned off and dead. My phone died and I lost most of the editing work done. When my phone turned on some of the  additions I did were saved so it was really easy and fast to do everything again. After I finished everything I made sure I saved everything correctly. It was really fun to work on this project with my friends. I believe that we did really well and besides the minor setbacks we had I believe the project was really successful. We did our best to put what we did on the paper into the video and I believe we did really well on that.