MediaStudies 22/23

 

 

 The hardest part of this film, the animation... The only way I could do the animation was to insert drawings and do an, almost, frame-by-frame animation. I have experience in drawing, but not animation so it was laborious to complete.  Creating the bird was three frames of a bird flapping its wings, with it repeating and shifted around the screen to imitate flying. The time lapse is punishing. The pictures aren't overlapping correctly and since the camera is being hand held, the vines won't stay matched with our bodies. I decided to scrap the vines idea and show leaves falling down instead. They don't look the greatest, but it fits in with how the bird is loosely drawn.

This session had the most difficulties. Transitions, Audio and the title were worked on. When I edit for the content creator I work for, I don't deal with the transitions, since there are rarely any. It was confusing, it was new to me, plus I had only ever seen the film in straight cuts so far. When adding dissolves or fades, it looked strange, however it had to be used. There are most straight cuts, but for the beginning of the film and the title are dissolves, for a cleaner entrance. The time-lapse had gotten a fade in and out, it's showing a longer time passing, and the dissolve didn't have a nice look.  Audio had two parts, the instrumental and the speech excerpt by Jason Reynolds. The speech had to be trimmed down to the specific parts, there are two times were it's used. The instrumental is our main problem. We want to put the actual piano music that was playing during Reynolds' speech, the problem is when trying to extract his voice, the audio warped, forcing...

 During the second session, things went a worse than Session One.  The Rough Cuts were finished quickly, since there was a few left to pick and I began the Fine Cuts. This was incredibly difficult on a laptop, having to trim down clips to the specific frame, so I used my phone for mostly all of the trimming.  Another issue was the total time. The time was at 00:01:19, it was over the one minute mark. Our group decided to watch the whole film together and see where I could trim some content down. There were many instances and it went down to 00:00:58.  The next session is to start on Transitions and our Audio.

 For my first time using Rush and a computer to edit, it went swell. The clips had been added for the Raw Cut before the session had begun, meaning the Rough Cut was going to begin. I put the clips in order for where they will be located during the final film and decided on which clips to use for our film.  There was one instance where a clip had to be split, have another clip inserted in the split and then the remainder of the first clip be at the end. I got a feel of how editing on a laptop was like, quite frustrating. On mobile, it was easier to move clips, so I used my phone for a large portion of the time.  I had also discovered how to put clips in a separate line, other than the main film location. I left the shots we weren't going to use up there, to save in case a clip was misplaced or another looked better. Mainly to remove the issue of going back and needing to redownload clip. The reordering took most of the time and left about 3 shots where a clip needed to be...

Our second day for filming! I remembered to turn Auto-lock off, thankfully. Filming consisted of finishing shots that were ruined by people behind me and more close up shots of the chess board. My shots were related to looking for at the bird flying across the sky. We unfortunately couldn't get a shot of a bird flying in the sky, so we decided to animate it in along with the foliage growing around the characters during the time-lapse. Having multiple elements of the animation will allow the time-lapse animation to not look out of place and connect with the rest of the film.  We had finished shooting quite early so I could start editing. With the limited internet, I could only get everything downloaded into Rush. Plus we previewed some of our takes together, overall deciding that we were completely finished, nothing needed to be reshot. 

Even more problems,  My group had to see what the clips looked like and I needed to send them. I went to send the clips through Rush, however the way to share wasn't straight forward and confusing to use. I went to send the clips through OneDrive email. Once I had, my group members informed me that OneDrive email also wasn't working.  Nevertheless, I uploaded all the clips into it's own stream on OneDrive then sent the clips, which thankfully, worked. 

 A horrible issue happened, Since the clips weren't sending to the creative cloud to Rush, I needed a new way to send the shots our group had done that day, for reviewing in case we had to reshoot some scenes. I decided to upload all the clips into one Rush project, basically a Raw Cut for the first day, then I would share the link with my groupmates.  However, once I uploaded all the clips into Rush I noticed a problem I created, all the clips were vertical in portrait mode, but viewable in landscape. The issue was figuring out how to turn the clips to fit landscape on Rush. In Rush, there was a option to flip the clips only sideways or vertically, nothing to flip the clips in a 90 degree angle. I went though every clip, manually adjusting the clip 90 degrees. It didn't take too long, but I learned how to take off Auto-lock before the next time filming. 

 We just started our film! Once we got to our location for the film, we immediately started to film my scenes, since there were more. There were a few issues involving lighting. My face was away from the sun, so we needed to use artificial light so the camera could get a clearer shot of my face. The cinematographer used a white folder to reflect the sun onto my face. The next issue was the lighting reflecting in my glasses, however we fixed it by simply removing my glasses. An issue that occurred were the people in the background. After a while, the gardening class came out to tend to their crops, which was directly behind me, meaning my clips were postponed till the next time we shot. I had wondered if I could blur the background, so the people weren't as noticeable, however that would mean to reshoot the clips with a blur already on and having to incorporate that with the rest of the clips, so I decided to let it go. Plus cropping wouldn't work either, the people were directl...

 Hey, The location for out film is basked in sunlight, with a tree right overhead. During the filming days, it will be the morning and the sun will directly hit behind where my character is sitting. We couldn't find any other location where there is a prefect split where the Non-privileged is in the shadows, but me having my back towards the sun will at least give a dull look to my face. The other thing I decided to try is when in editing, I will add a tint of black to my shots, or when both characters are present, my half will be tinted only. This will involve research and asking for help on how to do it, since it wasn't covered in how to edit like this in Rush.  (With the tint)

What's up,  I got given the role for the Non-Privileged for our film! I'm not too excited to be in front of the camera, but I know I'll get a better design for my character. During editing, I'll know how I want the character to be seen from a viewer. However, I won't see the same thing from the Privileged character, I won't see them fully, I will only understand them from the storyboard. This will make it difficult when editing because the audience won't completely understand that character, I feel that in editing, I won't present the Privileged as they should be seen.  I have experience in editing, however I see the clips completely done, plus from the directors point of view. Since I will be in the film, it will be foreign to me, and probably make it difficult to edit. If I "watched" the film be made through the directors eyes, then I wouldn't have a bias towards my character. I understand my character better than I will ever the Privileg...

 We have completely decided on our name! Fortunate Wings Our first name was Clipped Wings, however we didn't like it enough for it to be our title. There was something missing, the Privileged side. We wanted to have both characters represented in the title. Fortunate for the Privileged, and the wings will represent the Non-privileged, since they are the one looking to a bird for advice.  take a pic of a bird tommorrow

Hey, This will be the last meeting my group has till filming. We had been doing the last of the paper work and I got the Sound Design work. Doing Sound regulations will be quite helpful in the long run. As the Editor, I'll be playing around to get the sound perfect, so having to go through will help once I begin editing. I got to have a feel and a better general idea on how the sound will go for our film.