Creative Critical Reflection

 Here's the link to my CCR!

Final Opening

 Here's the link to the finished opening for my film, "Honey." Enjoy!

Final Thoughts

     As this project comes to a close, I can't help but get mixed feelings.

     I wonder how I'll do, what my peers will think, how I could've done better.

     I am proud of how much I've learned, and having pushed myself all the way to the end result, and the way it turned out in the end. And, of course, I am relieved that I finished.

     Some key moments I think about when looking back at this process are as follows:

My planning stage

    I spoke to my teacher a lot during this process, asking questions and taking recommendations of other films to study. As she predicted, my main struggle is usually slowing myself down once the ideas finally begin to flow. That was still a bit of a struggle in this project, given the fact that I ended up planning two plot twists in two minutes, but the big idea was one I really loved nonetheless, and made all the time and effort feel like good fun. I won't say I'll be less ambitious in the future, but I'll try not to get too sidetracked in my excitement to ensure that my messages are loud and clear to fresh eyes. Although I love movies that make me sit there trying to process what the heck is going on, I must be careful not to make my own like that without purpose.

My Filming Process

    In my posts reflecting on our previous music video project, I learned a lot about what it's like to really film something for the first time, and how tricky it can get. My number one takeaway was that in the future I needed to give myself extra extra time and come up with thorough plans as well as backup plans. I can happily say that I pulled through on that commitment with this project, and boy did I see results. Like I mentioned in my post about the second day of filming, my filming process ended up going super smoothly which I am so happy about. This is because I foresaw issues, planned to start early, spent time before filming figuring out logistics and working out my set-ups, and making sure I knew what to do if something went wrong. Something I want to improve in the future, however, is my knowledge of my filming software. I just got the app I used this year, and didn't know much about many of its camera settings, but I tried to learn what I could. During the editing process is when I noticed and understood things that I could have been setting on my camera all along. Knowing more about in-camera elements like white balance and picking the right shutter speed for a smooth shot will make fixing up my next project easier on both me and my computer.

My editing stage

    This is where I learned the most in this project. Not only did I learn the software and hardware set-ups that work best for me, but in the future I'll also have the skill to do many more things with ease. I now know how to color correct, color grade, motion track, apply 3D effects, use masking to reveal things or fit things into a shot the way I want to, and prerender more complicated shots so that I have the ability to do more with what I have. It only goes up from here as I practice and learn new skills in upcoming work.

All in all, this was a difficult experience, but one I'm grateful to have had the pleasure of going through.

The journey to the Drive

      I really wanted to challenge myself with this project and make something more advanced than I ever have. Naturally, as a result of this, my editing process is replete with new effects and techniques I’ve never tried before. This made me insanely nervous. 

     Not necessarily because I wasn't sure if I could pull it off, I had YouTube tutorials to guide me through what I didn't know, but more so because I wasn't sure if my *computer* could pull it off. 

     I’ve been using Hitfilm Express as my go-to editing software for a while now, and I like it a lot. It feels like a real professional editing software, at least from my amateur perspective, and the amount of features it has at no cost as well as the vast expanse of tutorials and support available for the software online make me confident that I could make anything I set my mind to with this software at hand, perhaps TOO confident, I feared. 

     In the past, I’ve really not done much other than paste clips together, add in background music, and maybe put in some text. Even then, I had always experienced a bit of lag throughout the editing process, so my apprehension was real when I thought about layering visual effects, color grading, and even placing multiple videos on top of each other for the first time ever. 

    And guess what? My computer did lag. Big time.

     BUT I was determined to do what it took to make my film the way I envisioned it. So, although frustrating, I learned a lot of new things about the editing process, like:

- Pre-rendering composite shots to reduce lag and make my export faster.

- Connecting an external drive to my computer and linking exports and pre-renders to this drive instead of my computer to give the software more storage space to work with

- How to adjust the settings on my software for optimal performance 

     In the end, it was still a little laggy and still a little slow, but I made it through and learned things that allowed me to take my editing to the next level.

Story board edit

      Last time we met, I detailed the filming process for the last part of my opening. Here, I'll walk you through the revised story board I came up with that day on the fly.

         Beginning with our same old shot 9, I kept the same format of a slow zooming out shot to reveal my sister. However, instead of showing her sitting outside of a hotel or large city scape, the camera movement reveals her location to be the metro.

     I then include shots of her walking up the steps and boarding the train. The final shot of the film is the train leaving the station. I'd like to have the train mask the title so that it is revealed as if it's behind the train while it's leaving, but I've never done that type of thing with my text and it might require a lot of time. 

     Like that.