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.

Filming Final Shots- Quick Thinking

     This one's about the day I was able to go downtown with my family and record my little sister's part.

    We went down to the city, where I could get a lot of buildings and lights within my shots, and as we were walking, we came across a little metro. Immediately, inspiration struck. Yes, yet another change. I collected my shots of the city as well as the final pieces starring my sister.

    The moment I saw the train and heard the automated announcements that came with it, I knew this would be the perfect fit for the film. This is because I had been struggling this whole time to attain an environment that could adhere well to both the genre of my film and its plot, but having the final sequence revolve around the main character boarding the train is the perfect puzzle piece of a solution. 

    As for genre, not only would the train obviously suggest an urban environment, but this specific station was dimly lit, not very occupied, and complete with flickering overhead lights (needless to say, we did not stay there very long). On top of that, this specific platform at this specific stop on the route had a greenish tinge to the lighting that screamed cyberpunk almost as audibly as I did after excitedly getting my last shot of a train pulling out.

    As for the story, my original plan was to have our main character in a busy cityscape, to better establish the setting and vibe of the film within the opening, but it didn't make much sense plot-wise to cut to my character in a seemingly random or unrecognizable place. I wanted viewers to be able to understand that she was leaving, but just having her walk out of frame in the middle of a city made that less likely to be understood. Instead, I thought I'd find somewhere where she could do her part in front of a hotel, since her father clearly tells her to go to a hotel earlier in the opening, and have her leave from there so there's a better sense of continuity. However, this was proving a difficult task as I didn't know of any hotels around me that I could take my sister to in a timely manner that were visually appealing enough and fit the urban vibe. This metro was a clear, in-your-face way to show that the character is setting out on her journey while keeping the aesthetic in tact.

    To make matters even better, the sounds in the metro station would make my opening's overall sound flow seamlessly with the music. I had always been a little worried about the cut off point in the song I am using, since it isn't at a very neat part of the music, but since I'll be using the train, I'll be able to fade out from the music while the ambiance of the station goes on, leaving only the announcement that the train is leaving, and completing the soundscape in a satisfying manner.

    Pretty great how that worked out so quickly.

What Even Is Color Grading

     Recently I've looked at many, many, many, many YouTube videos on the coloring process. 

    I feel like I have the color correction part of things down, but the grading? I'm still sorta winging it. At this point I have a much better understanding of things like color curves, histograms, and how the tools at my disposal work, but it's still tough to know exactly how to manipulate them to get the results I want.

    Below are a few screenshots from when I was messing around with different settings on the first clip. They don't look all that different but I was trying out different methods and tools to get to the same vibe.

    Through this process I also learned about an effect I can use called "glow." I knew that would definitely come in handy for my cityscapes later on. 

Shot Two?

     You may have noticed that shot two of my storyboard is blank. It's not exactly meant to be that way. What I wanted to do there was a slow zooming shot of the city in a bad state, I just wasn't sure how I'd do it or if it would make it into the final film.

    I could have found a location in real life to shoot, but I didn't know of any that would look dystopic enough,

    I could have made it in miniature like I had seen many other low budget cyberpunk films do throughout my research, but that would tale a lot of time out of my project timeline for a two second clip.

    Funnily enough, another solution came to me while I was at a virtual computer science fair this weekend. A friend who was also attending the event had told me that she was currently in a workshop about 3d modeling software, and I was bored in my own workshop, so I left to join her and thought:

"YOOOOOO. i could make a city with this"

    It was then that I opened my eyes to blender, which I had kind of heard of before, but I knew nothing of it other than the fact that it was something the real deal film kids used and it was probably a painful amount of work to operate. It turns out neither of those assumptions were wrong, BUT this YouTube video lays out a pretty quick and painless way for me to create a simple cityscape I can use for shot two, and I can probably add a bit more detail in parts and make multiple shots out of it (which might be nice in case I want to add a cutaway during any iffy moments in my dad's Grammy deserving performance).

    All I need to hope is that my computer can handle the software.

Technical Difficulties

     So a few days ago my personal computer ran out of battery. Okay, no big deal, until I went to plug it in.

    You see, I was well aware that my charger was on its last leg of life; it had been that way for a decent while, but it wasn't too bad, and those things are ridiculously expensive for me to buy on my own so I had been settling with the all too familiar it-only-works-at-a-certain-angle situation. 

    Finally, it had given out on me. I know it sounds like I should have been expecting this, but I was not. It hadn't even gotten to the point where I had to give it a few taps to get started yet, it was gone much too soon. I tried (for the second time) messing with the magnets on the inside and taping it back up, but still no light. Ok.

    

    After going through the stages of grief in record time, I ordered a new charger on Amazon.

    Anyway, all this to say that I couldn't work on any editing for the better part of the week. Truly tragic, but I'll try to catch up over the break.