Creative Critical Reflection

    Hello everyone! This will be my final blog post I ever make and I just want to say thank you to all that have read and enjoyed my posts. It was a very interesting and fun experience for someone who just started to blog for a couple months. Thank you all again and before I leave, I wanted to create some small projects to answer these big questions.

Question 1. "How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?": Director's Commentary and screencast with voiceover

Question 2. "How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?": Q&A

Question 3. "How did your production skills develop throughout this project?": PowerPoint with voiceover

Question 4. "How did you integrate technologies - software, hardware and online - in this project?": Interview

Film Opening Brief

Group members: Nikolas Velez and Samuel Duque

Film Opening Title: The Impersonator

Production - Using Other Film Openings to Compare with Ours

     Hello everyone, welcome back to another post from yours truly. Today, I wanted to give some background info. on what gave me and my partner Samuel ideas on creating our film.

    When we first started creating our film, I thought to myself about looking at examples of other film openings to give the inspiration for ours. My first thought was to look on YouTube for any examples of film openings. Most of the videos seemed very off and kind of off budget; making it difficult to use them as a reference for our film opening. However, there was one that caught my attention; it was called DISILLUSIONED. In this film opening, the people who created it were very detailed by including fake blood in their scenes, on top of the first scene showcasing the title of the film with credits slowing popping up. They also had a flash in the mirror when the main character was in the bathroom brushing their teeth.

This would give me and my partner the best inspiration and motivation to use some of these similar elements in our film opening to give a similar effect on the audience. At first, it was kind of corny and goofy when we did it, but we got used to it after reviewing it multiple times. Overall, I think this was the best way to figure out how to make a film opening and I would encourage you all to look at it over on YouTube.

Production - Editing Progress

    Hey everyone, just wanna give another quick update on the music situation that I was talking about in the last blog post. 

    I was able to find another background music choice for the last scene in my film opening. This time, I wanted it to be a more suspenseful sound to make the scene more scarier to the audience. At first, I wanted the music to slowly build up at the beginning of the scene to later be cut immediately at the end. This however, would not be the case, due to the cutting of the sound being to quick and I wasn't able to make it a slower cut. So I ultimately gave up on the idea and just used a fade away effect so it could then roll to the final thing, which is the title of the film.

    I'm still in consideration of changing the music most likely last second since I don't know if it's allowed to be used for my final submission. All in all, I'm gonna stay optimistic and hope for the best on if I can use this for my film opening.

Production - Editing Progress

     Hey everyone, on here again for the usual quick 'yap' session. Today, I was able to finish the credits scene, specifically the title of the film, at the end of my film opening.

    This was fairly simple to do since I had already figured out on how to add effects to specific clips of the film, so I had no troubles there. Now, I also did just figured out on how to put music into my clips to make the scenes a bit more dramatic. The only thing I will say that was difficult about doing this, was figuring out what music was best to use in the first scene in particular. I didn't want the music to be too loud since it was supposed to be in a dream and the music could counteract with the purpose of the scene. In the end, I was able to find the perfect sound that could incapsulate the mood of the scene with it not being too loud nor quiet.

    I do want to point out that I might change it last second since I'm not entirely sure if this is okay to use for my film opening. I might ask for conformation when I return from spring break right before I submit the file of my film opening.

Production - Editing Progress

     Hello everyone, welcome back to another blog post. As usual, I'm here to give another quick update on what is going on with my editing on the film opening me and my partner have made.

    Great news! I'm made a lot more progress on the credits for the film opening and I was able to add effects to them. Originally, when I first put the text bubbles for the credits of the film, they were very stiff and didn't leave. This made me frustrated since I didn't know how to make it so they would fade away for the other credits to appear. I then decided to look up on YouTube for ways on how to add these effects; making the process much more easier and quicker.

    This part of the editing process was a bit challenging at first, but would later become quick and easy when I realize that I can look up guides on how to improve. Also, for using Premiere Pro for the first time and still learning and understanding it, I would say I did a pretty good job at implementing the elements of what I wanted into my film opening.

Production - Editing Progress

     Hello everyone, I'm back at it with another quick blog for updates on the film opening. As of now, I reached the final stage of my film opening production; which is the editing portion. Since the hardest part of the production was the actual filming, doing the editing would take much less time to do since I can do it in one to two days.

    For right now, I have done a good amount of progress with having the clips of the videos we took being in order and knowing the run-time of the film opening. This has helped me significantly with how much effects I can add or any other clips such as the credits.

    In this photo, I was trying to in capsulate the idea of being the in first person. So what I mean by this, is that there were many clips where the camera was held in front of the person to show the illusion of camera being on the main character. By improving the idea, I try to create a blinking effect on the Premiere Pro which did have some challenges that came with creating this. However, in the end, I managed to create a blinking effect that is a bit wonky at best.
Overall though, I believe this is a great learning curve and helps me understand how Premiere Pro works.