My CCR

"It's ALIVE!!" Well, not really... but it sounds better than "It's a finalized video file!". I can't believe this is my last post, I have truly enjoyed this journey, I have learned so much by doing this project;  I also can't believe how many things went wrong while making this, Murphy's law I suppose! It's been quite the journey, there's been fun days and stressed days, but regardless, they've been great days.

GOOGLE DRIVE LINK: https://drive.google.com/file/d/17tBmWbYdUp620JRgRT_E1jKP4wSgKHVl/view?usp=sharing
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Message for the reader:

If you've read through my journey on this project, thank you! If I can leave you with any message it's a simple one: YOU are a storyteller and the stories you tell matter; stories change people, people change people, YOU harness the power to write history.

-Luis

My Film Opening

HERE IT IS! Finally, after weeks of work, I present my film opening to the world! Thinking back on the project, I would have loved to organize myself better so that these last few weeks we'rent so incredibly labour intensive. Regardless, I'm very proud of myself, proud of the technique I exhibited, and overall I'm proud of what I'm putting forward! ENJOY "Y7Y: 2017"!!

GOOGLE DRIVE LINK: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hDQQu-3MmMe-ovyxCGDDIRTs8UtGIPwy/view?usp=sharing

Editing My CCR

Hey there! Hi there! Ho there! It's 11:50pm! I am nowhere near editing and there's a good reason why. There is no time for me to make a post about how shooting my CCR went, instead, before I get into editing, here's a bullet-pointed summary:

• I set up my room
• I couldn't find the mic
• I found the mic
• The camera died after recording 2 videos
• I charged the camera
• I freaked out because it wasn't charging fast enough
• I took the battery before it was done charging
• My parents failed to tell me they had arranged a Latino gathering at my house
• LOUD music
• I DIY soundproofed my room
• I recorded it all
• I sat down to edit
• ALL the videos where blurry
• I had a small mental breakdown
• I re-recorded the scenes where I'm seen on my camera
• The mic quality from the old videos didn't match the new videos
• I re-recorded the off-screen dialogue to match the same quality
• The microphone broke before I finished 
• I found another mic but the quality didn't match
• Oh well!
• I sat down to edit

Well, there it is, this all happened... SO FUN!! This delayed the entire post-production of the CCR, but I struggled through it and now I'm editing! Here's the breakdown:

Segments

Like I mentioned in my scripting post, I'm separating the 4 set of questions into 5 segments: Overview/Genre, Representation, Distribution/Audience Engagement, Production, and Tech. I'm only "done" with Overview/Genre and I'm almost "done" with Representation ("Done" in quotation marks because I know they'll have to be revised). I'm giving every segment its own unique stylistic personality by changing music, passing, and the type of visuals in each one. Sure, there's some overlap, but they are differentiable! Part of that is because of the transition between each one!

Transitions

I love the transitions, they allow me to infuse my CCR with creativity by moving into each segment in a fun way! Whether it be a catchphrase or the use of a green screen ( I think I know how to do that), each transition is both fun for me to edit and entraining for the audience. I'll also to include some "Fun Fact" at the bottom of the phrase after most transitions as a way to point out easter eggs in my CCR. 

I'm in this one for the long run! I'm committed to making a high-quality CCR that is engaging and something I'm proud to have my name on.

Writing the script for my CCR

I've got this! Exactly as planned I'm currently halfway through writing the script to my CCR! I decided to make a post halfway through instead of when I'm done because I want the analysis  I present in this post (about what I've written so far) to help guide the rest of my reflection process.

My Vlogs VS My CCR

First of all, I'm so glad I decided to start vlogging my project a while ago! I've gotten used to explain some of my process in front of a camera and it's a great communication & storytelling medium! The biggest difference between my vlogs and my CCRT is the fact that my CCR is scripted, whereas I improvised my vlogs. 

Scripting My CCR

Scripting my CCR is the best possible decision because I'll be able to communicate my reflection effectively! I have determined I want it to last about 7:30 max because this will help me filter my thoughts, leaving only the necessary information; therefore, scripting also helps my CCR be more ---  It also saves A LOT of time!! When I recorded my vlogs it took upwards of 15 times to get ONE single scene right, having a script to follow will make my CCR a lot faster to records and to edit because I won't have to go through countless bloopers.

I want to make my CCR as entertaining and engaging as possible, scripting it allows me to work on developing that engagement/entertainment by trying different things on the script and seeing their flow on the overall picture. Scripting also allows me to develop my answers to the critical reflection questions, I can constantly revise my answers and find missing links between ideas or find new, more effective, ways to deliver them!

What I have so far...
Like I mentioned, I'm half-way through writing my script; I've answered 2 sets of the questions so far (How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues? AND How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?). I'm formatting my CCR is similar to my blog posts, in order to make it easier to digest the information (especially since both the audio & the visuals will be providing information) I'm splitting into 4 segments, one for each question. Having segments also opens up a world of fun transition possibilities that help the CCR be more engaging and entertaining! I'm feeling really good about the timing too, I would love to talk for 15-20 minutes about all the decisions and their reasoning, but I've made it my priority to only answer the questions, summarize the process, and reflect how it's helped me improve my skills. I estimate it'll probably be around 6:30!

That's A Wrap!

After making version #3 I emailed 5 people of the focus group with the new and -what I personally consider- the best version. The response was so good that I sent it to some of the other members of the focus group that I hadn't originally emailed and they agreed, this version was just right! At the request of one of the members, I sent it to her husband who works supervising the editing for TV production; he was very impressed! I am really proud of version 3 and very confident in it does its job right!

 All I did to finish it was add the opening credits! For the Actors, I simply put their names (including mine because I did the voice over which is voice acting); after looking at some movie opening credits non of them put the actor's name along with the character they play, just their name. For every other role, I specified the role in its credit; for example, "Cinematography: Luis Andres Lageyre". Since my dad and I share the same name, I included our middle name to help differentiate us in the credits. I manually made sure every credit was the same font size and was roughly in the same position so the transition from name to name would be seamless.

Screen capture of the credit writing process.

FUN FACT: In an interesting coincidence, all the names shown have either a "Luis" or an "Enrique" in them.

I like the way the 2011 film "The Help" introduced its title, I'm doing something similar since I already had included that last shot! Instead of simply superimposing a picture on top of my video, my title is much more subtle; it doesn't break the flow of the opening, it's embedded in it.

 Title from the award-winning movie 2011 "The Help"

An on-set photo of the title for my opening film.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but THAT'S A WRAP ON MY FILM OPENING!!! Now it's time for my CCR! Can't wait to have an update on that later tonight!

Focus Group

Like I mentioned in my last post, today I sent the opening to a "focus group" I recruited to help me better understand how an audience would receive the film opening. Here's an overview of what I did:

The Sample
My focus group sample consisted of 10 people, 5 teenagers (of whom only  2 have taken AICE media) and 5 adults ( all graduates, with experience, or currently working in the field of media/production of media). I reached out to everyone ahead of time yesterday and asked them if they would be willing to volunteer to be part of the focus group; after they agreed, they received this email:

Noticeable members of the group include a college professor at the University of Maryland and a graduate in production from the New York Film Academy.

The Procedure
I scheduled the email to send itself at 6:00am, all members of the focus group had until 2:45 EST to respond to the email with their answers to 3 questions, they were not able to see each other's response. I sent the original copy of the video, not the second version because I strongly believed -and still do- that the first is better than the second edit I made. 

The questions were:

1)What do you think the film is about?
2)What's going on during the film Opening?
3)Feel free to include any comments or suggestion, these are all pieces of critical feedback!

Analyzing The Feedback 
I read through every answer, some were very detailed, others too vague. All 10 members were able to correctly identify the topic of the opening, 9 were able to identify that the experiment would reopen (citing either or both the "2017" in the last shot or the voiceover foreshadowing); however, 8/10 members mentioned the audio as an aspect that could be improved. Having a better understanding of how people with no background about the syllabus (expect from 2) received the opening was eye-opening! I have to say, I'm very proud that the first version performed this well! Nonetheless, I knew I could do better! That's when I got working on version 3!



Editing Like There's No Tomorrow
Thankfully, I received most responses before 9:30am which was perfect timing because it was the beginning of my study hall! I edited non stop, I edited through very much needed bathroom breaks and through my lunch, I edited until it was probably a bit unhealthy to keep going. I found a track that was PERFECT! All along the static sound effect I was using wasn't helping me in the last, the one I found (on we video's free public domain library) was just right! That changed it all, I had finally found the happy middle! I noticed I had to rerecord some part of the script again for it to sound right, so that's exactly what I did. I locked myself in my business teacher's closet and rerecorded what I need. Here's the sample (same as the samples for version #1 and #2)!



I'm A True Media Nerd

It's official! After I finished recording the new voice over pieces, I was doing foley for the opening and closing beeps on the sony recorder inside of the closet of my teacher's class; I recorded the lst beep without the video on preview mode in the hopes of just matching it to the visuals later by moving it around the timeline and editing it... Then it happened, I played it back with the visuals and the foley matched PERFECTLY! I jumped inside the closet and triumphantly walked out with the computer at hand to show it to my business teacher. When I played it back again, I did a "yes hand gesture" and went in for a high five! My teacher didn't get why I was excited in the least but it was an awesome moment for me!

Editing Day #3

Well, you know what they say, third time's a charm! -At least I hope it is 😐-

Today was my third day editing the film opening and I may a final copy! I'll be sending the finished video to a focus group I assembled tomorrow at 6:00 am, all the group members have until 2:45 to email me their observations about the film (I'll discuss the process more later in the post). Today was a long day with many different parts, here's the breakdown of the editing process!

Oops, My Bad!
On my last editing post, I mentioned that my mom pointed out a problem with my audio which was preventing the diegetic sound that transitions into a voice over to be clearly heard. I wanted to get more opinions, not because I don't trust my mom's vast experience in the filed, but rather because I wanted to make sure it wasn't just her who felt the voice competed with the static in the voice over. I asked my friend Jake (who's portfolio blog is amazing! Check it out HERE!) to view the opening and give me feedback; I didn't tell him what my mom had pointed out so there weren't any demand characteristics. Jake agreed. I even asked one more person, whose opinion I highly value, to watch it and they gave me the same feedback; "the shots look great, but there's something about the audio that's not right."

I thought I had fixed my audio problem by creating the "dips" but it seems like I needed to revisit it. By discussing the feedback, I found the problem; I recorded the voice over on the sony recorder and later took a video of that recording which is what you could hear in the film opening. The audio sounded authentically old but the static was WAY too loud, which hindered the audience from hearing the dialogue (an essential part of the opening). When I explained the situation to my instructor, she recommended I changed the leveling; but that can't be done since they aren't separate tracks... I should have known better than to use a third generation of the audio!!

I had to sit down and re-record the ENTIRE audio directly into the editing platform (using a mic) so that I could manipulate the levels; sure, I could have left it as it was, but I'm committed to this project and when I commit, I commit my 110%. Since the static audio has a constant volume I had to create A LOT of  "dips" to get it to sound somewhat close to the original. The voice over is much clearer in the new version of the audio, but I'm just not convinced it's good enough, it sounds mediocre; my gut is telling me something isn't right. I plan on looking for a solution tomorrow as I haven't slept in days and I still need to get through writing this post while everything is still fresh on my mind.

Here is a short clip from both versions of the opening, try listening to hear the difference between the diagetic voice over.

Adding The New Scenes
When I recorded the filling cabinet scene I wasn't sure that I would use them in the opening because I was concerned about the quality of the production; however, after editing them together, I think it helped enhance the overall story just like in my storyboard! I added the new videos and decided to lower their brightness, increase their contrast, and increase their saturation to help disguise the backdrop. I was quite happy with the results! I edited the timing so that the shots would be quick, added the non-diegetic sound of a heartbeat, and left black frames between shots. When I first came up with the idea of adding a heartbeat I thought I would soon dismiss it, it turns out it was a great idea! The slowly increasing, low base, heartbeat builds up the tension into the experimenter's scene. I love how the scene turned out, have a look! PS: I recommend to wear headphones when listening because I'm finding some devices don't have enough base power like to hear the heartbeat. 

This scene is so fun to make because of one thing, there's a psychological reaction! When the audience hears the sound, it's a clue that the atmosphere is both very tense and potentially dangerous, this causes the viewer's own sympathetic nervous system to react by making them more alert (in a way warming up their "flight or fight" response). Knowing that the media I produce can have this type of effect has gotten me to question whether content creators are both aware of the power they have on the audience's emotions and whether they all use that influence responsibly.

I'M READY!

The first episode of Spongebob aired on May 1, 1999. The episode featured a scene of SpongeBob over enthusiastically saying "IM READY!" over and over again as he walked towards the Krusty Krab restaurant ... Today, I AM SpongeBob, and the finish line for this project is my Krusty Krab!

Screen grab of the SpongeBob episode

I'm finally ready to import the final clip to my timeline and FINISH THE OPENING! This is really exciting because I'm ahead of what I anticipated! I thought I'd finish editing on early Friday afternoon but since I'm done recording early, I'll just jump into editing tomorrow! I'll hopefully be finished by tomorrow night which leaves all of Friday to write the script for my CCR, get feedback from the focus group, and set everything up so that I can get recording early Saturday morning!

PS: Here are some comments on the last day of shooting!

I only had one scene to shoot (the file cabinet scene from my storyboard). I shot the scene at school, I asked my ex-business teacher if I could use her room after school to shoot and she agreed! My former business teacher, Mrs.Reid, had to leave at 3:00... School gets out at 4:45... So, I only had 10 minutes to set up my shooting space, 25 minutes to shoot it all, and 5 to clean up. I successfully put up a black background in 10 minutes! (Even though it kept falling because the tape wasn't strong enough). The most difficult thing in today's shoot was framing, I didn't have a set like in my garage, I had a backdrop, which made it difficult to get interesting shots by utilizing angles; instead, I'll make the shots more engaging in post-production.


Fun Fact: I didn't tell my business teacher exactly what I was going to do in her room and she was on a skype call when I recorded it, so picture this... I walked into her room, she can't address me directly because she's on a call but she acknowledges me with a wave of her hand off-screen, I suddenly start putting up black plastic curtains for no reason, pretty much hijack her computer car to serve as a filing cabinet, and start to shoot video and take pictures... She was SO confused!! I was able to explain what I was doing after she hung up so it didn't seem completely random, she's super excited to see the final cut as am I!

Editing Day #2

Today was my second day of editing! I made a lot of progress today, I am now only about 10 seconds away from finishing the opening! I added the rest of the audio tracks I needed, now my project has a total of 6 layers of visuals & audio (I haven't added the opening credits & title which will make it about 8 layers in total). I showed the draft to my mom, who worked in the media industry for many years, she pointed out that my audio wasn't clear and told me that was affecting the delivery of content necessary for the viewer to exercise the "rule of 2+2".

Like it can be seen in the video above, after reviewing the audio I decided to play around with audio levels to find the one that would allow the voice over to be heard through both the static sound and the background music. After you could distinguish my voice from the background, I decided to add quick decreases and increases in the audio level (which I call "dips"); these "dips" help emphasize what's being said and contribute to the tone of the opening by creating a dramatic and suspenseful delivery of the lines.

The first "dip" on the music track

Lastly, I want to make sure that an audience member with no background about the project can understand the film and grasp the opening's promise. I assembled a focus group of people with no knowledge of the AICE Media curriculum to watch and interpret the film,  once the opening is fully edited on early afternoon Friday, I will send them a link and read their reactions, questions, and comments. It might be too late to re-edit somethings at that point, but I'll have peace of mind if everything goes as I hope! Wish me luck!

Vlog #3

Here's my third vlog about shooting! In this vlog, I discuss my creative process when shooting, the planning stage, and offer some tips I think will help future AICE Media students on their portfolio project! I'm confident that this will be my last vlog posting, my priority is finishing my opening and CCR in time so that my teacher can grade them! I've never "vlogged" before, so it was a new experience from which I learned a lot (including that my life would have been easier if I scripted my vlogs 😅), I hope to use what I got from this experience when making my CCR! without further ado, here it is, enjoy!

Editing Day #1

What a great way to start my week off! Today was my first day of editing and for the first time in a long time, I feel as though I can pull this off on time!

I uploaded and checked all my videos on Thursday so all I had to do to start today was upload the re-shoot videos. I definitely think that the shots from the re-shoot fit perfectly with some of the original videos; some simply flow, which makes my life editing just a little bit easier.  I realized I didn't ask my dad to make a specific set of movements which I could simply record from different angles, I just said "look busy" which was certainly a mistake because I had to watch EVERY video over and over again to find the ones that had similar movements so that the scene didn't look choppy.

Like you can see in the video, I had to in many cases go frame-by-frame in order to achieve a flowing moment between shots (I also matched the sound coming from each video so that it's constant). Thankfully, WeVideo allows me to see every single frame, this means I can cut a shot halfway through a hand motion and switch to a shot that completes that motion (like in the video above). I also added the music, I decided to give the track from WeVideo a try because I like how it matches the very begging of my piece. Speaking of audio, here's a short break down of my audio so far:

Picture pointing out the audio tracks currently in my project (zoomed out) 

The picture above highlights all the audio tracks I currently have in my project, as I continue to edit my project over the next few days I will be adding more. Currently, I have the music (non-diegetic sound), the recording (diegetic sound and transition to voice-over), and paper sounds (diegetic).

I like how the video is coming together! One of the only complains I have about WeVideo is that when viewing the preview is could sometimes be jumpy, just to ensure that the video is coming out exactly as I want it, I processed the video and downloaded it to make sure both the editing and the quality are up to my standards. Here's what I have so far:

The clock is slowly ticking on this project! I plan to have the entire opening done on Friday; yes, it does leave a short time to record my CCR, but I plan on writing my script for the CCR on Thursday which should alleviate some of the pressure of filming on Saturday morning.