Laura's AICE Media Studies Blog

Here is the link to the final cut: https://youtu.be/L7iHvFAq77c This week, we used peer reviews as guidelines to edit our film openings. After reading my peer reviews, I decided to make a few minor changes to make the film opening more fluid. First, I changed the audio. I decided to lower the audio of the original videos, extend the length of time it takes for the music to build up and fade out, and slightly lowered the volume of the music as well. By making these changes, I was able to center more of the focus on the film opening than on the background noise. Next, I chose to change the font and color of my title and subtitles. Originally, I had my title in black in "chalkboard" font and the subtitiles in white in Arial. The two fonts clashed and made for a distracting final scene, so I chose to make all of the typing black chalkboard. While these may seem to be minor changes, I feel as if these small differences were able to make my movie a much more cohesive piece.

Here is a link for the first cut of my film opening, titled The Trek:  https://youtu.be/7xf47DeiBnI I have posted the video on YouTube as “unlisted,” so the link must be followed in order to access the film opening. 

Finally! Week 2 of editing is complete! In this second week, I worked on some of the smaller details. I found some music to add to the film (in a very advanced method of listening to the first 20 seconds of every song in my iTunes library) and used this music as a guide to trim and adjust some of the clips. For example, I sped up some of the clips to 1.25x speed so that it wouldn't be as long, but still looked pretty natural. I also added some titles and headings to the end of the clip. However, there was one thing I had trouble with: changing the volume of the audio. I wanted to put in the music so that it started with a fade and ended with a soft fade out. However, I couldn't find the controls to do this. After some serious searching, I finally figured it out and was able to add this to my film. I also had difficulty saving my video to my flashdrive, but after a while I figured this out too. Here are some images from my second week of editing: Here's a link to my...

For the first part of editing, my biggest challenge was refamiliarizing myself with the software. As I had to edit from home (due to the scheduling conflicts with filming and last-minute genre change), I used iMovie instead of Premier Pro. Though I've only used iMovie once before, I found it to be pretty straightforward, and once I figured out what I wanted to do, I was really on a roll. In this first week, I imported all of the clips and put them together, so that I had a very basic version of the film opening. Here are some pictures of me editing:

This was my final week of filming. After facing the scheduling issue with friends that could help me out, I decided to ask my mom for some help. After explaining what the project was for, she was eager to assist me in any way possible, so I asked her to be my cameraman. We used my iPhone 6 for the camera and, after being unable to find a tripod in the garage, used a stepladder for stability. We shot about 20 different clips of similar scenes from different angles. However, we did face an issue with lighting. For one of the shots, I am seen pulling a backpack from a hook on the wall, but the wall is right next to my front door, which has panes of glass. As it was afternoon in the Sunshine State, the sun was bright and shone in from the door, so we had quite a bit of backlight making for a very shadowed corner. To fix this problem, I decided to use a lamp from my bedroom to get some light from the opposite direction. This managed to fix the problem. Another issue we faced was while bikin...

Since I had some difficult with the first genre (comedy), I have decided to film an opening in the drama genre instead. My first week of filming for this genre, I faced the same difficulties as I did last time. As I have chosen to work independently, I had to make sure that my film involved as few people as possible, as it was difficult to ask someone to join (especially during spring break.) While I initially tried to film some shots on my own, by balancing my phone on a book or trying to film with my iPad, I found that this was extremely difficult and hindered the quality of my film. As my friends and family were all busy during this first phase of filming, I chose to instead focus on preparing any props and finalizing my ideas. Some things I did to prepare include writing a letter (and using tea-bags to make the paper seem aged), gathering some books about traveling within Florida (all available in my dad's library), and researching about what people typically take on bike trips...

So it has been a few weeks since I started the planning and filming process for my film opening, but I came across a few issues along the way. When I first chose my genre (comedy), I thought more about what I enjoyed watching than I did about how I would make it happen. Though its easy to be funny and make jokes in everyday life, I underestimated the difficulty of filming in the comedy genre. More specifically, I have had a lot of trouble making my film opening "funny" while limited to two minutes. Though plenty can happen in the span of two minutes, it is difficult to establish a sense of humor without establishing the entire plot of the film. For this reason, I have decided to change the genre. While this does require me to restart the process and plan, storyboard, film, and edit an entirely different film, I believe that, in the long run, this change will help me make a higher-quality film opening that is more manageable for me to create. The genre that I have now chos...