The final days!

 The Final Days

Time is ticking very fast and me and my group finally finished editing our film opening "The Landscaper" We are still not at the finish line yet as I still have to do my CCR and reflect upon my entire journey. Currently I am about to leave for another soccer tournament in Tampa and will be missing 2 days of school. I will be gone for the entire weekend from Thursday-Sunday. This obstacle will be a test for me to see if I can really balance my student/athlete lifestyle. My plan for this week is to type up and memorize my script for the CCR and I will be filming it at my teams hotel and maybe I will try to get some clips while I am at the soccer field just for the cool background. I am going to be very behind on my other classes as I wil be prioritizing this project and my performance at my tournament this weekend. 

 Group Stage

  8:55 A.M. My first game is today at 2pm in Tampa and I am just about ready to leave as I am waiting for my parents to get in the car. I will be bringing you guys along the journey with my soccer tournament and hopefully we will win today and start off strong in this tournament.                                                                                                

 2:00 P.M. gametime! We will be versing a team from New Jersey called "IronBound" hopefully my team will come out victorious. So our game ended up in a 3-2 Loss and we lost at the last second of the game. It sucks because we were winning 2-0 then in 2nd half my team started slowing down and the other team started picking it up. I personally played very well but this sport is a team sport, so it doesn't matter. I got cleated in the side of my face pretty bad and I was bleeding but I ended up playing the entire game and didn't let this stop me from trying to help my team win the game. This result doesn't define who my team is and hopefully tomorrow we will get the W. After tomorrows game I wil start working on my CCR and will edit it hopefully by Saturday/Sunday. I lowkey feel that I should mainly focus on this event but I did not plan out my time with this project well with my athletic life. Hopefully I won't make this mistake again but there's nothing I can do about it as it's best to just be as transparent as possible. 

 So its 9 P.M. and I just put a little bit of rubbing alcohol on the mark where the bandaid is. This pain felt excruciating for about 5 seconds but at least it got rid of any possible infections that could have arose from the hit. It's a little bit bruised underneath the bandaid as you can see but I will be working on the CCR production right now and go over some of my notes that I took in class to make sure I am answering in detail the 4 main questions.

Class Meeting about project!

 Class Meeting

     In class today, we did something very engaging and helpful for our project which was being able to get into groups and review/critique our peers projects so far. The people in my group had very well ideas as I got the chance to see Kirians final video as he already finished editing. His film opening "Back on Track" was very well edited and I really like how he edited the keyframes to match with the title as he was walking past and it gave off the affect where the title was forming as he walked past the screen. Overall, in this film opening I learned how important pacing and cuts is withing the 2-minute time period for this project. During the discussions, it was very interesting to learn about everyone's approach going into this project as we all had a very different storyline for our project. There were genres ranging from comedy all the way to drama and horror. This variety of genre conventions was very cool to learn about how they adapted to different locations to help them represent their chosen genre. 

     After this class meeting, me and my group got back to work on our editing as we are a little bit behind as we will probably finish editing hopefully by tomorrow and we will spend the rest of the time working on our CCR and make it the best it can be. Overall, I chose to blog about this class meeting because I feel it really opened my eyes and gave me a different perspective of my peers and how they are overcoming their challenges. One challenge that was told to me during the class meeting was that the person couldn't find any song that matched the vibe he was going for so he ended up learning the guitar with only 3 weeks of experience and produced a soft song to match the tone of his film opening. Learning from my peers is my favorite way of learning and I will use some of these lessons learned to help make my film opening more engaging. 

Foley!

 Foley Process!

For a more enhanced sounds of footsteps, I will be making the footsteps noises using foley so that it can sound louder then it would be in the actual clip. I like to use foley as it helps enhance the sound of things to make it seem more dramatic and realistic at times. My soccer tournament went very well as we won all of our games, and once I got home I went straight to work with the foley sounds such as the footsteps. 

  

With these sounds, I will be exporting them to audio files on Premiere Pro so that we can easily access it for editing usage. I also used my backpack for school and filled it up with some of my binders and tried to use this to replicate the sound of a man falling. Surprisignly it sounded pretty similar but once we try to match it up with the actual footage then we will decide whether to keep it or not. I personally did not think it would sound that close to a body falling on the ground but i started trying out random things and my room and seems like the backpack works best.

Another thing I will be looking for is free sound effects from online that can help make the film opening feel very haunting and terrifying with the use of stings. After searching the internet for quite some time, I came across epidemicsound.com which is an online app that allows you to download sound effects to help your film come to life. After playing around with this app I found some sound effects that may be worth taking a closer look at which was the Chainsaw sound and electric sound. I like the sound of the chainsaw as in our film opening we can see the "killer" using a chainsaw as him source of attacking the homeowners. With these sounds chosen I will be sending it over to Lenny in an audio file so that he can easily put them neatly in the editing software. 

Starting the Editing Process!

Editing Process!

 Now that we got all of our puzzle pieces together, we now need to start putting the puzzle together. This part of the project feels like the most intimidating part as this is where our idea really comes together into the full picture. Never would I have thought we would already start to edit this project, but here we are. For this film opening we are aiming to achieve clean cuts and we will be making sure none of the cuts seem choppy and hopefully it will all flow together. Within our editing process we will be striving for a well paced experience  that has a sense of tension which arises gradually to help hook the viewer into wanting to watch more of the film opening. Most importantly we want to make our film opening "The Landscaper" seem very engaging but also terrifying at the same time.

     We will be firstly laying out our clips on iMovie and once we get a feel for how the shots will flow into each other we will most likely switch over to adobe premiere pro so that we can have a much cleaner and more variety landscape for our editing process. Thanks to my blog posting from February 18th, I discussed about Premiere pro and I can use this information to help me use Adobe Premiere Pro with ease. With iMovie there isn't as much of options like there is on premiere pro but iMovie is great to create an editing rough draft for the project to see how the shots are flowing. Our overall flow of this project is very smooth but we need to make minor changes and we mainly are looking for the perfect sound to incorporate at different times into the film to really represent the horror sense. We will be including a good amount of stings and diagetic sounds coming mostly from foley as this allows us to control many confounding variables within this project such as wind sound messing up with the audio on the phone. We will be incorporating Foley sounds with footsteps, the "kill" scene. and we will also try to make 'stings' which are abrupt sounds suggesting the horror sense of this film opening.

Getting Ready for Spring Break!

 Spring break obstacle

With spring break starting, almost all of my group members will be going out of town including me. I will be going to Tampa as I have another soccer tournament to play there and hopefully my team will win. With this exciting project being due in around 2 weeks, me and my group filmed our horror film opening "The Landscaper" just before spring break and this was our main goal as we do not want to work much so we can enjoy this 10-day break. Within this 10-day break, we will be working on Foley and editing so that during our class time we can do revisions and make changes to this project. An obstacle that we had to face throughout our production process of "The Landscaper" was that Lenny's parents were our main character in this film and they are traveling all spring break to Amsterdam which is the main reason behind why we started filming fairly early. 

This did not really affect our project thankfully as we planned every shot beforehand thanks to the storyboard and our scene-by-scene rough draft paper which was made by Lenny with a step by step of every shot in the film opening. This paper was the secret sauce that helped us stay locked in with this project as we had everything written down and with the help of the storyboard, we knew which type of camera shot/angle to use within the chosen frame. The storyboard was the backbone of this project and the main reason why we chose to storyboard our film opening was to have a direct step by step sheet in making this idea come to life. Although in our film we chose to incorporate different shots from the storyboard we pretty much stayed consistent throughout the entire film process which is very nice as we pretty much went with the flow. 

    

What I really enjoyed most throughout the entire filming process was once we got our first shot. I feel like once we get the perfect first shot the rest of the shots just seem to come together like a dominoes effect which is really intriguing to experience as we never ran out of ideas, and we filmed every scene 2-3 times to have a wider variety of options for our editing process. The shot that I really enjoyed the most in this entire filming process was the low angle two shot of the "killer" and "homeowner's" tense interaction. This shot really helped tie the entire piece together as we now get the hint of what is about to happen. Overall, I chose to blog about this as throughout spring break we will be spending much needed quality time with our families and will be taking a break from this very stressful school year. Hopefully our editing and foley will be as fun and exciting as our filming process. We are almost there!

Shopping for Prop design!

 Shopping for our Prop Design

Today we went to look and find prop designs for our horror film opening. Today was very exciting as we are now ready to start filming on Friday! Finding prop designs are very important for the overall project as it helps make our project come to life and helps at depth to our film opening. We went to party city in hopes to find everything that we needed for this project such as the fake blood and some costumes, apparently they didn't have any left because its not Halloween. Our trip to party city was pretty useless as it didn't have anything that we were looking for since it sells things seasonally which none of us knew. However, this fail of trip helped us learn that party city isn't just a Halloween store as most of us only really ever go to Party City on Halloween. 

 We looked through every single isle at party city but had no luck. We were also looking at things for lighting mise-en-scene elements but decided that it was best that we go to Walmart as we needed to buy a yellow vest as part of our 'killers' costume design for our film opening. Once we went to Walmart, we had no idea if they even sold the yellow vest, and we were searching for isle by isle to find it. All in all, Party City was an epic failure, but we did not let that stop us from finding our main necessities for our film opening "The Landscaper." 

 After about 45 minutes of searching for the yellow vest, my group member Lenny found it near the gardening section at Walmart. This was the last place we checked before we were about to give up on our search and we were just going to go back home and accept defeat. This yellow vest was very important as we now have a clear costume design for our character in our opening film. This will help the viewer differentiate between the normal person and the killer in our opening film "The Landscaper". We chose "The Landscaper as our title as our opening film is based upon a crazy stalker landscaper who is still doing work in a person's backyard at night which is very unusual, and he ends up taking the people's lives... or does he? We must watch in order to find out. Overall, I chose to blog about our experience shopping for our prop designs as it shows a closer look at the journey for completing this horror film opening. This trip also gave us the opportunity to bond as a group and talk more about our overall film opening and how we will be executing it.

Storyboard is complete!

Storyboard

After much planning and drafts of our opening film, I finally created the storyboard. The main idea of a storyboard is to create an outline and have a clear direction of what will be going on in the film and the type of shots that will be used in each scene. This step towards creating our production is huge as we can now begin filming with a clear idea of what we would like to capture within our horror opening film. Without further a due, here is the storyboard. 

   This is our completed storyboard. After many weeks of rough drafting and failing, we finally came up with a strong outline of what our opening film will look like. This is very exciting as we can now get to start filming after weeks of tedious researching. My first time storyboarding I was very lost but with the lessons we learned in class and the many projects that were given I learned to storyboard very quick and got very comfortable making them. Im not very good at drawing but as long as we can see the different shots and angles then we will be good for the production process. I chose to show my storyboard as this will be fairly close to how our opening film will look like with maybe a couple of changes. I am very excited to start the filming process! 

Foley Research

 Foley Research

What is foley and how can my group implement foley sounds into our horror film opening? Foley sounds are used to enhance the auditory experience of the movie. With foley sounds we can create sounds using different objects to enhance the sound of an object. For example making the sound of rubber being stretched can be made by rubbing your fingers down a wall to create the stretch of rubber sound. In my audio only project for aice media, I used this technique to make the audience believe that someone was entering the boxing ring through the rubber on the side. This foley sound worked perfectly in my project and I feel that foley sounds are a big part of creating a film. 

 Those who had worked at Universal Studios had called it “Foley” because of the man, Jack Foley, who had run that department for Universal for over 45 years. Foley is only a part of the sound effects component of motion picture sound. The other elements are background ambiances such as wind, city traffic, birds, etc., and “hard effects,” which include gunshots, car engines, and doors. Foley is generally broken down into two categories. These two categories are footsteps and props.

For fighting scenes, the auditory noise is used as an illusion to give the audience a sense of actual fighting. The sound of punches can be made with various objects to create the illusion that the people in the shot are actually fighting. In my opening film, we will be incorporating foley sounds to enhance the realness of the scene and make it seem like the sounds are actually coming from the camera shot. I chose to research foley as this is going to be a major part of our production and without the use of foley then the sounds being created from the shot be enhanced and will sound very. This research will benefit my entire production process as we know how to use foley sounds and most importantly the history behind it.  

Our Schedule!

Our Schedule!

Starting this week my group will be following this schedule made by my group member Lucas. This schedule will allow us to stay on track with our production process and will give us enough time for our CCR production. For the next 4 weeks, the schedule is as follows:

Week 1:

Monday: Pre-production meeting

Tuesday: Location Scouting/work on script

Wednesday: Finalize script and storyboard

Thursday: Casting and Rehearsals

Friday: Equipment setup and testing

Week 2:

Monday: Filming

Tuesday: Filming

Wednesday: Filming

Thursday: Filming

Friday: Post production meeting

Week 3:

Monday: Editing and sound design

Tuesday: Editing and sound design

Wednesday: Color grading and visual effects

Thursday: Audio mixing and mastering

Friday: Final review and export

Week 4:

All week: CCR production

With this hectic schedule my group will be able to finalize the film opening in a timely manner and with this we can have a clear view of our entire production process. We chose this as our schedule since the first couple of weeks were just mainly research blog postings and we did those on our own time but with the film opening my group will be very organized and will work on everything in a chronological fashion.

FILMING DAY!

 FILMING DAY!

After weeks of planning and researching for this opening film, we are finally ready to start filming! This is a huge steppingstone for my group because we are now shifting our focus on editing and producing the opening film along with producing our CCR. I never thought this moment would come so fast as this entire journey feels like it has been going at the speed of light. So today we met up at my group member Lenny's house as this was where we were going to film the horror film opening "The Landscaper." 

Throughout the filming process I took charge of taking all of the behind-the-scenes photos for the blog and Lenny were the cameraman throughout the process. Dave was the "killer" acter in the film opening, Lucas was directing us and telling us the type of shots and angles we need for most of the scenes, and I was taking all of the behind the scene photos throughout this entire film process in order to have a detailed blog about our entire filming process, I also was making sure the lighting was good in each shot and made some changes throughout the film opening. 

     In this shot of the confrontation between the homeowner and the "Killer" we chose to incorporate an over the shoulder shot as this would best represent the encounter and the dialogue being said between the two. This very tense shot was filmed with a handheld camera movement to show the tense and nervous interaction of the homeowner. This scene is moments before the homeowner is represented to be passed away. The killer in this scene is shown to be doing the gardening work very late at night and for the people that live here in Weston, no one does garden work past 5pm especially the ones hired by the city which is what Dave is being represented as. Overall, I feel that this shot was a very impactful moment for our filming process as we had the main building piece for the rising action in "The Landscaper."

This low-angle two shot of the innocent homeowner and the "killer", we see that Dave has a chainsaw in his hand which represents what will be used in the kill scene. To clear things up the chainsaw was off throughout the entire filming process to ensure safety amongst the participants in the film. In this shot we can see how Dave is shown to be much bigger than the homeowner through this low angle and this represent how powerful he is in this moment. This shot was very uncomfortable for Lenny to film as he is lying down on the rocky surface just to get this shot and we had to redo this approximately 3 times to make sure that the acting was done perfectly, and the shot was filmed well. this Overall, this shot is key to the next piece in our film opening as this is the cherry on top for the kill scene to be represented. 

     Here it is this moment was capturing moments before the kill scene and this encounter happened as the homeowner turned around to call 911 franticly and before he had time to press call the killer grabs his left shoulder to stop him from doing so. This shot was filmed with a low angle to once again show the power and strength that Dave has over the homeowner. This was just 1 of the 2 kill scenes that was represented throughout this film as the mother was also seen to be killed but later on after the 2 minutes is up we can tell she survives to tell her story and later on capture the killer with the clues being left inside the house. Overall, this scene was the most crucial part in our film opening as we remade this scene 5 times to make sure it was close to perfect with the angle and camera movements being spot on.

CCR notes/Class discussion

CCR notes/Class discussion

In the last class, we talked about the do's and don'ts of our creative critical reflection for my overall production process. The purpose of the CCR is to reflect on production, respond to questions, and most importantly
express my personality. My first time hearing about the creative critical reflection was pretty intimidating as the idea of writing a script about my entire project in under 10 minutes sounds very hard to achieve. With the CCR we went over 4 main questions which were:

1: How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues? In class we went over how to approach these types of questions and we learned how to answer this question with a cleaner format. Firstly, we should discuss the genre, next discuss which genre you chose to challenge or why you chose not to challenge genre conventions. Lastly, we should end with a discussion of representation, and we should remember that representation refers to the choices made in how individuals, groups, events and issues are illustrated within a production. 

     

This class talking about the CCR really gave me more confidence towards the direction that im headed with this overall project. Currently I am not focused at all on the CCR as I am not even close to finishing my film opening. Once the time comes then I now know I will be very ready for the CCR. The main takeaways I got out of the CCR lesson was that we should create a script, present clearly, Incorporate research (APA/MLA) format, and we should have fun fun with the CCR and be creative with it. Another thing I learned was to not just have a talking head the whole time as that makes it boring and it does not include 2 media products that we should include such as Presentation w/ voice over, Director commentary, talk show "Host" interviews director, enhanced podcast. My decision in writing about the CCR so early on is to have a clear idea of my whole journey and its always best to anticipate what's to come so once it's time for the CCR I will be very confident in my production. 

Subgenre Change

Changing our subgenre!

As we quickly approach the filming process of the film opening, my group and I have decided to make a change to our subgenre from Paranormal horror to slasher horror. The reason we will be doing this is based on our location change. The paranormal subgenre would have fit perfectly in the abandoned building that is just recently being taken down. With this location it would have allowed us to have a variety of options for shots and angles and different mise-en-scene lighting/background elements to make the paranormal subgenre representable within our film opening. With this change in location we feel that for our film opening its best to take the slasher subgenre route as this would make our filming seem more realistic. The paranormal subgenre mainly focuses on the monsters we can’t touch such as upernatural entities like ghosts, spirits and demons. Paranormal films often feature haunted houses, possession, exorcism, or occult worship.

                                                              Slasher Mood Board:

Paranormal Mood Board:

 The slasher subgenre usually revolves around a psychopath who stalks people and is depicted as a murderer. In our film opening we obviously won't be including any sort of kill scene or bloody scenes but we will make our film opening representative of these slasher elements. We will be doing this with our editing skills and camera shots and angles. The music element in this subgenre is also very important to include as this sets the tone for the viewer on what they are getting into and adds a key sense of horror to the film. The term 'slasher' refers to the way in which the killer slashes at their victims usually with a bladed weapon. The film usually follows one of two-story patterns: 

• Teenagers or young adults who are stalked at summer camp, school, or somewhere else isolated by someone with a motive of revenge.
• In some cases, a psychopathic killer simply stalks and murders people at random.

My groups overall decision in writing about the two subgenres is to show how our approach to the slasher subgenre will be represented better then paranormal with our change in filming location. Without further a due let's keep continuing on with this journey!

First Major Production Change

 Change of location for our horror film opening!

     Our film opening was going to take place at an abandoned building near Top Golf in Miami Gardens. This building has been abandoned for around 20+ years and to our surprise it is currently being demolished as it is now owned by the Haimov Family. Me and my group members first realized this place was getting demolished when we saw and Instagram post showing the building getting taken down. At first, I honestly didn't believe them and thought they were just joking.

when we first saw this post, we couldn't believe it but once I started looking deeper into this, I realized that this was actually happening. At first, I thought that our project was going to be ruined since our location was being taken down but after I realized this story can turn into amazing blog and I ended up just laughing it off since like the odds of this happening right when we were about to start filming is actually hilarious. Thank goodness they didn't start taking down the building during the filming process so we are grateful we still have time to plan out another location. 

Accoring to Miami Gardens hospital vacant for 20 years to be demolished | Miami Herald,"An 11-story former hospital that has been vacant in Miami Gardens for more than 20 years, and considered an eyesore, is being demolished and a convention center with a hotel and wedding venue are now planned for that site." The first website I immediately went to, to verify this information was the Miami Herald as this gives local news very fast and shows all the backstory to what is going to be constructed in place of the abandoned building. Knowing that this will turn into a Hotel and Wedding Venue makes me very happy as this place will bring jobs and good times for the people of Miami. This change of location affects our overall project as we now will be searching for new locations, and we are most likely thinking about using one of the group members houses to film the opening of our horror movie! My decision to talk about this event is to show how my group members and I will be overcoming our first major obstacle in our journey to accomplish this film opening. No matter how many obstacles we face we will keep pushing through and we won't let nothing stop us from creating the best film opening possible.