Wrapping up the movie and a recap

 Hi blog. Today we have finally finished up our short film. Our journey was not an easy one but we pulled through. With our background from last year, we had an easier time with the basics in this project. However, it was also a lot harder in some aspects. With it being 5 minutes long, and being an actual short film, with a beginning, middle, and end. We had a lot to do. Thinking of a plot for the movie was one of the hardest parts. We basically at the deadline though of a quick idea, and ran with it. It was bad in the beginning, but we kept modeling it like a piece of clay, until it turned into the art piece we have now. Creating a story board was in my opinion the hardest part of the journey. Fleshing out the basic plot we had then, into a 10 page story board, was a very difficult challenge compared to last year. It was more than double the work, but like everything in this project we persevered. With this detailed story board, we were able to easily put it on film. This was probably the easiest part of the project. We just had to film the shots, and we were able to do other fun stuff after we were done. The next part was the editing. The editing part was easy this time, because we didn't have to use the school computers, but the huge problems that we had to solve were the only hard parts. The Wi-Fi problems, time constraints, and the many bugs were big problems, but at the end of the day, we got through. All and all we did the best we could with the recourses and time we had. We are both proud of what we did for this project, but there are still some things we could improve.

-Here's one of my favorite screen shots of the movie 

Editing blog: Finishing it all up

 Hi blog. Today was our finally day of editing. After yesterdays disaster of editing, we had to do it all today. We first started on getting back what we lost yesterday. We organized all the shots in order, exactly what's on the story board. When we were doing this, we discovered that we were missing one shot. A major problem you might say, but it actually didn't affect us at all. The shot was when my groupmate was walking up the stair case. Its in the story board, but we didn't need it. when we put all the film organized in the editing software, it was around 7 minutes long. 2 minutes longer than what it was supposed too. So we had to cut out some non important shots, which we would of cut out that missing one in the process. While shortening the film, we had another problem. The screen sharing on discord (the communication software that we have been using on our computers) stopped working. We then decided to use our backup software, facetime that is on our phones. After that bump in the road, me and my groupmate were able to basically finish up the editing. We cut basically every shot, to make them shorter so the time would be a short as possible. Its still a bit to long, but its the best that we can do. All in all, we had a really good day of editing. I'm proud of what we did, and so is my groupmate.

-This is me helping on Ft, when discord was not working (look how dumb I look)

Editing blog: Running through some problems

  Hi blog. Today me and my partner did/tried to edit today. We didn't actually get that much editing in though. When we started to edit, it was pretty smooth for the first 10 . After that, it started to go down hill. on the main computer that we were editing, Elijah's computer started to get some bugs. The pixels on screen started to bug. it got to the point where we couldn't see parts of the screen. After that the screen decided to freeze. We waited for a couple minutes for it to unfreeze, then another thing happened. My partners Wi-Fi  went out and we were no longer on a call. I had to face time my partner because that could use Cellular. When i called him, he informed me that his whole computer had to be restarted. This meant that we could of lost all of our editing that we did from these past weeks. We both got super frustrated. When we restarted the computer, it had saved what we were doing, but not todays work. We decided to end the editing of today then because we were already frustrated with us not being able to do work, and the computer needed time to breathe. What ever bad could happen today, happened. we got totally screwed from a day of editing. However, we persevered and got it all back.

-here's a picture when it first started to bug. 

Editing Blog: editing on Christmas eve (organizing, and transgering)

 Hi blog. Yesterday, me and my partner did some editing on Christmas eve. We didn't have that much time to edit on Christmas eve, but we got some work in. The first thing that we did was working on organizing our Film. When we filmed we did many retakes, and I mean many. We had done our filming in the highest quality of resolution, and which that it took up a lot of storage. We also took a lot of retakes As well. This lead to our film taking up my groupmates storage completely. With that, we had to convert the film to a lower quality so it didn't take a long time to transfer using an app on our phone. With the lower quality we could now transfer the film. We used google drive to transfer our film between the phone and our computers. However, we had to organize it first. This took us a while to do. We had a bunch of retakes that were equally good, but we both kept arguing about. We argued on and on, but we had to soon compromise because we were waiting time. After that we found the best shots for the film. With those shots, we Transferred film, but it took a while. Even though we changed the quality of the film to be a smaller storage, it still took some time. By the time we had it all transferred on to each of our computers, it was time for Christmas eve stuff. Even though we didn't do the largest amount of work, We still did progress for our project. 

-Here's a screenshot of our film in google drive on my groupmates phone 

Editing Blog: solving problems

Hi blog. Today me and my partner picked up our progress, first time this winter break. We had some problems to solve though. Since its winter break, and Christmas is around the corner, Both of our families are quarantining for this break because there has been a large break out here in our country's. This had lead to our plans of editing to be squashed. We were planning for my groupmate just to come over to my house and we would just edit on my computer together. very short and simple. So, with this problem of us not being to edit together, we found our solution. We found a communication software that we could download on each of our computers named "Discord". With this software me and my groupmate are able to talk and communicate on our computers while we both edit. This allowed us to both edit, better than just having one of us edit at my house. That isn't even the best part too. On the software we can share our screens so we can visible help each other edit our film. Its really helpful, Its just like if we are sitting right next to each other at school a year ago. With this we started to begin to edit. The editing software that we use is "HitFilm". Me and my groupmate both already had this software downloaded on each of our computers from when we both used to make YouTube videos in elementary and early middle school. However, I'm not that proficient in HitFilm, but my partner is still. He had to reteach me a couple of things, but I am remembering things from middle school. All in all, today we solved our major problem with tools of our own. \

-This is a picture of us editing together on discord.

Filming blog: Day 3

 This weekend, me and my groupmate finished filming in 2 days. This blog is about the 2nd day we filmed this weekend, which is the 3rd day we filmed in total. With having Friday being all rainy, Sunday was our day to film outside. We were very lucky with it being fully sunshine, and no clouds. First we did that day was do the missing shots we had to do. We first had to do a bunch of dialogue that we some how forgot to do. We had to retake many times because we kept laughing in the filming. In total that was around 3 or 4 shots we had to do. We also had to redo the filming of the opening of the box scene. We had to redo it because it turned out it had really bad background noise. After filming inside, it was time for the outside. The first shot we did was the riding the bike outside the house scene. That was easy enough, but my huge tortoise kept getting in the way so we had to wait for it to move. We ended up keeping the shot of where its in the filming because we thought it was pretty cool. The next scene we did was the tree scene. This one was easy, and i decided to do a low/medium angle shot too, to add some flavor to the filming.  The next shot was the last major shot, the lake scenes. Like the other shots it was fairly easy, but people kept walking by so we had to momentarily pause from filming. With that we were done with filming! Now its time for us to start editing our film.

Filming blog: Day 2

This weekend me and my partner finished filming. We took 2 days this weekend to film because we had some mishaps on the first day. On Friday my partner came to my house to film, but there was a problem. When got at my house it was raining very bad so we try to wait. We waited for a while and nothing changed. It kept poring and poring and there was no end in sight. We decided since that we were stuck inside that we would work on planning out the next time we were going to film. After arguing over and over, we figured out what day we would film. We decided Sunday would be the best choice, and i would just have to move the plans i had that day to Saturday. After that scuffle, we moved on the the other task. Me and my partner did the 2 shots we forgot to do inside the house last Saturday that we were supposed to do. We first did the walking down stairs and the walking down the hallway shot. That was easy enough to do, but we just had to match the lighting. The next shot we did was the opening box scene which we forgot to do. That was very simple, and what wrapped up our filming for Friday. Since we had time left before my groupmate would get picked up, We planed out the next time we would film. The first thing we did was circle the shots that we needed to do outside on our screen play, and we started the dialogue too. When we did that however, we found out we had to do like 2 more shots inside that we forgot to do. By that time though Elijah my groupmate had to leave, so we couldn't film. even though that day we couldn't film outside, we were productive and used our time manageably.

     

Filming blog: Day 1

Hi blog. This weekend, me and my partner started filming. We had prepared the props days before too. We filmed at my house this weekend. So my partner had to ride his bike over to my house, and leave before sundown, so we had around 3 hours to film. With that in mind, we decided to film in 2 different days. We decided this because we could barely fit the whole filming in 3 hours, but basically all the scenes would be rushed and that's not how we want our film to go. We decided to film for the second time on probably this upcoming Friday, the 11th, or the weekend after it. We picked those days because we have midterms this next week, and we need to get this filming done with this weekend. To get back on track, Filming wasn't that hard. We decided to first film in chronological order. The first couple of scenes were fairly easy to film. We then decided to make a game plan because after those scenes we realized that we needed to split the filming into 2 days. We decided that this weekend we would do all the shots that are with my dad, and inside/around my house this weekend. The next weekend would be all of the neighborhood scenes. So when we filmed this weekend, we basically got 2/3rds of the movie done. The only hard part that we had with filming, was with my dad. We just had to wait for him to stop doing yard work to film with him. Other than that it was a breeze. Me and my group mate might even get the foundation of our editing done too this week with the film we have so far.