If you have been following up with my blog from the start... thank you! On this post, I will make a quick reflection and refresh your mind's on the whole journey. For any newcomers, let me describe the process and decisions I made while completing the portfolio project.
From just a vision to my head, to becoming reality, my portfolio project did not come out as I had expected. At first, I wanted to have an airport scene to convey a "moving family", but then I realized that it was unnecessary. Throughout the entire project, I wanted my opening to be meaningful and something that would be relatable to some people who may have gone through the same situation as the character.
Starting off... I was totally lost. I was not sure what genre to choose: Action, Horror, Comedy, Drama? I then told myself, "What type of movies do you enjoy?", in order to choose a genre I am interested and invested in. Most of the movies I enjoy and find entertaining mainly consisted of drama films. By choosing drama, not only was I able to find a project that I would enjoy making, but I was able to incorporate real life expereiences to develop and produce a meaningful project. Choosing drama allowed me to generate various possible ideast. After deciding on an idea for the opening, I conducted research, created a story board, decided on the setting, and emptied my room/bathroom for the project. Since Irvin and I were not going to be home for spring break, we quickly recorded the shots a few days prior to break.
To record I initially had a Canon camera I intended to use, but my mom gave it to our aunt to keep. I felt like having a big camera would have made my film easier to record and make the quality really clear. Due to this, I used my phone which was surprisingly really good for most of the shots. I was very stuck on which song to choose for the project. Since piano music tends to be intense and emotional, researching piano music was my first idea. I sorted through some songs that could be used and finally ended up using Nocturne- C sharp, minor 20. The song was in the Public Domain, so worrying about copy right was not an issue for me.
Irvin and I needed to finish the filming for the opening prior to spring break, so we intended to split the filming into 2 days. The first day consisted of the car scene with Irvin and the children. Working with the children was very hard so some of the scenes did not come out as intended. At first I wanted a scene of the children playing in the street, but I found the scene of the children playing on the swings more clear and pleasant. A few days after, we met together to film again. This is where Irvin and I shot the rest of the scenes. We started off with the car scene because we did not want the sun to set. Afterwards, we completed the bathroom and bedroom scene. I initially thought we had completed filming until I reviewed our clips and noticed Irvin was wearing a different outfit. We then needed to redo some of the car scenes and bedroom scenes with success.
Afterwards, the editing took about 2 days. I wanted to utilize slow zoom ins and closeups in my film to make my film more dramatic. By using some of these techniques, I believe the film was made more dramatic. The difficult part was the audio which I am still unsure about. Should the audio of the clips play? Or should they be muted? I ultimately ended up using the audio of the clips, but I do not think it came out very well.
Overall, this project showed me the difficult process that films undergo during production. Creativity is essential in film making and can ultimately make your film better. By experiencing some difficulties in film making, I was able to learn and fix some of my errors during the process. If I had not deleted the timeline, I would not have known that there was an auto-save file for every document on Adobe Premiere. If I had not changed my location from the airport to my neighborhood, I do not know if the project would have made sense. I believe that these difficulties helped make my project come out better . The difficulties I faced helped me learn how to be a better editor and camera man. Before this project, I did not know how to use Adobe Premiere, but this project taught me how to easily navigate through the software without much difficulty. Creating this film had made me very proud of myself.
