Editing Blog: Editing With Stephanie

When I got home, I face timed Stephanie so we could discuss editing our opening through iMovie. Stephanie first informed me of the editing she did so far. She selected the tapes and put them in order. Next, she trimmed the clips. She also told me this process took around 45 minutes. We then moved onto discussing what new edits we would make. Initially, we planned on having a voice over in the beginning, but we didn't end up using it because we felt like it wasn't necessary. For the majority of our call, Stephanie was adding titles to the video. Before, we wanted to do a pattern of red and green for each of the words in the title. We were also going to put some parts of the titles in bold.

However, we didn't end up doing those things. Instead we had one title be green, then the next be red, then the one after be green, and so on. We also did not put any of the titles in bold. Next we talked about what music we wanted to added to the film. Since our opening has a lot of action in it, we decided to use fast tempo music. When we found music that we liked we had to ensure that it was uncopyrighted. Luckily, the creator said it was free for anyone to use. At that point, I had to leave the call but Stephanie continued editing in my absence. We wanted to add diegetic sounds like doors shutting, gun shots, etc. So, Stephanie had to record the sounds and add the audio into the video.

Peer Review: Katie's Group

When Stephanie and I couldn't figure out how to upload the person we had to peer review's movie, we decided to review another group's video. A girl named Katie asked if we could review her groups video because they didn't have anyone to review or anyone to their video. So our groups exchanged our movies. Stephanie and I watched the other group's film the first time and we had complete forgot to actually fill out our peer review sheet because we were so invested in the movie. We watched it again a second time and actually paid attention to the things we needed to find. The video was the correct length and it did tell a story. We thought the story line of the film is that two women kill men by tricking them into going on dates. The transitions were very clean but they didn't have all the correct titles. Throughout the majority of the film, there was good lighting. However, in the scenes where the girls are driving in a car at night, the lighting could've been improved.

The sound quality wasn't the best in some parts of the film. In scenes where there is noise in the background, the group can use voice overs for the dialogue. The group did avoid filming the tripod, other people filming, etc.. As for camera angles and editing, the group had a wide variety of both. However, some things they could add to the film is an establishing shot, a pan, and a shot reverse shot. Stephanie and I really enjoyed the plot of the film. It was interesting and easy to follow so it kept our attention. Some critiques we had were that they should add those camera angles that they were missing, finish adding all of their titles, and improve the lighting and audio in the car scenes. Overall, we were happy to be reviewing such a good film. We felt inspired by it and we want to use some of the techniques this group used in our film when we do re-shoots.

II

Editing Blog: Editing by Myself

The last day of editing in class had begun and our movie was still far from finished. For the third class period in a row, Stephanie had to stay home because she had the flu for the whole week. It was up to me to finish the movie. I started by finishing up selecting our footage. After that, I began to trim the clips do my desired length. This took up a majority of the time I had in the period. Once I finished that, I added a filter to a scenes that were apart of the flash forward. I was getting very frustrated because my computer was going very slow and for some reason the filter wouldn't show up. I decided to give up on adding the filter then moved onto adding the subtitles. As I mentioned before, my computer was lagging so this task took longer than it probably should've.

I was having trouble changing the colors of the text in the titles so I had to ask someone around me to help me out. While I was working on the titles, a notification popped up on my computer saying that the laptop's battery was almost dead. At this point, I was already stressed and this just added to it. There were about 20 minutes left in the period and I wanted to do everything I possibly could during that time, but it didn't seem like it would work out that way. I still needed to finish the titles, add music and sound effects, and put a filter over the flash forward. So I texted Stephanie and told her my dilemma. I also told her that I would use i Movie on my iPad and edit the movie from scratch. Stephanie told me she felt bad for not being there so she would download the i Movie and edit the clips. I was disappointed in myself because I felt I had failed my group for not being able to finish editing the movie by myself. With that being said, I was also very grateful because Stephanie and I make a great team and I don't think neither of us would've been able to succeed in any of the projects in our media class by ourselves.

Editing Blog: Selecting Our Footage

After we finished filming at Stephanie's house we decided to import the footage to Stephanie's Google Drive account. We wanted to do this because if for some reason we aren't able to import the footage from our SD card onto our school laptop we would have a backup. This proved to be beneficial to us during our last project which is why we wanted to do it again. For some reason the footage wouldn't download onto her account so we didn't end up doing that. When we got back to school we began editing. We got an SD card reader from our teacher and imported our raw footage onto our school's laptop. We then imported the videos onto Pinnacle Studios. As usual, Pinnacle Studios gave us trouble before we even started editing. Once we got the application to work properly we got to work.  We started by selecting the raw footage we wanted to use in our film. We made sure to refer back to our storyboard during this process.

We didn't get to finish choosing all our footage. So we made plans to finish our selection next class. When we had our media class two days after we resumed our editing. However, we didn't get far because our computer died. We don't have chargers for our computers and we are only able to use Pinnacle Studios on this computer so Stephanie and I decided we wouldn't edit that day. We also had work for other classes so our class time wasn't wasted. The week after, Stephanie didn't come that day because she was sick. I finished to picking out the clips for our movie that period. However, this took longer than I expected because it took the whole class period. I was a bit disappointed by this because we only had two days left to work on this and if I kept working at this rate, I wouldn't  finish on time. The next class period Stephanie was still sick so she didn't come. I didn't edit because I had to do work for another class and another group was editing on our computer. I started to really worry if I was going to be able to complete this assignment without Stephanie's help.

Filming Blog: Things That Went Wrong

During filming a lot of things didn't go our way so we had to improvise quite a bit. The first thing that went wrong was that Stephanie got injured when we were filming. Stephanie had to jump over my legs to get to the other side of me but when she did she hit her head on my mini chandelier. We had a safety kit on stand by in case something like this happened. Luckily, she only had a small cut on her finger and I gave her a band-aid. I swept up the glass shards that fell from the chandelier as well. Next, it started raining when we were filming outside. We had to be quick and film during the short intervals when the rain had stopped.One scene that was hazardous was when we had to run on wet tile that was right next to my pool. To prevent any injuries, Stephanie and I jogged slowly when we did the scene. We also brought the safety kit outside with us.

During filming we noticed some potential racial issues that could be perceived as racism. I am African-American and I played roles such as a guard and a kidnapped could raised potential issues. We decided that Stephanie should do a scene where she played as a guard so we wouldn't have any problems. Moving forward, when Stephanie and I went to go purchase a doughnut, we had to run in the rain which could have led to us getting hurt. There is a scene where Stephanie had to fall out of her chair. In one of the takes, when Stephanie was falling her chair had unintentionally flipped over. We put pillows on the ground to keep her safe when an accident such as this one happened. Lastly, when recording our last few takes my camera started to shut off because the batteries were exhausted. I didn't bring extra batteries and Stephanie offered to go buy me some more. However, I took the batteries out of the camera for a few minutes then reinserted them and the camera turned on again.

Peer Review

Today we did a peer review for our films. Stephanie and I downloaded our opening onto a flash drive and gave it to the group that was assigned to review ours. The person who we were assigned to review, Michele gave us her flash drive but the video didn't show up on our computer. So we gave it back to her and told her the issue. We ended up reviewing another group's video instead. We were able to watch their video on our computer so we decided to ask Michele if we could try and load up her video again. We were able to get the video to show up on the computer. It didn't take long to realize that her video needed a lot of work. We first noticed that the video was over five minutes long. We also saw that whenever she propped up the camera to record a scene it was always in a spot where an object was covering some of the view.

At first, there seemed to be a plot developing because the main character was packing a suitcase. But as the video went on, Stephanie and I became unsure of what the story was because we couldn't hear the dialogue going on in the scenes because the background music was too loud. All we gathered from what we watched was that a girl was packing her bags to go somewhere. A way Michele could've improved the sound quality was that she could lower the background music's audio when the characters were talking. Her transitions were also very choppy. We believed that Michele didn't finish editing her movie because whenever she finished a take, she didn't cut out the parts where she went to go turn off the camera. She also had no titles in the opening. The lighting was bad when she recorded scenes on her front porch; she could improve the lighting by turning on the porch lights. In some scenes we could see the camera in the background. Stephanie and I liked the choice of background music but one suggestion we had was that Michele should just finish editing her opening.