AICE Media Studies

 This is my Creative Critical Reflection Questions video. 

We are done! This really has been a long journey. I never expected how much went into making a movie. My favorite part of this whole thing was filming. I was super nervous to be acting but I ended up loving it! I also liked researching about other thriller movies. From starting out with our basic pitch to our final movie, it has been great. My group was perfect to work with and I would work with them again. I am sad to see this project finished but looking forward to the future. These skills I’ve learned will be so helpful in my life. 

      I finished up editing! We added the title sequence as the last part of our video.       The first step of doing this was deciding on a font. On imovie, there are a couple different ones to choose from. Unfortunately there aren't any spooky fonts, but the one we chose was still good. I wanted a font that faded in and out. In each clip, we moved the title around to different parts of the screen for some diversity. I messed around with the sizing until I found one that everyone liked.  I also made the titles all white. One of my group members thought black would be better, but I thought white would stand out more.        Editing was a quick and easy process for the most part. The only trouble I had was sometimes the text wouldn't fade in or out. But it was easy to fix. When adding the title of the movie, I knew I wanted to make it a different color and font. This would help it stand out. The color we chose was red....

Today, we made the changes that was suggested for our film. As I said in my last film changes blog, my soccer coach gave us suggestions to change to our film. Her main tip was to fix the lighting because it was too dark. I thought that the darkness made it eerie, but after re watching it was a little too hard to see what was going on. So we re filmed the inside scenes today. I made sure to keep the blinds on the windows open, so that there was natural lighting. I like natural lighting better than harsh overhead lights. I did have to have some unnatural lighting though, because the window lighting wasn't enough. When we re filmed the blood scene, I realized I ran out of dish soap. The first thing that came to my mind to use was ketchup. Ketchup is red and has a thick texture so I thought it would work well. I really hate the smell of ketchup, so I hated filming this scene. It made my whole kitchen smell like ketchup, and it wasn't pleasant. I wanted to film it twice so we could ...

 Today Dara and I picked the music for the video. We used a royalty free music website called pixabay. I wanted 2-4 different songs for the video. We first looked up suspense for the genre. A couple good options came up. The first one I knew would be perfect for the cleaning up blood scene was this eerie almost quiet song. It did not have sudden bursts of sound, which I really liked. Dara downloaded it to her phone and we added it to our movie. The next genre we picked was scary. There was some songs that were from the other genre too, but there were enough new ones. The second song we liked was a little calmer and almost spiritual. I wanted this to be our background song for when we are speaking. We also downloaded this and added it to imovie. I have to cut some of the music to quiet it in certain parts, but make it louder in others. To get the final song, we searched up “royalty free suspense music”. A lot of options came up. The one we picked had a violet sounding instrumen...

     Today we sent our video today my soccer coach. The video isn't done yet, but I thought it would be smart to send what we have to someone so they can critique it. I trust that my coach will give us an honest review of our video. She wouldn't lie just to spare our feelings. Once we sent it to her she said she was impressed. I was really happy about this.       She did say that she had some suggestions. In the beginning of the video, she thought that the lighting was a little weird. I was pretty surprised at this. My coach said that she thought the lighting was too dark. We purposely made the lighting dark because we wanted it to be more eerie. It didn't occur to me that the lighting could be too dark and hard to see. That was her main critique. She complimented the blood and said it looked realistic. I guess the dish soap worked pretty well! I am grateful for her feedback and am looking forward to fixing our mistake.     Tomorrow we are go...

 Today we had our second day of filming. Siena, Violet, and I were filming. We were short on time today, so we decided to only film the first scene of me cleaning up the blood and putting away the knives. I suggested we facetime Dara, who wasn't available to film with us. This was she could still offer advice without being there.  The first thing I did was make the blood. I am using dish soap and red food dye. I mixed about a quarter cup of dish soap with the 2 drops of red food dye and it looked pretty good! I poured it on the floor and we started to film. I got on my hands and knees and with a rag started to clean it up. Violet and Siena were filming with an over the shoulder shot, so I tried to not move my head too much to avoid getting it in the screen. Once or twice it did, but we will just cut that out later. After filming this part, I wanted to film the putting away knives scene. I made sure to be very careful when handling the knives as to avoid any possible accidents....

 Over the past couple of days, I have been editing. When we filmed on the 17th, all went overall well. So we decided to edit the parts that we had filmed. I wanted to use iMovie, because I am most familiar with it. In past projects I have used it, and I use it sometimes outside of school. We put the videos into iMovie and begun working. It took a few seconds for the videos to load into iMovie. There wasn't a ton of footage because we only filmed a short scene. The main parts I was focused on cutting out were the little parts before and after we filmed. This was the most time consuming part because I had to be very specific when cutting the clips. I did not want us to cut too short to our dialogue. The easiest part of editing was cutting out the parts where we messed up or were talking about something else. We just clipped these parts out and deleted them with ease. A few times I messed up and cut out our dialogue. But with the undo button it was an east fix. Once we were done, we ...

 Today we filmed! I had to do the acting since Violet wasn’t available to do so. We had to re film the parts she was in from our last filming day. So Siena was going to be filming us. I was really nervous to film, because I have no experience doing so. We decided to film the sidewalk conversation scene, because we didn’t have enough time to do more. I am playing Naomi. When we first started filming, it took me a couple tries to get used to it. I kept laughing and we had to keep re filming it. My biggest struggle was trying to portray emotions onto my face. I tried my best and I think it turned out pretty well. When we were filming, the wind was very loud. Sometimes we had to pause filming to wait for the big gusts of wind to pass. I made sure to talk extra loud so my voice wouldn't be blocked out by the sound. Once we were done filming, we watched through the clips. I thought only one of them needed to be re filmed. The next part we are going to film is the table scene. I have to m...

 I originally had suggested that we continued to film this past Saturday (3/12/22). On Saturday morning I double checked with my group that we were going to film, and Dara said she couldn't anymore. I was kind of bummed out at first. Dara then suggest we film on Sunday. But I am a soccer player, and on Sunday I had a game so I couldn't film. So then I suggested that we film on Monday. Monday did not work for two of our group members. We deliberated more dates and decided we would film on this coming Thursday. I thought about filming over spring break next week, but I think the sooner the better. Then we will have more time for editing.  I may have to be a actor instead of me filming. One of our group members is going on a spring break trip, so she won't be available to film. I may have to step up and act, or my other group member Siena will. I want to be prepared, so I am going to go over the script a few times before we film so I know what to say. I don't have much act...

 Yesterday I decided to start thinking about props. The main prop I was concerned about was the blood for the first scene. I've never really known much about blood props, so my first task was to read about it. i found that a homemade mixture was pretty common. The homemade mixture is made out of corn syrup, food coloring, and water. I figured this was easy enough to make at home for our movies. I also read that you could use dish soap and red food coloring. This sounded like the easiest one because I have dish soap at home. When we film this scene, I think I will try the dish soap blood first. I wanted to make sure I had a backup plan though, incase the dish soap didn't look good. So I decided to go with Dara to target to see if they sold fake blood. After looking around for a while, we couldn't find any. So I suggested we go to a costume store. Once we were there we asked an employee if they sold fake blood. He said that they did and led us to the area. I only bought one b...

    This past weekend we started to film. It did not go as planned. We are filming near Dara's house, because she lives near the main part of our city. The first part we planned to film was when the 2 girls are sitting at a table chatting, and walking around town. When we first got to our filming location, we noticed there was an excessive amount of wind. At first I did not think this would be an issue, but I was wrong. It was very hard to hear our actors voices because of the wind. The wind was also blowing our hair everywhere, and it did not look great. Eventually, we got clips without too much wind and where you could hear the actors speaking. I saw that when we went out to the sidewalk to film the walking scenes, there was so many people around. Its spring break for a lot of the college kids, so everywhere was very busy. When me and Siena were filming, it was reall hard to get clips without people walking into the scene. I also had to be careful that I wasn't walking ...

Slide 1: In this scene Naomi is going to be scrubbing off the blood from the floor and her hands, a over the shoulder shot will be used during this. The "Berry Studios" title will be displayed during this scene. Slide 2: Naomi is going to be putting back knives and the title "Four Girls Pictures" will be displayed. Naomi will walk off screen. Slide 3: Naomi sits down on a couch, and then from a point of view shot, she opens up Instagram. The title of the actors will play on screen. Slide 4: Naomi will begin to scroll through her following list on Instagram and during this the title "Unfriended" will play on screen.  Slide 5:  Naomi smiles to herself, we see this through a close up, and she clicks on a girls profile from her following list. The title "Music by" will play during this scene. Slide 6:  We see through an over the shoulder shot that Naomi DM's the girl and asks her if she would like to hang out. The title "Edited by Siena Panc...

Location  Because our scenes take place in different settings, we have two main filming locations. Our first one will be Dara's house. We will film the first and last few scenes in this setting, varying between different rooms and areas of her home. The second location will be a downtown area of the city we live in. This will be for the scenes that take place in around the middle of our script. Where our two main characters meet up. This location is flexible and will allow us to achieve multiple angles and shots. Participants The only participants of this production will consist of our current group members. Dara Sedaka, Parker Merrick, Violet Roberts and Siena Pancera. We will all take part in different jobs to get it all done. Health We are taking different precautions to ensure everyones safety throughout filming. We all are taking covid tests prior to filming. As well as having adult supervision when handling the knives, and when going downtown. This way we will establish a saf...

The movie title we have picked is "Unfriended" The title will be in a bold, spooky looking font and will appear on the screen for 3-4 seconds and it will fade out. This title will take up most of the width on the screen, to ensure that the audience will see it. The color we chose was black because it stands out the most. The other titles will be in a different font from the film title, to make the film title stand out more. The other titles will be a normal everyday like font. They will also be black and will appear on screen for 2-3 seconds depending on the title. Every title, not including the film title, will appear in the bottom right corner of the screen. It will only take up a small portion of the screen, so that it won't distract the audience from the scene, but it will also be big enough to be read. The titles will fade out after their 2-3 seconds on screen. The name of the studio is "Berry Studios" and the production company is going to be "Four Gi...

  UNFRIENDED ... (title sequence) (Scene 1) Girl scrubbing blood off floor and hands  (studio name BERRY STUDIOS …) (scene 2) putting knives back. (production company FOUR GIRLS PICTURES …) (scene 3) Girl opens Instagram (actors and crew VIOLET ROBERTS AND DARA SEDAKA …) (scene 4)  scrolls through her following. (Film Title… UNFRIENDED ) (Scene 5)  Clicks on one and examines her posts  (Music by …) (Scene 6) then messages her asking to hang out. (edited by… SIENA PANCERA ) (Scene 7) Other girl replies “sure!” (Produced by… PARKER MERRICK ) (Scene 8) Shows the girls face (Story by… Dara Sedaka and Violet Roberts ) Establishing shot of city (scene 9) (written by… DARA SEDAKA ) (scene 10) Two girls sitting at table (Scene 11) Skylar : Thank you so much, I had so much fun! Naomi : Of course, it was great catching up. (scene 12) Walking on street Skylar : You know, I feel bad that we never really spoke in high school. Naomi: Oh no it's fine, really. Skylar: yeah ...

    We are researching  the movie  She Dies Tomorrow  (2020) using the website  www.artofthetitle.com How Many Titles are displayed during the opening sequences to the film? Which Ones There are 25 titles shown in this sequence. These  include, the title, the writer and director, main actors names, producers, co-producer, photographers, editors, production designers, music artists, production manager, first and second assistant directors, art director, camera operators, design team roles, hair and makeup, sound editors, title designer, songs, and special thanks.  What connotations do the images carry? The images carry almost no connotation, against a black screen they are bold and in stark font. They show mystery by not revealing much. How is genre reinforced through symbolic and technical codes from the outset? Genre is reinforced through symbolic and technical codes in one main way, through mystery. It reveals little to nothi...

  We are researching the movie   Antebellum (2020)  using the website  https://www. artofthetitle.com/titles/   How Many Titles are displayed during the opening sequences to the film? Which Ones? There are 27 titles . The production company names, main actors names, producer and executive producers names, music supervisor, music writer, costume artist, film editor, production designer, director of photography, writers and directors.  What connotations do the images carry? The images in the background of the title sequence carry suspenseful  connotations. We can hear nothing from the video we see, as there is classical music playing over everything. It shows that the movie takes place far back in time, giving negative connotations with the way many people were treated. How is genre reinforced through symbolic and technical codes from the outset? The genre is reinforced through symbolic and technical codes from the outset by outlining a sp...

  We are researching  the movie  Here Before  (2021) using the website  www.artofthetitle.com How Many Titles are displayed during the opening sequences to the film? Which Ones? There are 19 titles shown in this sequence. They include the originality, the production company, the main actors' names, the producers' names,  the executive producers' names, the creator, the writer, the author's name who's book it was based off of, the director's name, and the title.  What connotations do the images carry? The images give the feeling of mystery, a sort of haunting sense is being created. The combination of the stark text over dark images and odd angles creates the feel intended for thrillers.  How is genre reinforced through symbolic and technical codes from the outset? You can tell what genre this movie is from this title sequence due to the tone and mood it creates around it. The images and bland yet almost eerie scenic design contribute to the portra...

We researched the movie The Invisible Man  (2020) using the website  www.artofthetitle.com   How Many Titles are displayed during the opening sequences to the film? Which Ones? There are 5 titles displayed in the opening sequence and they were all of the production companies. What connotations do the images carry? There are negative and scary connotations in this opening sequence. The first part is in a strangely lit room with a creepy looking girl, and the second part is from the ocean. It is dark and there is water splashing on rocks. This creates the suspenseful feeling. How is genre reinforced through symbolic and technical codes from the outset? The genre is reinforced through the eerie lighting, spooky character and the lack of sounds, all you can hear is the splashing of the waves. There is also a flickering lightbulb, which is often a symbol in thriller movies. What conventions are used to ensure the film appeals to its target audience  The lighting capt...