One Day We’ll Finish Editing...One Day

   Hello. As I said in my last post, the entire world is facing a major issue. We are all suffering from the effects of a major virus that has plagued mankind this spring. This pandemic has made it very difficult for my group and I to edit our project. And with that it is very hard for us to do basically anything for the production of our project. None of my group members want to get sick or risk spreading any germs which is why we aren’t getting together to do anything. And when we do try to get together to edit it will most likely become very difficult to do so because I’m always booked with work. During this crisis, my job has been scheduling more and more, taking away a majority of my free time. This may not be a huge problem because our film takes place at night and with all this hysteria, my job now closes early. Since my job closes early, I’m able to get out and maybe film at night. This is one of the problems that I have faced solved.
    We also the issue with transportation. Even though we may be out of school, our parents still have work. None of us have a car of our own so driving ourselves is out of the option. We also can’t take a ride service such as Uber or Lyft because that would raise the risk of catching a he virus which would really be a problem. I know I have two older siblings who may be able to give me a ride but it’s not for sure. My group and I could still try and do a lot of editing over video chat as we did in the last blog but that can become pretty difficult when only two people in the group are actually doing the editing and the the others are just trying to give critiques over a screen. I tried writing some editing ideas down today so that if we do have to do a video chat, I can have a list to go through which may help us to get the job done quicker. I googled some songs that I think would be good to have in our film and I also thought if some ideas for when we do reshoots that will help our movie seem more paced and professional.

Editing During a Pandemic

   Hello. So currently the world is facing a terrible pandemic. A majority of the world is being affected by a highly contagious virus. To protect everyone from getting infected, my school has closed and the students are at home right now, we are also in spring break as well. This virus has made it very difficult to edit our movie as a group. We don’t want to risk getting sick or spreading germs at the moment, so that prevented us from getting together and editing or doing any filming for our reshoots. We knew that we couldn’t just sit around and do nothing so we tried to do some editing over online chat. Ava and Morgan were the ones who actually did the editing since they had all of the footage. To do group video chat we used the video call feature on social media app Snapchat because we all already had it and knew how to use it. The main things that we wanted to get done with this call were the titles and the transitions. We decided to do the sound editing another time because it would be hard for us to do it over video chat.
   Once we were in the chat, we edited the time a little so that it was just a little under the maximum time of two minutes. We did this so that we could add transitions into the movie that may have made the movie longer. We lowered the time by cutting out very minuscule parts of the movie that ultimately served no purpose. The next thing we did was add the transitions. We didn’t need to add to many creative transitions because a majority of the scene switches were just quick cuts back and forth. We added a fade transition in the early title scenes because it was on a black screen and it would have been boring if it cut from black to action so we added the transition from the black screen to the establishing shot. The next thing we worked on were the titles. We wanted to make sure they were in the correct order and we also had a couple of new actors that we needed to add into the opening that weren’t there originally. We also had to choose a different font because the one we originally wanted wasn’t available. This font isn’t my favorite but it matches the overall tone of the movie well. While editing we also realized that we should change the title of our movie because it doesn’t really match the plot well anymore. The last thing we spoke about was our plans for reshoots. We need to reshoot a couple of scenes for our film and since we are in spring break until further notice, we think that this is a great time to start filming reshoots for the project, we just need to find a good time to do it and to stay clean while doing it so we don’t get sick.

Who Knew Editing Could Be So Hard?

   Hello. Today, I’m a little bit annoyed. For some reason it is very difficult for my group and I to be able to edit our project. It’s almost like every single time my group and I try to edit, something goes wrong. As mentioning in my previous blog, the only editing that my group and I were able to get done is shortening our movie to the appropriate length. Even though our film was at the two minutes that it needed to be, it still looked really choppy and poorly done. The reason that it is so hard for us to edit is because we have had to deal with so many technical difficulties. First, my group and I couldn’t find a good editing software to use. We wanted to use iMovie but iMovie didn’t have the font that we wanted to use. The other editing softwares that we tried to use were really confusing and complicated to edit with, so we couldn’t really edit with those.
   The next thing that we tried to edit with was Pinnacle Studios. The reason we didn’t use this software in the first place was because it runs very slow, and we didn’t have the best experience using it for our first project in the class. However, even though it was slow, it still worked decently. Since we shot our movie on our phone, we imported the footage onto our computer and put it on a flash drive. We brought the flash drive with our footage on it to school and put it on a lap top. This is where the issue occurred. For some reason the footage that was imported onto the laptop wouldn’t download onto pinnacle studios. I assume that it was just too much footage at once because, the laptop began to freeze up and glitch. This is what happened the first time we tried to use the app for our first project.
   Even though everything seems to be working out horribly, my group and I asked a friend for help with editing and she did show us a great way to edit using iMovie. She paid for extended features on iMovie which gives her more font choices. She was generous enough to let us use her app one weekend so my group and I need to make a new plan for editing so we can finally get this part finished.

First Day of the Editing Process...Yikes!

Hello! For this blog, I am going to be focusing on a huge part of my project that I forgot to write about. This process is the editing process. The reason that I haven’t really been writing about the editing process is because it has been pretty complicated to do so far. The reason it has been so hard is because my group and I have not been able to find a good software for us to use. Our original plan was to edit using iMovie, but that software has a very limited number of fonts that we can use for our titles, so we decided not to use it. We then decided to try out some other editing software apps but none of them seemed to work. Pinnacle Studios was the app that we used for our first project in the class but we didn’t like using it because it was really slow and would never play our clips smoothly so we didn’t want to use it for this project. The other editing software's that were free that we used were still not very good. This was taking up a lot of our time, so we decided to get started on some other parts of the editing process instead. The software that we used ended up being our original plan of iMovie. 

 Since we decided to not worry about titles and get started on the cutting and organization of scenes. The first thing we did was import the scenes we filmed onto the laptop and organize them in the correct order that they should have of appeared in. Once we put of the scenes that we shot imported into iMovie, we noticed a big problem: it was way too long. Our project needs to be a max of two minutes, our movie was three and a half minutes long. In order to fix this problem, the first thing we did was cut out all the little mistakes that were in the beginning and end of scenes such as a prolonged amount of time where nothing is happening and scenes that bloopers that were accidentally imported. After we did this, my group and I took our time to cut certain scenes out of the film. This was a very hard and tedious task that took a lot of thinking and consideration from everybody in my group. We eventually ended up cutting out a lot of our movie which really hurt to do. Our film now very choppy and looks very cheap and well...bad. The product that we ended up with was definitely not what I wanted. We still have a lot of editing to do so we may still have a chance to save our film. When in doubt, my group and I can always just re-shoot a couples of scenes and change them so that they are shorter. 

Peer Review

   Hello!  Today, our teachers challenged us with a new task: peer reviews. What we were supposed to do is give a copy of our rough draft of the film we created to another person or group in the class and then fill out a sheet that went over what that person should have in their movie and suggestions on the movie. The point of the assignment was to have more peer feedback on our film and it was to see what your film looked like through an audiences perspective. In this blog, I’m going to be writing about the group that I peer reviewed. The movie that I reviewed was titled “Nightmare” and it was about a girl who had a nightmare about a girl running from a mysterious hooded figure. In all honesty, I didn’t really like it. I just found it to be pretty...boring. To me it was just a minute and thirty seconds of a girl running from someone with no dialogue or anything in between. Other than that everything was pretty good. The group didn’t finish putting in all of their titles but the ones that they did put in where placed in proper order and they were spread evenly throughout the movie. The lighting that they used throughout the movie was great and it stayed consistent throughout the scenes that it needed to be the same in. The sound was also really well done when there was any. They didn’t have a lot of dialogue or music in their film but when there was, it was at a great volume and was very clear. The group was did a great job with their camera work. Their transitions were clean and not choppy at all. They also did a good job at not filming any of the equipment or any other people. There were a lot of creative camera angles and movements within the film such as pans, over the shoulder shots, low angles and many more. A really cool aspect of the movie that I thought was very creative was since the movie had scenes that were supposed to be a dream and real life, the way the group established these two times was by using a filter. During the dream sequence, a filter was added that made everything look hazy and hyper realistic. During the scenes that take place in real life, no filter was added. This was a very cool effect that the group put into their movie and I think it was my favorite thing about the movie. On the other hand, the movie was just very boring and it didn’t want to make me keep watching once it was over. The running in the dream sequence was way too prolonged and it almost becomes comedic after a while. After I finished my review, I allowed the group I edited to see what I said and they seemed to take my criticisms into consideration. I have yet to see my peer edit sheet but I can’t wait because I really want to know what others think of my film.