Progress Report #5/CAP Hollywood Review

 

This is my CAP Hollywood movie.  It's called The Ticket.

As of Wednesday, the 29th, CAP Hollywood is officially over - and the best part is that we successfully completed our film!

It was actually exported last Friday, so we didn't work on it at all this week.  Wednesday night everyone in CAP, and most of our parents, arrived at school dressed up.  The kids all walked the red carpet and students who did CAP Hollywood last year acted as paparazzi and took our pictures.  We then all went into the auditorium where we watched all the films.  Then the nominations for the different awards were read (the awards were the typical Oscar ones - best actor/actress, best director, best editor...) and the awards were given out.  Our film didn't win anything, but we were nominated for best actor.

I think that this was a really fun and clever project.  I liked how we incorporated what we did in English to what we do in Media.  Also, I think that the time frame the we were given to do this project was perfect.  Were it any longer, no one would have felt pressure to try to get it done and so on the last day everyone would realize time is up and the videos wouldn't be good.  Were it any shorter, no one would have had time to produce a quality video.  It was very helpful that we could stay after school any day to edit, we could come in on the weekends, and we could come in before school.

My group's video, The Ticket, is at the top of this post.  It is about a boy who finds a lottery ticket and then has to decide what he should do with it.

Enjoy!

Progress Report #4

We finished our film!  We came in early, stayed late, and came in at lunch.  We had some crises along the way:  Clips getting overlapped,  music not rendering, random black frames, realizing we didn't get every shot we needed so trying to work around that....  We did, however, fix all of those problems to make what I think is a really great short film.  It is definitely not the best one out of all of my peers' but I think we did really well considering the prior editing and film experience the members of my group had (none before this year).

This week I came into school early to edit all the days our editing sweet was available.  I also came in at lunch a few days during the week to edit.

CAP Hollywood is Wednesday night and I'm really excited to watch the other groups' films.  I should have our up on my blog next week.

Progress Report #3

Our film is still progressing at a steady pace; however if we want to have a quality film by THIS FRIDAY (which came a whole lot faster than I thought it would) we really have to buckle down and work.  We have a solid rough cut but we need to add more cutaways and shots that clarify what is going on.  Also, we need to do a voice over of lottery numbers being read and we need to pan the audio.

This week I was responsible for making a group's movie poster which I think turned out pretty good.  I also did some editing.

This week we need to finish our film!  Each person in our group is choosing a day or two to come in and do some extra editing.  I am planning on adding and perfecting the extra cutaways.  I am also planning on making the transitions smooth.

I should have our final film up on my blog at the end of this week or the week afterwords.

 This is a picture of some members of my group and I filming our video.

Progress Report #2

On Monday of last week we finished watching all our clips (which there are a lot of but we forgot to get some shots...oops) and we sorted them into folders to make it easier on ourselves when we are editing.  We also got a rough cut of the first half of the film.  Currently, we have some random piece of music in our film that we are probably going to switch out... who knows though.

A challenge that we faced this week is that some shots we just didn't get, but its easy to work around those so that's okay.  The real challenge that we've faced during editing is making sure there is continuity.  Some of the shots we have our actor facing one way and then all of the sudden he is facing the other, or his hand is in one spot and then we switch to a close-up and it is in another.  These shots are hard to work around.  We are cutting as close as possible to make it look like everything is continuous but sometimes I feel like it is kind of obvious that their is not great continuity.

Again, like last week, we didn't each have a specific job.  We switch around and take turns doing the editing and such.  I sorted our clips into different folders and did some of the editing.  I also chose and imported the music, but, like I said before, we are probably going to end up switching songs because ours doesn't fit as well as I originally thought it would.

At the end of this week, my goal for our group is to have a rough cut of the entire film.  I think that we can definitely get that done.  We only have one day of class this week because of AP tests but we will now be able to start staying after school to work on the film.

CAP Hollywood Progress Report #1

So turns out our first progress report was supposed to be done this weekend, not last weekend, so I turned last week's post into a pre-progress report and this week's post into the first real progress report.

This week we got all our filming done.  I was a it concerned about how the filming would go, but it went great!  Tuesday, the first day we filmed, was a dreary day so not too many people were at the gelato place where we filmed, which made filming a whole lot easier.  Also, the guy working there was super nice and really into our film.  Wednesday was a really nice day, but luckily we were pretty much filming outside the gelato store so it didn't matter that it was crowded.

On Thursday we started watching all of our footage and there is so much.  Its kind of overwhelming.  We've been deleting the ones that obviously won't work as we go through but there is still a lot.  Hopefully what we end up with in the end is good.

This week I went to the gelato place to make sure that they were okay with us filming there.  I also filmed with my group on Tuesday and Wednesday (my technical role is director but I did some of the filming as well and other people in my group did some of the directing).  Additionally, I helped my group go through our footage.  There wasn't really any individuals doing one task, so far all the work has been pretty evenly split.

By the end of our next class (Monday) I hope that our group will have finished watching all the of the footage.  By the end of the week I am hoping that we will have each of the clips in a very basic line-up so we can see the order of them and establish what we have.

CAP Hollywood Pre-Progress Report

Our latest CAP project is titled CAP Hollywood.  In English we wrote short stories, then we got into groups and are turning those short stories into short films.

The story my group is doing is the classic "Someone finds a lottery ticket, what do they do with it?" story.

So far my group (Katherine, Jacob, and Ross) has done a lot of pre-production planning.  We have a script, actors, costumes, props and so on.  Yesterday, I went to a gelato store near our school to ask if we could film there in this up coming week.  The lady I talked to said yes, so that is really good news.

We are going to try to get all of our filming done on Tuesday and Wednesday so we can maximize our editing time.  The films are being shown May 29.

I'll post another progress report next week!

 

Image Source: Lottery Tickets

The Oscars

Tonight (Sunday, February 24, 2013) are the 85th Academy Awards (a.k.a. the Oscars)!  I'm really excited!

Here is a link to the Oscar website which tells all the nominees, a little bit about the movie, and a trailer for it.

I though I might try to explain the voting system for the Academy Awards.  Members of the Academy are the ones who vote (pretty much everyone who is part of a movie is a member of the Academy - except for extras).  The members are given a list of all the nominees in each category and then they rate the movies/actors/directors/things in the other categories in the order of preference (favorite to least favorite).  Let's say that the votes for Best Picture are being counted:  all the number 1 votes are distributed to their respective movie.  Then, the votes from the number 1 movie with the least votes are redistributed to the movie that the voter put as their number 2.  This continues with number 3, 4, 5 and so on until there are only the top two movies left.  Whichever has more votes wins.  The Washington Post made a really good sample of this where it takes you through the process with your votes.  Here is the link.

There may also be some potential firsts in tonight's Oscars.  At nine years old, if Quvenzhané Wallis wins Best Actress, she will be the youngest person ever to win an Oscar.  At 86 years old, if Emmanuelle Riva wins Best Actress, she will be the oldest person ever to win an Oscar.  

The video below is called Paperman.  It is nominated for Best Short Film - Animated.  It is made by John Kahrs.

 

Gross Feet!

 

Last week CAP hosted around 14 foreign exchange students from England.  During their stay we were assigned a project where we had to make a 60 second film in the one week.  The catch is that we had to use a random prop.  Ours were these huge, gross, disgusting feet. 

When we first saw the prop we got we were all freaked out.  If the feet look horrible in the film, they looked even worse in real life.  Then, we had to start brainstorming for out video.  It took awhile, but eventually we all agreed on an idea.

The premise is that there is a new girl who has normal feet and everyone else has the weird feet.  The new girl thinks that her new class is strange and they think that she is strange.

From this project I learned how to crop the screen on final cut pro.  I didn't know how to do that before and I think it is a good skill to know.  I also learned how important it is to plan your script in advance (ours didn't have the greatest detail which made filming difficult) and how important it is to take multiple shots (we had to go back and redo one or two shots and some we didn't have time to redo so we just made the best with what we had).

I thought this project was pretty fun and I also liked how it was different from everything else we've done.  Originally I thought we would not finish, but we did, and I am happy with the results.

A list of our shots:

-Setting the scene that this is a classroom.  We are trying to make everything seem normal.

-The new girl comes in and seems a little bothered.

-The class sees the new girl and seems bothered/grossed out.  Sorry that the camera is a little shaky.

-Close-up of the new girl's face.  She is really freaked out now.

-Shots of the gross feet.

-Girl's face being freaked out.

-More feet.

-The new girl's "normal" feet.

-The class being freaked out about the girl.

-The teacher introducing the new girl.

-The teacher's weird feet and then the new girl's "normal" feet.

-A student asking the new girl what is wrong with her feet.

-The new girl being totally freaked out.

Living in DC

Our newest independent video assignment was to create a video between 60 and 90 seconds that shows what it is like to live in this area.  We also had to make sure that there is background noise, like people talking.

On Sunday, January 20, the day before the inauguration, my family and I went into DC for the day.  Even though I don't exactly live in DC I thought it would be pretty cool to film this assignment there.

The day we went had perfect weather.  It was sunny and around 60 degrees.  I tried to capture some of the pre-inauguration excitement.  There were all sorts of people walking around, talking about their plans for the next day and everyone was really friendly - and they were all there for the same reason which sort of created a kind of invisible bond between everyone.

Anyways, I edited this video on wevideo.com which has pretty good editing for a free online site.  I turned down the sound from the clips I filmed because you could hear the wind and such, but no worries Mr. Mayo, you can still hear people talking.  I also decided to add some music which I got directly off of wevideo.  They provide it for their users to use in their videos.  And the music I added doesn't even drown out the sound of people talking!

I hope you like my video (as always, its a bit jumpy and stuff - I haven't quite figured out all that stylistic stuff yet.)

*The first person you can hear singing is James Taylor practicing.  During the merry-go-round scene you can also hear a recording of Bruce Springsteen that was playing through the jumbotrons. 

Challenges of Making a Documentary

A few weeks ago I wrote a post on how we are making a documentary for our media class.

Well, at first I thought this would be really easy - an interview with our principal on she choose for our school to have a closed lunch, what some students think, and some interviews with the stores that agreed not to sell food to students during school hours.  Throw in some B-Roll (secondary footage) of kids eating lunch and the Woodmoor area (the place near our school with all of the restaurants), and, wa-la! we would have an A+ op-doc.

Unfortunately, this is not the case (as you've probably already figured out).  We were on a roll when we got our interview with the principal talking about the policy and her decision (and she agreed to a really good idea we had which I'll come back to later) and the head security guard who came up with the idea of not having businesses sell to students during the school day.  We even got some really good interviews with students.  Things started going downhill for us when our idea (which I mentioned before) didn't work out.  Our idea was to try to leave campus and see if the security guards stopped us and then continue on to Woodmoor to see if the businesses really didn't serve us food.  Our principle said that our idea was great, as long as our teacher came with us (which he agreed to) and we had parental permission (which we did).  On the day we planned to execute our plan, we found out that our vice principal had said no to the idea.  Not only were we disappointed because we wouldn't be going out for lunch, but that was going to be a major part of our documentary.  Then, later that day when we tried to interview the business owners and managers after school, they wouldn't agree to go on camera and we were not allowed to film in the stores.  I get that they want to keep their privacy but those were all going to be important parts of our video.

We are currently making a new plan for our video (we did write down the interviews with the managers) so we can just do voice overs of those but our documentary won't be all that we hoped it to be (I hope this isn't a regular occurrence in film/documentary making).  I think we'll be able to pull it all together and still have a great documentary though!

I think we're going to be done sometime in February so I'll be sure to post it on my blog then!

This is the Woodmoor shopping center near our school.  They have a Starbucks, Chipotle, Subway, a delicious deli, a bakery, and a bunch of other restaurants.

Image Source:  Woodmoor Shopping Center

Documentary Project

Our newest media assignment is to make a documentary.  We were given an option of four different types of documentaries to make:

1. A profile documentary - a documentary on an interesting person in our community. (NOTE: The video I connected the link to has some really graphic scenes of Chad Jones's leg.)
2. The C-SPAN competition documentary - make a documentary answering the question what should Obama do in 2013.
3. An indiegogo documentary - a documentary to raise funds for our change project.
4. An Op-doc - (this is what my group is doing.) a documentary showing your opinion on an issue.

Like I just said, my group is making an op-doc.  Ours is going to be about open and closed-lunches.  Our school has a closed-campus lunch and recently announced that they have made an agreement with local restaurants where the restaurants will not sell food to students during the day.  Obviously students should follow the rules to stay safe but the restaurants are also businesses that need to make money.

We plan on showing benefits and consequences to open and closed-lunches and even testing the policy by going to one of the restaurants and seeing what happens (we will have school approval, of course!)

I think this is going to be a difficult and long project (it goes through January) but I think that ours will turn out really well.

Fall Film

A few days ago I wrote about the progress of my fall film.  The assignment was to capture fall anyway we wanted to in 60 seconds.  I finally finished mine!

I have shots of trees that I saw and looked cool and leaves on the ground.  I also have shots of a creek and path near my house which look really nice in the fall.  I have various Halloween decorations and I have some different fall foods.

I'm really happy with how my video turned out.  I found an effect called "Old Film" in WeVideo which I added to my video and I really like.

If the time that I actually spent on the project is added it up, it isn't really much time; however there are gaps of about a week between the times I spent working on different sections of the project.  I first started working on the project a few days after it was assigned.  I did all the filming and the next day I put all the clips into wevideo.  Then, during our days off because of the hurricane, I did all of the editing and found the music I wanted.  I couldn't figure out how to import music into wevideo but today I finally learned how so I added the music to complete my video.

A few times when I was editing I got pretty frustrated with WeVideo.  It wouldn't let me put transitions between all the clips and I found it difficult to figure out how to cut clips and import the music I wanted.  Also, when I tried to export my video to YouTube I couldn't find where it exported to for awhile. Once I figured all that out though WeVideo worked really well.

All in all, I actually liked this assignment and I'm really happy with how my video turned out.

Finished Dystopian Trailer

So a while ago we started this project where we come up with a premise for a dystopian movie and then film a trailer for it - I wrote a post about it before where I put up a sample movie poster for it.  Anyways, we finally finished our trailer and I posted it above so you can watch it.

Our trailer is called iPower.  The basic story is that sometime in the future machines, specifically phones, will control everything and everyone but without the knowledge of the people.  The machines can send certain people back in time to kill those who have too much knowledge in the future.  Eventually one girl finds out what is happening so sends herself back in time to try to stop the machines from ever being invented.

I think that our trailer came out pretty good, especially considering that no one in our group really knew how to use Final Cut Pro before the project started.  It was all a learning process for us and I feel like that I am MUCH more comfortable navigating Final Cut than I was four weeks ago.  There is still A LOT more that I need to learn how to do on final cut; adjusting sound on music, key frames, transitions between shots (like fades), and overlaying clips are just a few to get the list started.

I enjoyed this project.  I liked how it connected things we were doing in English to Media and I liked how it gave us some freedom but it was guided (yeah, I know, kinda contradictory).   It was fun going out and filming and figuring out what we were even doing.  There were a lot of moments that happened when we were filming that might not have been so funny then but looking back now are hilarious.  My favorite is when we got yelled at by a farmer lady saying we were killing the planet by filming.

Even though this project required some dedication, I wouldn't mind doing another one like it.  And I'm really looking forward to Friday when we get to watch all the other trailers - I've seen a few already and they're really well done.

Pre- Fall Video

So last weekend I was working on my fall video.  The assignment is to "Capture the Fall" and make a 60 second video doing so.

I went to the bike path near my house and recorded the creek, a bridge, some leaves, a biker and a bunch of other stuff.  I also recorded various Halloween decorations I saw around and liked.

During our days off this week I worked on editing my video.  I used wevideo to use it and it worked really well, however it was kinda wierd because my video kept getting SHORTER, when I wasn't cutting clips.  Oh well, it all worked out.

I just have one more thing to do before my video finishes which is adding music.  I found some music that I like that I think works with my video except I can't figure out how to import it into wevideo.  I think that wevideo might not let you import music which is really frustrating. They (meaning wevideo) have their own selection of music to choose from which I'll probably just end up doing.

I'll have the video ready to post next week so I'll probably be adding on to this post then.

5 x 5 Video Project

This is my 5x5 video project.  It shows the walk I take to the bus stop each morning.

1. The first clip shows my feet walking up my street.
2. The second clip is a shows a road I have to cross to get to the bus stop.
3. The third clip shows the bus pulling up.
4. The fourth clip shows the bus pulling into the school's parking lot.
5. The fifth clip shows me walking into the school.

 I created my 5x5 when I was walking to the bus stop one morning.  I used a little hand-held video camera to shoot my clips and I edited my 5x5 with WeVideo.  We video worked really well for me.  It was easy to figure out how to use and easy to use.

I am really proud of my project, mostly because I edited it by myself and learned some basic editing skills while doing so.  I think that it turned out pretty well.  I found some good clips in the ones that I made and put them all together.

I don't really have any ideas for our next video challenge.  I have not really done any video classes so I don't know any typical film projects.  Maybe we add on to our 5x5 with an opening or closing credit and some music. 

Dystopian Trailer Critique

The Hunger Games. Gary Ross. PG-13. 2012
When 17 year-old Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is sent to fight to her death for the entertainment of the cruel Capitol, she uses the opportunity to ignite a spark and start a rebellion against those taking away the freedom of the people.

The trailer for Gary Ross' The Hunger Games is exemplary in its portrayal of a dystopian society, characteristics of the protagonist, and summarizing the movie's plot.  The first thing one notices are the characteristics of the dystopian society which are captured through the telescreens, images of everyone dressed in the same drab grey color, a fence separating the outside world, and so on.  Then one notices the outstanding personality of the protagonist, Katniss.  One sees her ability to hunt, her caring and motherly side, her slightly weaker side, and her strong will to achieve her goals and her courage.  Finally, as the trailer finishes, the viewer comes away with a sense of what the movie will be about.  Through a voice over, one learns what the Hunger Games are; through words one learns of the intensity of the games, and through snippets of dialogue one learns of the struggles the characters will endure throughout the film.

In my dystopian movie trailer I plan to show several shots of dirty, run down neighborhoods to show how the society is falling apart.  I will include pieces of dialogue from the protagonist to help develop who they are and to show what their hopes are to change the society.  Finally, I plan to use words to establish when and where the trailer is taking place and voice overs to help establish the plot.

Movie Review

I read a movie review of "Airplane!"  It was written by Janet Maslin in July of 1980 and published in the New York Times.

The review starts by talking about the energy that "Airplane!" has.  The writer states their opinion, calling the movie "clever and confident" as well as "furiously energetic."  The review slowly leads into a  brief synopsis of the plot and then it talks about some of the characters and their best moments in the movie.

Maslin weaves in the three aspects of film, literary, dramatic, and cinematic, by bringing up different actors and different scenes as the review and plot go on.  The review focuses most on the literary aspects of film.  It often mentions different characters, the plot, and the setting.

The tone of the movie review is lighthearted.  Maslin reccomends "Airplane!", as do I, and only speaks highly of the movie.

For our quarterly movie reviews I think we should be given some basic guidelines but mostly freedom.  Some suggested questions that we can touch on if we get stuck would be helpful; however, I think we should have more freedom than we have guidelines.

Here is a link to my annotated movie review: http://diigo.com/0ssum