Final Blogs: Final Project- Movie Creative Critical Reflection

Once our movie was finally complete, my group members and I focused our attention on the creative critical response (CCR). This CCR was a bit different from the rest. Instead of it being typed, it was being recorded. My group members and I learned that we should take a creative approach when doing this. The approach that we decided to take towards the CCR was a television interview. We came up with a plan to meet at one of our houses and do the interviews. To make it more proper and easier, we were going to get one of our friends to be the interviewer. However, due to the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic, plans changed. Due to the virus, there were many rules and regulations placed on us for our safety and the safety of others. We were told to self-quarantine and social distance. This left us lost on what to do. We were concerned as to how we were going to get this done with the self-quarantine and social distancing order. Fortunately, one of my group members came up with a brilliant idea. This idea was for each of us to send in videos of ourselves answering one CCR question. To prevent confusion, we assigned questions. One of my group members enlisted the help of her friend wh agreed to be the interviewer or host. That same group member volunteered to put together the videos to make one. Some of the videos had to be reshot because the time limit was not reached. Once those videos were done and all put together, the CCR was finally complete. We believe that it came out well.

Final Blog: Second Project

At this time when my group members and I became more comfortable with the filming process, it was time to jump into our next project. This project was a music video. For this project, each group got to choose any song they wanted as long as it was school appropriate. This granted us creative control. So, we were quite pleased and enthusiastic about the journey. The song my group members and I chose was, Catch Me Outside by Florida native rapper, Ski Mask The Slump God. The planning process for this project was a breeze. Due to the song's fun, hype and jumpy beat and flow my group members and I decided to make the music video a fun "Girls night out" type of theme. However, that's not all. We also revealed at the end that it was all a dream that everyone was having at the same time. We shot the video at the Sawgrass Mills Mall during the night. A few of the scenes were shot at one of my group members' houses. Everyone in the group was an actor in the video and a director. When filming this video, not everything ran quite smoothly. For instance, not every store in the mall allowed us to film. Regardless, we worked around our shortcomings and were able to produce an amazing music video. During the filming process, we truly enjoyed ourselves and had extremely high hopes for the outcome of the music video.  After Lauren finished editing the music video, the rest of my group members and I were amazed at how good it came out. In the end, we were very pleased with the project and couldn't wait to begin the next one.

Final Blogs: Final Project- Movie

After about a year's worth of preparation, it was finally time for the last project. This project was to film the first two minutes of a movie. In the first two minutes of every movie, you will see the titles. The titles introduce the main credits. This includes the production studio, the film studio, the director(s), the actors, etc. It was highly stressed that we do not make the movie seem like a trailer. That is why certain movie genres were ruled out when deciding on one for the film. For example, comedy was ruled out because in the first two minutes of a movie it would be difficult to tell that the movie is a comedy. However, deciding on what genre our movie should be wasn't a problem. My group members and I were sold on the idea of doing a thriller. After we decided on the genre, we came up with three different plots. In the end, we went with Aaliyah's plot because it was the most original and wouldn't be too difficult to do. Once this was settled and the filming process began, we found ourselves running into problems when it came to our schedules. As a result, we got really behind on filming, but things began to calm down and eventually, we got a majority of our scenes done to have something descent to turn in for the peer review. After we analyzed what the other group said about our film and it was time to reshoot, we knew exactly what we needed to switch, add-in, or take out. Not too long after this when my group members and I were planning the reshoot filming schedule, the schools closed due to the COVID-19 (Corona Virus) Pandemic. We thought that this would be a disaster, but instead, it gave us more time to reshoot. Even though we didn't have the camera from the school, all of my group members had an iPhone 11 which has been cleared to use for filming. Once we finished filming Lauren began editing and the film came out amazing. Though it didn't start out too great at first, everything started to come together to eventually create one of the best projects we have ever done.

Final Blogs: First Project- Commercial

The first project that my group members and I worked on was the commercial. When beginning this project we had high hopes for the outcome. To start off the project each group was given an identical list of companies to choose from to advertise for. The company that my group members and I chose was McDonald's. We focused our attention on the "Happy Meal". More specifically, the toy that comes with it. We chose this approach to appeal to the target audience: children. In the typical McDonald's commercials, you would see a happy family eating their meals together, and the kids playing with their new toys. These commercials imply that the children are the center of the household. To add on, when children see something that they want, typically on the television, they run and tell their parent(s) and the majority of the time their parent(s) would say yes because they can't seem to refuse their young one. So, once that the McDonald's "Happy Meal" commercial airs and the toy catches the children's eye, the sales of the product will increase.

 At the time the toy that came with it, for females, was the Barbie Doll. Once we discovered this we knew exactly how we wanted to film our commercial. The costumes for the commercial were casual, child based clothing for the actors playing the children, casual adult clothing for the actor playing the mother, and plain black pants, shirt, and visor for the actor playing the McDonald’s employee. The lighting in the commercial was natural. The actors were everyone in the group: Lauren, Aaliyah, Anishkaneel, and I. There was no makeup used for the making of this commercial. The props that we will be using are the McDonalds Happy Meal box and the contents that come in it: the sandwich/ chicken nuggets, a small fries, a small drink (milk, juice, or soda), apple slices, and a toy. The setting of the scene was the Upper Classmen Patio outside and, briefly, the doors of the Media Center. For this project, we didn't have much time to film. We were only allowed to film on campus and during the class period for two days. This became quite frustrating because we found ourselves trying to rush to make sure everything is correct, and we had to return to class once it was time for lunch which was an hour to thirty minutes after the beginning of class. This project didn't turn out how we had hoped, but it was our first project and it taught us a lot.

Re-shoot Blog: Day One

Today, Friday, March 20, 2020, my group members and I began to reshoot our film. We decided to film on this day because this day was the best for about all of us including one actor. The only people missing were my group member Anishkaneel and one of the actors, Bobby. However, this was not detrimental. We still had the two main characters. During this reshoot we were very productive. We only have a couple of n reshoot. In this reshoot we added and improved many different parts of the film. For instance, we reshot scenes that weren’t properly shot before. These scenes were scenes that were rushed and last minute. We also filmed scenes that weren’t shot before. In some of these scenes that were reshot the whole setting changed to make the scenes line up better. Another thing we approved was the sound. As previously mentioned in my past peer review blogs, one of the critiques that was given to us about our film was that the sound was awful. As a result, during this reshoot all of the actors made sure that they were louder. After we finished shooting everything, we decided to plan to plan for our next day reshooting. We plan on having everyone there to shoot whatever we have left to shoot. We predicted that this will be quick and we’ll have enough time to re-edit together. Overall, we were very satisfied with how today turned out and we have high hopes for the next day. Though, things may change due to the Corona Virus; all we can do is take it one step at a time.

Reshoot Blog: The Plan

Now that the peer review is over with, it is now time to reshoot. My group members and I planned to reshoot the week of the 15th, however the unexpected happened. Due to the Covid-19, commonly known as the Corona Virus, epidemic, school closed for that week. When first hearing this news my group members and I thought that it would be even better if we filmed during this week, but unfortunately we were given false hope. The government issued a state of emergency. As a result, we had to self quarantine ourselves, limit our time out, and not be around big groups. Even though it became a bit more difficult, we didn’t let this stop us. On Monday, March 16, 2020, we received a notification from our teacher. This notification said that, we should remain on schedule, in terms of our blog due dates, film submission, and Creative Critical Reflection (CCR), just in case since there wasn’t any word from Cambridge as of yet. On Tuesday, March 17, 2020, we planned to film on Thursday, March 19, 2020, and try to get as many scenes shot as possible. However, we got the news on Tuesday that school will be closed until April 15, 2020. Following this was another notification that said, all state wide tests we canceled and any requirements that are needed to be met in order for us to advance to the next grade or graduate will not be taken into account. My group members and I all had one question. What does this mean for our AICE classes and their exams?  We were confused and left in the dark. One thought that occurred was that we’re were pretty much done with the movie and everything else. Though, later that day we received a notification from our teacher that everything will go as planned according to the due dates and exam dates. Upon hearing this, my group members and I made a plan to film Friday, March 20, 2020. We suddenly became more optimistic. We have high hopes that everything will go as planned.

Editing Blog: The Re-edit

On Tuesday March 10, 2020, and Today, Thursday March 12, 2020, my group members and I decided to begin to re-edit our film. It was done using one of my group members’, Lauren, MacBook laptop. This same device was used to initially edit our film. The person assigned to edit was Lauren herself. She decided to begin in class since we were all there, and it was overall more convenient and efficient. The reason that prompted us to re-edit our film was the results of the peer review. As previously mentioned in my last two blogs, the class participated in a peer review. This allowed the film to be seen with a fresh set of eyes, and bring to light something that we might have missed. In the peer review sheet the other group states, in terms of editing, that we didn’t haven the necessary 10 titles. They also stated that the titles weren’t in the correct order. Although, this isn’t all that we did.

In class we also took our music into more consideration. We already had a plan for the music. However, the music we found didn’t fully fit the film’s mood in our opinion. As a result, Lauren and Anishkaneel began to search the internet using the search engine “Google” which led us to the website “Premium Beats”. This process wasn’t too nerve-racking, but it did take longer than expected. Fortunately, we never planned to use a copyrighted song. Instead we searched for royalty-free ominous music. Throughout this process there was one problem that we did run into. The people that made and provided the music for a website the search engine led us to, had their producer tag in it. This was a bit challenging since it wasn’t ideal, but we have not given up hope.