Creative Critical Reflection: Borderline

 Finally finished the project, it was a long ride without a doubt.

Watch my CCR here!

Film Opening: Borderline

 After 8 weeks of researching, planning and working I'm proud to say we finished our film opening. We had a couple problems here and there but we managed to pull through, and have fun working on the project, either way, here's our film opening, Borderline

Reflections on project

     At this point there is no time to go back or reshoot, what we have is final. Over the course of 8 weeks we researched and discussed the different ways we could get our message across, with the proper techniques  according to drama film "standards". We went through some troubles, and some break throughs, but at the end of the day, we learnt a lot more than we struggled.

    I learnt a lot about the process of filming and editing and all the important details behind it, it wasn't as easy as it seemed. It was very complicated not having continuity errors throughout the film, specially because we had many different shooting days, and Florida's weather is very unpredictable.

    When choosing the location I didn't take in mind the fact that it was close to a highway. This caused the audios to always have a lot of background noise, which obviously isn't the greatest thing in the world. We tried recording audio with separate phones, or headphones but it was very complicated and still not perfect.

    Either way after all of this it was a learning experience. I learnt how to properly record shots so that what's happening on the screen is relevant.

    I believe our film opening conveys what we wanted it to from the beginning. Its just a teens relatable life related to college/his complicated future, and his friends attempt at providing help to ensure his friend isn't a failure.

    All being said, working on this project has really prepared me for any other large/lengthy project I will work on in the future. It helped me realize how to properly time manage so that there is room for mistakes on the first days of work. I look forward to working on large projects in the future.

Reshooting

     Reshooting is something that's part of most projects, me and my partner accepted that last week when we realized that some of the filming was improperly done. We didn't stress out and rolled with it. We chose to film someday at the beginning of this week since that's when my partner got back from spring break.

    We decided to reshoot for various reasons. The most important one being for the fact that we needed continuity, and they way some of our clips were put together by the lighting wasn't very normal or natural. Plus we also had the struggle of running out of battery on both of our phones, while not being close to my friends house. All of this in combination with other factors lead for us to schedule some reshooting. 

    Despite our problems we still aren't stressed since we know we have a small amount of clips left to retouch and refilm. We feel confident with our available time.

week 2 of filming day 2

    Filming day two was most definitely less eventful than day one. We ended up changing a couple scenes due to the fact that for some odd reason my friends dog hates me, probably due to my cats. This was the least of problems considering what happened next.

    

    It was all going ok until we realized that the audio was going to be an issue, we managed to figure out ways to record the audio but it wasn't perfect. The sun started to get low which meant we had to finish recording quick, not only that, we weren't close to his house so it wasn't like we could do any pit stops to quickly change things up or look for anything.

    I then realized how low my phone battery had gotten to from filming for the CCR plus filming the entire day, I ended up running out of battery which led to us filming with my friends phone, this was bad because it would cause problems with continuity since I had been using his phone as a "prop" through the whole film opening.

    Shortly after we also ran out of battery on his phone too, fun.

    We quickly ran home and charged up in hopes of finishing the last clips, we recorded for about another hour, to then realize that it had gotten too dark on the last clip, so the sequence of events wouldn't make any sense. 

    To conclude the filming day we gave up and decided to meet up on Tuesday or Monday when he gets back to finish off the last clips and details we missed.

    

week 2 of filming day 1

    We started our second week of filming strong on day one, we got a lot of work done quickly, we managed to finish all the shots inside of my friends room, which helped with cleaning up the "set". We ran into absolutely no problems in day one which was great. 

    We managed to finish everything but 8 clips pretty quickly which led to us planning our blog posts and editing ideas earlier. 

    There isn't really much to say except for the fact that I'm looking forward to day two of filming, we have to record the big clips which include the most dialogue and movement.

Scene Development

    In my opinion scene development is a big factor of film openings since they allow this short projection of the film in a decently short amount of time. Me and my partner had this in mind throughout our project brainstorming, which allowed for a great flow and development in between the scenes. 

    Some of those ideas included making sure that the dialogue would flow towards a significant point. We didn't want to have insignificant filler dialogue, this meant that we had to change the script often, making it flow better and sound more natural.

    Most of our scenes followed this pattern which led to the main talk being related to college and future.

    Our main character would mention his underachieving self, as the secondary character developed the talk of the scene to be about college and future. This happens throughout all of our scenes. Not only did the second character develop our dialogue but Peter's dad did too, interrupting him when being lazy with phone calls.

    Judging by our decisions and the look and "feeling" of what we have recorded up to date, we are doing a great job with scene development and the film opening should come out great.