Congratulations! Your Prize for Finishing Is.... More Writing!

Hello! After a few days spent trying to blur a video (I told you I was hopeless at editing), I finally added the extra bits that I wanted to complete the image I had for the opening. So the good news is: Editing is over! No more torture!

    The blurring of the walking video was a nightmare. I tried fiddling with settings and effects on Openshot to see if I could have the video gradually blur, to show Martin getting unconcentrated, but no matter what I did, the blurring on Openshot was not easy to work with. Either the blurring took too long to get put into effect, or the image wasn't blurry enough, it eventually got to the point where I would save a "blurry" version of the video then run it through Openshot again in an attempt to double-blur it. 

    These efforts were in vain however, and it left me stumped for the better part of Monday. In order to distract myself from this failure, I added the nighttime ambient sounds and the internal ringtone, which made me feel better about how the opening was tied together, albeit somewhat haphazardly.

The preview for my OUTLINE of the CCR script.

    On Tuesday, I looked at a few video tutorials on my phone about how to get the level of blur I wanted, but nearly all of them involved reshooting the scene again, which wasn't an option for me since Danny's actor had since shaved, and would ruin what little continuity I still had. So instead, I tried animating the title card. Note for future reference: Not a good animator. I ended up making a animated title sequence on PowerPoint of all things, which will now haunt me forever.

    I also started some work on my CCR on Tuesday, since I figured I was pretty much done with the brunt of the workload for this project and could relax a little bit with some light script writing. I was very much mistaken. When I laid out the list of all topics I wanted to touch upon in my CCR video, it dawned on me that this would not be a walk in the park. Merely listing the topics had taken up a whole page of paper, which set up how daunting the task was. I ended up writing a rough draft for about half of all of the topics last night, and I plan on finishing writing my first draft tonight. No spoilers on the script though!

WHAT DOES ANY OF THIS MEAN???

    Today, after I got home from school, I decided it was time to stop dragging this on and finally blur out the video. But how? I was forced to use an old enemy of mine, something I swore never to touch again... Adobe Premiere. Even after spending 30 minutes exploring the settings and effects on Adobe, I refused to ask my peers for help out of stubbornness, but miraculously found a setting on Adobe to reduce sharpness and make everything blurrier.

    However, this STILL wasn't blurry enough, even after running it through the old double-blur method, so I figured I'd try to illustrate this "out of focus" experience in a different way, which ended up being messing with the coloring of the video as well as adding a vignette around the edges of the frame to make it feel like he's zeroing in on his target. This ended up being satisfactory enough, but I still have no idea how to use Adobe.

    As I write this blog, I'm uploading what I have for the opening onto a private youtube channel to send to a few friends for some peer review. I'll most likely use their criticisms for a blog post, and to fix any mistakes that have slipped past my very tired eyes. Until then, however, I need to go take a nap.

Maybe Sorta Kinda Finished?

 Hello again! It's been a few days since I've been able to write on this blog, since I was on a family road trip for the latter half of this week, as I mentioned in the previous blog post. While it was nice being on the open road and touring various colleges, it felt like all I could think about was editing this opening, and how I was feeling less and less secure about the state of it. However, these feelings pretty much dissipated once I got home and looked at its current state.

I had spent Friday night and some of Saturday afternoon working on editing the opening, which mostly involved cutting it down from its three minute runtime into fitting into the two minute timeframe. It was a daunting task to cut out so much footage, but when I sat down and really looked at it, it wasn't so bad.

After working on it over the past two days, this is pretty much what its looking like as of right now.

Major changes to the video include the splicing together of two shots that I needed to be mixed together (One shot where Danny is monologuing about some random game and another where Martin is focused on his next victim), which was crucial to blend together because I needed to illustrate that  Martin was zoning out and thinking about killing the person he's watching without spoon-feeding it to the audience.

The way I dealt with this was by cutting out almost all of the footage of Danny monologuing and layering the audio recording of his rant over the video of the camera following the victim, which saved me a lot of extra seconds on the runtime and overall makes the sequence flow more smoothly than if it were two separate videos. To further connect the two videos, I added a ear ringing sound effect that I found off of YouTube, which faintly starts when Danny starts talking about videogames and persists, getting uncomfortably loud while the video of the victim walking is playing. I also added a fading out effect to Danny's speech to work in tandem with the ringing SFX to illustrate the idea of zoning out.

Another idea I had was to have the visuals for the scene slowly start to blur and get out of focus, but I was unable to do this because of limitations on the editing system (it only blurs entire scenes, there's no option to apply the effect gradually), which was an oversight on my part. Another way to accomplish this effect would've been to pull out of focus on my phone when we were filming the scene, but this idea hadn't come to me at that moment, and it's too late to refilm and reschedule with all actors involved. I'll continue to look into implementing this effect by experimenting with settings on Openshot or by using another editing app (I might deign to use Premiere for this), but only if time allows for it.

I also messed around with the final sequence of the opening, which consists of Danny waiting outside of the gas station as well as the slow reveal of the murder. I realized that this section of the opening was abnormally quiet, since there is almost no dialogue in this part, and the notes in the score are few and far between, so the silence is deafening. While I initially considered this to be a good thing, since it illustrated a definitive tonal shift from the more casual comedic start of the opening, I ended up deeming it as awkward and sounding unfinished. 

To fix this awkward silence, I decided to add some ambient nighttime sounds, like crickets chirping and slight winds, making the space feel more real and alive, showing that the world moves on in spite of the death that occurred moments ago. While this change was minimal, I felt happier and more comfortable with the scene than I did before. I made sure to also muffle these nighttime sounds when showing Danny inside the car, to establish that I'm using synchronous sound, further grounding the story in realism.

In addition to the ambient sounds, I also plan on adding an internal ringing phone sound effect to bridge the scene with Danny calling Martin on the phone to the ending of the opening, all the way through to the last scene with Martin cleaning his hands after killing someone. This also fills in the awkward silence I had worried about, but what I liked about it is that it establishes a concrete link between Martin and the killer, clearing up any confusion about who's the person standing over the body in the last shot.

As of now, however, that's all I have. Though when I really think about it, it's pretty much finished, while missing a few nitpicks and edits I have yet to implement. It is currently a functional opening that could be the final product, if I didn't have a few ideas on how to improve it. I also need to add the credits and the title card to the opening, though they're pretty easy to implement. In fact, tomorrow I plan on seeing if I can somewhat animate the title screen to look more professional and similar to a real title card for a film.

But until then, I'll see you later!

Putting Together The Pieces

 Hello! As I'm typing this, I'm currently packing my bags to go on a 3 day road trip with my family tomorrow morning, so this might not be the most quality blog that I've posted. Additionally, there isn't a whole lot of stuff to discuss today, since all it consisted of was picking out my favorite cuts of each shot, downloading them all onto my computer, ordering them, and shuffling them around to see what works best.

    That being said, I feel pretty good about today's progress! I had been feeling a little overwhelmed and unmotivated these past few days, but after seeing an idea of what the project put together (roughly, unedited, but still complete in a way), my passion for the project had been reinvigorated, providing a much-needed moment of refreshment that was missing lately. 

        Getting into the editing side of things, I will admit that editing is decidedly not my forte, so I will avoid using some of the more complicated vernacular for fear of making a fool of myself. Anyways, the operating system that I used to stitch together the first draft of the opening was Openshot Video Editor, and this was for a few reasons. 

First off, it's a free application, so I didn't have to worry about free trials or renewing licenses. My school had provided me with a free version of Adobe Premiere, but I haven't really touched it because it's unfamiliar to me, and I know that if I warm up to it, I'll be locked into a trial renewal scandal or something, which is a situation I'm disinterested in experiencing.

   Secondly, I've worked with Openshot before. In fact, I use Openshot for all of my own personal projects, like editing funny videos of my friends or stitching together compilations of video game footage. My experience with other editing applications is somewhat rudimentary, but in Openshot I am well-versed in its ways, as I've had time to grow into the quirks and conventions of Openshot.

    Lastly, the user interface for Openshot (at least, in my experience) has been much more user-friendly than the super-complex Premiere. I'm a very simple editor, so being barraged with so many options and features that I had no clue how to use made Premiere and other OS's kind of daunting to use, whereas Openshot is very simple and direct, possessing those same features but making them options that you have to actively seek out, rather than have everything offered at once.

This clip is 20 seconds long, but could be shortened 
into fitting the same information into a 5 or 6
second long clip.

    Using Openshot as my editing app, I organized the shots into order, and played around with some of the timing in certain scenes, while experimenting with voice-overs during quiet areas in my opening (which there were a couple of). As of right now, the project is sitting at about three and a half minutes in length, which would be a problem if I knew that a solid minute of it has to be cut down and mixed together, easily shaving off about 40 seconds. To reach my goal of having it be slightly over 2 minutes, all I'd have to do is shorten some of the shot lengths, which may mess up the pacing a little    bit, but it's a necessary evil.
    

Besides this though, there isn't a whole lot to report about, plus I'm very tired (writing at 1.40 AM will do that to you), especially since I have to wake up early tomorrow (today?). I'll be gone for a few days on my trip, but when I get back, I plan on finishing what I've started today... Until then...

Day 5 of Shooting Clean Kill: Finally.. Footage Finished...

 Hello! I'm typing this a little late at night, but I finally got the loose ends tied up from my list I mentioned in my last blog. These loose ends were a missing gas station scene, the murder scene, and Danny's late night car scene.

 I started off the day by going to my local grocery store and getting the materials needed for my fake blood mix, which I then put together after lunch (mixing corn syrup and red food dye) and put into a little bottle for easy transport and application. The mixing process is shown to the right.

    After getting my blood bottle, my filming equipment, and some cleaning supplies ready, I picked up my two actors and headed over to our Dunkin Donuts, which had already approved of our filming in their bathroom for a bit. The filming of the murder went surprisingly smoothly and quickly: my actors instantly knew what they had to do and aided me in setting up for the scene.

 We took a couple of different takes of the scene (one with no blood, one with blood, and one with A LOT of blood). I haven't compared the two last versions in detail yet so I can't choose which will be the official shot.

After filming the murder, we cleaned up the restroom, packed our gear, and bought some donuts to support our doughy benefactors, recharging after the shoot. We would later go to the same gas station that we had shot at a few days ago and shot the one scene that we had inadvertently skipped.

    Danny's late night car scene took place much later at night than I wanted it to be, but it got done. I met up with Cesar at around 11-11.30pm and parked by the gas station. Note for future consideration: filming at gas stations in the middle of the night- not a fun experience. We got it all done as fast as possible and parted ways, and when I got home, I collapsed from exhaustion after a busy day running around town shooting.

    And so, after waking up from my accidental nap, I'm writing this blog, realizing that 3 AM is not a reasonable time to be writing a blog, meaning this is probably a little shoddy compared to my other blogs. Nevertheless, now that I have my footage compiled, I plan on setting aside some time tomorrow to put it all in order and have a working (but non-edited / bland) version of my film put together before I leave on my family trip. Will update you guys on that tomorrow!

The Pressure is Getting To Me

     Hello! This is a much shorter blog post than I'd like to make but I figured I had to face the music and confront something that's been messing with the production: pressure. Recently I've felt as if the deadline's been creeping up on me, winding its way gradually around me like some terrible snake, slowly but surely starting to squeeze... It's safe to say that I'm a little anxious.

As of writing this blog I've put together about half of the 
opening, though there are gaps where I'm missing voice-overs
or scenes I've had to reshoot.

    I know that this isn't a traditional blogging topic but I think that its one that all other students have thought about making, because stress is a universal disease, especially among high school students. Even with all the planning that I've put into this project, pressure still builds up as schedules go awry and deadlines loom just over the horizon. For the past few days, things have been going a little slowly on the production side of the project. Availability for actors change, locations have conflicting times on when we can shoot, and I've been chipping away at editing the footage that I have- something that is definitely not my forte.

        I have three missing items that I need to have in order to put together everything: Martin's voiceover lines, a few shots of Danny waiting in his car, and finally, the murder scene. Luckily, I'm on track to get the first two of these done tonight, since I'm meeting with my actors for a quick shooting session to knock these minor details out of the way. But the murder scene has been a source of anxiety for me over the past few days, something I've been dreading to shoot. There's many moving parts involved in shooting this scene, such as actor availability, venue availability, the making of the fake blood, doing everything in a tight timeframe so we don't anger the management for taking too long... it's just a lot of stuff I need to keep in mind and account for. It's especially difficult because I won't be able to get any work done Wednesday-Friday because my family is taking me out of town, so I have to get everything done either tomorrow or the day after, and I plan on having some time to edit as well.

I think honesty is important in these blogs, and if I were to present everything as going perfectly fine and according to plan, I'm not only being disingenuous to my audience, but also to myself. I firmly believe that by illustrating some of my struggles through this project, I can shed light on a facet of this project that nobody wants to talk about, while also relieving myself of some of my own pressure by being honest.

I'm taking steps to get over this anxiety, and planning ahead with my team on how to make sure everything goes well- at least as "well" as I can achieve. The plan that I'm sticking to for now is to get all of the missing footage and voice-overs I need done by tomorrow, and to put all of the footage together and in order by Tuesday, leaving me in good shape to finish editing everything in totality by the end of this weekend, which will allow me to focus my work into polishing the end product and working on my critical reflection on my process.

Expect the blogs for next week to be about getting the missing footage, discussing editing and the software I chose to use, and when I get back, finishing the editing on the project. I'll be seeing you in tomorrow's blog!

Day 3 & 4 of Shooting Clean Kill: Reshooting

 Hello! I haven't published a blog post on Wednesday and Thursday because of some bad luck and generally being swamped with work. To put it into straight terms, Day 3 was pretty much a wasted day, but Day 4 made up for its shortcomings and progressed the project considerably. What this means for the project was that I missed my self-imposed deadline of having everything done by Thursday. It is what it is, my own disappointment has been pretty deserved, but I can't just throw in the towel and give up. I'll break down what happened on each day, touching upon Day 3's shortcomings and how we learned from that to fix everything on Day 4.

Day 3: A Disasterous Day for Shooting

The Plan

The plan for Wednesday was, in theory, very simple. I would pick up my friends from school, drive over to the gas station we had scouted, and shoot all gas station scenes there, except for the ones that took place at a darker time and the shots that involved the victim walking in front of Martin. I had imagined the whole process wouldn't take more than 2 hours to shoot, taking into account any problems with remembering lines or moving in case we disturbed a gas station customer with our shooting. However, things didn't go according to plan....

The Problems

The first problem with today's shoot had presented itself the night before, when I was watching the news. The reporters were stating that Wednesday would be a very rainy day, especially from between 3pm to 5pm, which was exactly when I planned on filming. I dreaded the weather ruining my filming day, but I shrugged it off, thinking that there's no point in worrying about weather.

    When I awoke the next morning, I received a text from my buddy Wade stating that he had forgotten to bring the mic to school, so I wasn't able to borrow it for the day. While I initially panicked, I proposed driving him to his home after school so that I could pick it up then. This was the agreed plan for most of the day until it wasn't, when he texted me 30 minutes before leaving school, telling me that he wasn't able to go home because of other commitments, and I was therefore unable to get the microphone. This massively stressed me out, since the scenes I was shooting that day were all dialogue-heavy. I lamented the poor planning of the microphone delivery, but continued anyways with my plans, since I had already scheduled a shoot with my two actors.

    As if the first few obstacles weren't enough, the gas station that I had chosen to shoot in was abysmal for our purpose, since it proved to be much busier than I first thought, which pitted us with disgruntled drivers wondering why a few guys had blocked a gas pump, and in general the level of noise was suffocating, I'm not even sure that the presence of the microphone would've changed the fate of the audio quality of the videos we took. Every shot we had was essentially unusable, but we persisted anyways, determined to get some work done.

The Production

    After dealing with all of these problems, Cesar, Blake, and I all were frustrated with the apparent waste of time that we had just invested in. Despite this, we tried to work around the obstacles in our production and so we settled on a solution, which was admittedly tacky and would've been a nightmare to edit, but still allowing us to have something to do that day.

One of the unusable shots I took this accursed day

    After realizing the audio quality was essentially a dumpster fire, what with all the wind, rain, engines running, and speech of other gas station visitors, we came to the idea that maybe we could do the audio separately. And so, they began to act out the script I had provided them with, exaggerating the movements of their lips and expressions since we were essentially shooting a silent film. After this, we got inside my car and did a read-through of the entire script, which was all recorded. The idea was that I could just dub the dialogue over all of the scenes, but in reality this was just a coping mechanism to feel like I didn't waste my day.

Day 4: A Much-Needed Good Day

The Plan

After learning from the train crash that was Wednesday, I was ready to rectify my past mistakes. First, I made sure to text Wade ahead of time to remind him about the microphone (which worked). After that, I checked the weather report, which, much to my pleasure, forecasted clear skies the whole day. And lastly, in an admittedly risky move, decided to move shooting locations to be in a completely different gas station than the ones I had originally scouted, one which was much closer to home, was quieter, and was near Cesar's workplace (in case the shooting took too long).

A BTS look at us conducting a mic check

    An important addition to the group on Thursday was Sebastian, who portrays the Gas Station Victim, tagging along with us, allowing for me to get more of the shots done overall, as well as having an extra hand around to help me manage the microphone and camera (to avoid having the mic show in frame, Sebi would hold it up and crouch out of frame in increasingly uncomfortable positions, which was unexpectedly efficient and hilarious).

 

The Production

 When we showed up at the gas station, immediately there was a notable change in our process for shooting. Now, I wasn't juggling the microphone and camera by myself, we had less environmental pressure from customers and weather, and the mood at the set was generally more relaxed and upbeat, as we were all determined to fix yesterday's shoot, and get as much done as possible. We spent the full two hours shooting each scene with a precision and efficiency I couldn't have dreamed of, now that the actors were familiar with their lines, leading to less takes of each shot.

Sebi's hand makes a cameo in an outtake

In summary, these past two days have been full of learning experiences and progress for this project, and while I did have my moments of self-doubt, I was able to push past them in order to get my work done.  Since I'm going on vacation for the later half of next week, I'll try to squeeze in as many blog posts before I leave. See you next week!

Day 2 of Shooting Clean Kill: An Unfortunate Series of Events

 Hello again! This will be a much shorter update blog post (and I really mean it this time, there isn't much to say) that will discuss how shooting was with all of my minor characters. As you can probably tell from the title, things didn't go particularly well.

The biggest issue for today was the pressure of running out of time, from all kinds of factors (Sam had to be done by 4, we started at 3.30, Martina had to go to work, Wade had to study for a test, and even nature seemed to rebel against me- it appeared as if it would rain soon). But as if the time pressure wasn't enough, I had organized this to start at 3 pm, about 15 minutes after school. However, the traffic to get out of the school parking lot was atrocious, made even worse by the fact that I had gotten to school late this morning, meaning I was parked in the very back. This turned a tight window to escape the parking lot into a death sentence, trapping me in the car line for 20 minutes, making me late to my own production...

    Needless to say, I was frustrated, the actors were frustrated, and the clock continued ticking. But my troubles weren't over yet. I had forgotten to mark where my car was parked the first time we shot film, meaning that the background was different and didn't match up. After 15 minutes of trying to guess the exact location I parked, I realized I had only 10 minutes with the actors before they had to leave, and I had shot nothing.

    Tired, frustrated, and a little desperate, I called them over to the spot I was, and just did one take of the scene. They acted perfectly, but they were victims of my bad luck in the day, and poor planning. I take full responsibility of this, and am embarrassed to have been thwarted by such a silly mistake as not remembering where I parked.  We did the one take, after an hour of waiting and setting up, and regardless of how it turned out, I knew it was the footage I had to work with.

This stretch of bad luck 
had me VERY stressed..

I thanked Sam and Martina for their time and apologized profusely about the circumstances, and then I shot Wade's scene, which I think turned out much better, mostly because it didn't rely on any background scenery that was already established. I mulled some things over with him afterwards, and fooled around a little after getting the shot to lift our spirits, and then I drove him home.

Overall, this has been a learning experience. First of all, I should always be the first one on the set, I never want a repeat of what the actors had to wait through as I ran late to my own event, especially after stressing the time limit we were working with. Second, if I plan to shoot in a location more than once, I should document everything about the environment to maintain consistency. And finally, I need to get a better parking spot... that was my true Achilles' heel today.

I'm going to shoot again with Cesar and Blake on Wednesday, which is when we plan to tackle filming the gas station scenes (which should be much easier, considering that it mostly consists of two shots and countershots to illustrate their conversation). All I have to worry about on Wednesday is getting my actors to remember their lines, and we'll be set for Thursday, when we'll film the murder bathroom scene and finish up any loose ends. Until then, I'll see you around!