Documentaries, School Trips, Short films: What the hell, sure

 If i had to describe to you my 1st semester of senior year it would be like playing basically like Five Nights at Freddys. I almost felt like every week I had a new responsibility put upon me.

That being said, as I entered the second level of media studies, one of the first genres we explored was that of the documentary. 

We started by watching 2 episodes of Netflix’s show “Abstract” . The two episodes we watched were actually very interesting and it showed me a new style of creating a documentary, using graphics to explain concepts when visuals for the thing being explained aren't available. I think the main thing that I learned from watching those two episodes was the importance of B-Roll and how it can shape the tone of the documentary.

Theres a huge difference between just listening to the documentary and watching the documentary. The visuals end up informing a lot of what you can take away from it and the opinions that you can form on the subject matter

The next documentary which we watched in class was American Promise.This documentary was by far the most unique of the 3 we were assigned to watch, as it was filmed over a 13 year time span, documenting basically two entire childhoods. What stuck out to me about this selection was its dedication to truly document life. Unlike abstract, this one almost felt like a drama film, it wasn’t just someone explaining their passions or motives, It was much more in action, which I really liked about it.

The last documentary I actually had to watch coming back home from a competition trip in new york (shoutout all american highschool film festival) with my good friend nico. I had downloaded the documentary before boarding the plane, and this definitely did a good job of shaking the travel shivers out of me.

Selfie from when we arrived back home

I think the main reason I ended up loving it so much was because the documentary in question, "Exit Through the Gift Shop" was the editing style. Up until that point I had for the most part percieved most documentaries as slow. This one changed all that by being quickly edited, and correctly pacing the story that Banksy (the director) was trying to tell within the documentary. I really admire its style especially when it came to the editing.

HERE IT IS GUYS (the film opening)

 ATARAXIA FILM OPENING

CCR 1 - WHIZ

ASSISTED BY ANEESA BAJAJ

CCR 2 - VLOG

ASSISTED BY ANEESA BAJAJ

Postpartum Depression

 Wow guys, its finally over, id like to thank Cambridge... ok but seriously this was like my baby and its now been born and now I'm sad so I think that makes the title accurate.

In Reflection

It's actually insane to think about how far our film has progressed. We started with this idea of a 2000s film like Legally Blonde, and somehow created a sci-fi drama that's completely new.

As the DP I was losing my mind on a daily basis. Managing every shot so that it became meaningful for Halley's character and then later in the edit making sure every shot was perfectly done with color correction and color grading.The editing was also fascinating. We ended up over-shooting quite a bit, so we had plenty of buffer to play with. Even the tiniest things that didn't make it through helped us get familiar with and develop our storytelling.

We definitely had a fat stack of issues. The competition we were preparing for threw our original schedule off, and getting permission to film at the gas station was its own adventure. It took three weeks to track down the manager and get approval to film, but we made it happen somehow.

The Creative Critical Reflections (CCRs) were a nice challenge. Im glad that they allowed me to be so creative with the approach that I could take it and do something more fun as a little video rather than solely an essay. And even as crazy as it got during the edit, I actually learned something from the process.

In retrospect, this project has been such a learning curve. From the lessons in our first classes to the major research works in our blogs, to actually implementing everything in practice during production and post-production, each step led to our final product.

Editing (soundation i will get you)

 Okay everyone so I've just finished filming my vlog and now I've gotten to editing my first CCR.  As I previously mentioned I decided to go with an arcade-esque theme for my Whiz interview (a decision I now regret). So I boot up after Effects and to my dismay, my laptop has gone bat s-word crazy and decided to run out of memory somehow. After fighting it for some time my computer finally decided to draw its last breaths upon this cruel world and freeze and then shut down. Sadly this was not the end, I yanked my dad away from his adult person job and he found a way to fix it, but not without scolding me for somehow ruining my relatively new laptop (My storage was full that was literally it). Now you may ask, "Samuel, how does full storage take up memory?" and my answer to that would be "idk." ANYWAY, I booted the ol' 'puter back up and began working on the 8-bit effect I would have on the interviewer,  Aneesa.

The actual visual effect was quite simple but the real challenge awaited me in the sound design. A few weeks ago I saw a video on social media about an effect called bitcrusher, which basically lowers the bit-rate your audio plays at to make it sound extremely low quality.

@harkeofficial Replying to @quill ♬ Backrooms - Harke

;This effect seemed perfect for the style I was going for but I was yet to discover the horrors of trying to achieve it without the one thing no student has, money. So when I typed "bitcrusher" into the google search bar the first 20 or so results are plugins for various music production programs, NOT an option since 1. they cost money, and 2. they take storage which we have established I do NOT have. Soon my scrolling eyes gazed upon what seemed to be a glimmering beacon of hope in this money hungered landscape. Soundation: a music production program native to your browser with a built in bitcrusher effect. Clicking on the link shows me:

 FREE?? how is this possible? I think to myself, but nary the time to ponder on such things. I rushedly sign up and import my audio, and apply the effect. I go to export and here is where my beef with this program begins:

WHAT THE HECK DO YOU MEAN UPGRADE TO UNLOCK?? I personally feel that exporting is the ONE feature that should never be locked behind a paywall if you are going to advertise your service as FREE, but that doesn't stop them does it. Well after much fighting with myself i decided to cave and just grab a plugin for adobe audition and pray to god that it doesn't murder my computer, which it didn't!!

Anyway with that out of the way the rest of my editing journey went fairly smoothly, I'm glad the format i chose wasn't very edit intense after the fun effects. now that I've finished editing the Whiz interview i can slap together all the clips from my vlog and hopefully close out my CCR work.

That's all from me for today stay tuned for my next post where ill reflect on the project as a whole.

CCR Filming

 Hey everyone!! It is officially the weekend which means I started as any media production student would, FILMING!! I got with my group member Aneesa and we began the day by picking up some equipment, and then picking up a Green Screen from my group member Oriana. Since one of my CCRs is a daily vlog, I thought I would document the experience while talking about my film opening. 

Once we got back to my house, we set up all the equipment, and the fairly large greenscreen and began filming. We started with Aneesa's CCR before filming my first CCR. The Whiz interview CCR went great, and I stumbled upon the fabulous idea of having it be sort of 8-bit arcade-themed. As you can imagine its been a pretty hectic day since I've been filming practically both of my CCRs at once but with one fully filmed I'm sure ill be able to finish the vlog quite easily.

Thats all for now!! I really need to go edit and continue filming my vlog so stay tuned for my next post on that!! :))

CCR Production Plans

 Hey everyone today I thought i would go over how I plan on filming my CCRs.

For my first CCR I plan on creating a film interview show called "Whiz" which is loosely based off of Genius Lyric breakdowns. For this I plan on using a green screen in our school's production studio in order to create a bright blue background for me to be against while I sit in a stool and go over each question in detail. I would check out a camera from the school's TV club and film in there one day after school. As far as editing I think ill get a basic edit done on After effects with all the motion graphic effects I want to do before sending the video to my iPad for some fun Hand-Drawn animations.

For my second CCR I plan on doing a day in the life vlog where I will take my audience through a day in production, showing both filming and editing while answering the questions. For this one I will most likely film it on my IPhone and then later edit it together in premiere. I'll also have to create some screenshots of fake comments that ask the questions of the CCR for me to answer. Overall the video will be sort of styled as a vlog with sporadic Q&A throughout the vlog.

CCR 4 (THE LAST ONE!!)

 Okay so as I mentioned before, my second CCR is going to be a day in the life video. This format is perfect for this next question being

• How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware and online – in this project?

The short answer to this question would be, YES. Our use of technology was unreal, relentless per se. In terms of software, we used Google Docs to organize everyone in the group as well as a program called Writersolo to write the finalized script. We also made use of Premiere Pro as our primary editing suite where we created the line edit, sound design, and color grading. My groupmate Santi also used his subscription to a plugin called Red Giant to add some fun effects that took our video to the next level. 

We also used Adobe After Effects to create the title graphic, as well as the credits and a fun-free plugin called VC Orb to create the planet - probably the highlight of our opening.

In terms of hardware, we went all out for the opening, we used a Canon 5D Mark IV to film in digital format as well as a Magnus VT-4000 tripod to stabilize our shots. We also sparingly used my teammate Santi's DJI Osmo Pocket to film some stable tracking shots.

That's all from me for now!! stay tuned for my next post about my production plans for each CCR