AICE Media Studies

 Below is my Creative Critical Reflection.

  I'm so glad to finally be able to say I am done with creating this project. It was a long journey full of mistakes and lessons. I feel like I have learned a lot about movie production, especially when it comes to the editing portion. For instance, I learned a lot about lighting and filters since this was an important factor for my film in order to set the mood right. I have also learned a lot about the filming part of it as well. This project forced me out of my comfort zone the most out of all of them. At first, this wasn’t something I liked, but it ultimately helped me in the end. I now am better at movie production than ever, and am so excited to continue this class next year. I also now know how to communicate better with my partners, since I feel like this was a problem in my group for this project. I am very ready to take all my knowledge and put it to use again next year. 

I'm so excited to say that day is finally here. The film is finished and I am very proud, to say the least. In order to get to this point, though, I had to finish up some quick editing. One of the things I noticed had to be fixed was a reflection in the window. There was a shot where Hannah was filming Nicole, and Hannah's reflection was visible in the window. At first, I struggled to figure out how I was going to do this. The first thing I thought to do was to download an editing app where I could mix scenes. I would then mix in a short video of a black screen and minimize it so it only covered the window. At first, it took me a couple tries of different apps to find out which one would be able to do what I needed. I finally found one that was free and allowed me to mix scenes. I tried to get a full black screen but it never turned out pitch black, so I tried looking up a video of a black screen through the app and using that. There ended up being no regular videos of just a b...

Almost as soon as we got our feedback back from the film review, we started to work on our project once again. One of the first things I did was change the volumes of things like the characters and the music. I made the characters' dialogue 200 and changed the music to about 50 so that viewers could clearly hear exactly what the characters were saying. I only did this in the scenes where the characters were talking while the creepy music was playing in the background. There were multiple of these scenes, so I did some and Hannah did some as well. I also changed the lighting in many of the scenes. I made it a little darker but changed other parts so that what was happening in the scene was still able to be seen. I made sure that the overall mood of the scenes was dark and scary, but the characters in the scene were still clearly seen. Again, Hannah did some while I also edited some scenes. While Hannah was editing on facetime, the rest of my group including me were all on the call t...

After months of being hopeful that someone was going to reach out about the music, my group and I are left without an answer. None of the musicians we reached out to have gotten back to us about being able to use their music. Now that the deadline for this project is approaching closer and closer, we are left with no choice but to use royalty-free music. I am quite sad about this because I was really excited to get to use songs made by a popular artist. I felt that this would really put our project over the top. However, I guess sometimes things don't go the way you had planned. While this wasn't our original plan, we can still do our best to work with what we have. I already had some songs in mind from a couple months ago. I made sure to start looking for some royalty-free music just in case we ended up not getting a response. Good thing I did, or I would be left with just about nothing right now. At the very least, I have some sense of direction when it comes to where to go n...

Since we had most of the video done, we decided to show it to some people in order to get their feedback. The video was not 100% finalized, but it was put together enough to start getting feedback on it. More specifically, small things like the titles were still not done. Still, the small parts that weren't there yet wouldn't have ended up making that large of a difference in the overall message of the film. This is why we didn't find it necessary to rush adding them in yet and decided to still show others our project. We ended up asking a mutual friend's cousin for their opinion on our film. We figured the mutual friend might be biased, so we didn't ask them. Their cousin, on the other hand, had no apparent reason to not tell us the absolute truth. Therefore, we decided to ask them in order to try and get the rawest feedback we could. However, there was a small issue with having the cousin review the video. This was because of the fact that they live in a different...