CCR

 Thank you for coming along on this journey with me. Here is my CCR enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkdTqSycG8c

Final Project!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apAEjiANalc

Hope you enjoy!

Final Update!

 Hey guys so I think I have officially finished editing! I have to say this project was quite a journey and this past week was definitely the most stressful for me. I was able to basically finish up editing and me and my partner wanted to meet up to go over anything I should change and let me say when showing her the project and hearing the few critiques I really started to worry and doubt our idea from the start. Together we discussed some of the problems such as lighting changes and some of the clips looking a little off because of the audio adjustments. The main problem that we couldn't seem to fix was this one shot of the main characters screaming since the mystery person just popped up in front of them, the audio of the scream and the previous shot having a different lighting made that part of the sequence look very wonky. I honestly was so stressed trying to fix up that part of the project that I just wanted to bang my head in the door, but after playing around with the clips, I finally found a way to make that part look as cohesive as I possible can by just cutting and overlapping the clips. 

One of the hardest parts for me during the editing process of our project was the audio. I didn't realize how much the video relied on the audio for the piece to come together. Paola recorded some sounds using Foley (the bone crack-celery, running on leaves) and the rest of the sounds and music I got off of YouTube and a website that specialized in classic horror music (of course both being royalty free so I can use them). I used the website epidemicsound to gather the perfect horror classical music to use for both the mood change after the few opening shots and then when the friends are beating up the person. I chose the song, ES_The Storage - Lennon Hutton because there was a good shift in pace during the song that matched up with our clips. Also for just a few sounds like a different bone crack for the ending shot and a different sound of leaves crunching, I used YouTube to search for those sounds and made sure they were royalty free and then used the website YTMP3 to convert those videos into an MP3 audio file that I can then drag and drop into premiere pro.

I wanted to also talk about the font I chose and the color. 

Here are the specific adjustments I made:

I looked at a few examples of fonts that horror movies used (because that's the main genre for our film with integrated comedy aspects) and I saw a lot of them chose the color white to have their font in.

Examples:

So I knew I wanted to use a white font, plus it would contrast at the end against the darkness of the night. The problem was that the font during the beginning credits would be too light to read, since we shot those right at sunset time. Because of this, I decided to add a shadow to my font which helped put a black border against the white font so it can be seen in the lighter shots to. The specific font I used was called Papyrus and this font stuck out to me because it looked like the typical horror font, but not as emphasized and this was perfect since we have a combination of horror and comedy as our genre. 

Throughout this journey of this project I have learned a lot about different editing techniques and it truly made me have a love for editing. Yes, this project took a lot out of me especially at the end but this experience is defiantly one to remember and I will forever be thankful for it. 

All that's left to do is to make the CCR script, which I already started, and then film that and edit it to upload!

Starting To Come Along

 I have been working on editing for some time now and it looks to be starting to come together, which is good because the due date is coming up soon. I have narrowed the video down to 2 minutes and 6 seconds, but still need to do additional editing and removing to meet the time limit. I have also been playing around with the audio and adding in music during certain shots to set the mood for the reader. I found this website called musopen, which has royalty free music for the classical genre. I thought it would be a good idea to set the mood in the beginning of our intro with some classical music, so the audience has no idea that instead of a nice happy story, they will be watching a funny and scary opening that will leave them screaming for more. I will next be looking for some slow horror music to play throughout the main scene of the attack.

Here is a picture of the editing process so far and if you see the audio layers they are starting to pile up with the different sounds I am adding.

I am going to try and finish the editing either today or tomorrow so I can then talk with my partner on things I can fix or make better.

The Editing Starts

I have started the actually editing process this time! Let me tell you guys it was a hassle to download all of the footage because I don't have a mac, so I wasn't able to airdrop the footage. There is another method that I used to use which was to plug in my phone to my computer and just drag and drop the files off there, however all my photos and videos were jumbled, plus I favorited the videos I actually wanted to use so that method wasn't going to work. Lastly, I thought to download all my footage to OneDrive and just download the videos on my laptop through there and that was successful for me. It took about 45 minutes to download everything onto my OneDrive and from there I was able to quickly get it on my laptop. 

When I added all the videos on premiere, I first put them all in order and quickly realized we were going to have a problem. Before I cut any of the videos to the actual parts we would use, the total length was about 4 minutes. I knew we were going to have a time limit problem because the maximum is 2 minutes and there is only so much I can cut from each video to cut it down literally in half. I was able to get it to 2 minutes and 19 seconds, which is still too high though. I know there are a few clips I want to speed up that should help, but in all reality we need to cut some shots from the final productions because it is impossible to include all the shots and be within the time limit. I am just hoping it looks cohesive after we cut those shots that are the least important to compelling our story because right now it is looking kind of choppy, but editing and transitions should smooth that out.

Filming: Done

We finally met up and filmed our entire film opening project and it only took about two hours! I honestly thought that it would take longer, but I guess we were just very efficient. Before we started filming we met up with our actors and decided to record the actor's lines through an app called garageband. We plan to use these audios to replace the sound in the actual footage that we recorded so the audio sounds more crisp. We were worried about getting actors one week ago, but we ended up casting enough actors that were willing to do this project and were actually excited about it, which helped the footage look better because there was that passion in the acting. We also found an actress to play the bystander so I was strictly just filming.

We filmed on Monday at 7:00pm, so in a few clips the lighting is a little bright, meaning in post production now I will edit the videos to look like they were taken later at night. When filming we used all kinds of stabilizers to help steady the shots including, the handheld stabilizer I showed in a pervious post, a tripod (which was our main form of stabilization), and just our bare hands. The shots came out mostly stable and I can make them even more stable through a tool in adobe premiere. The only problem that I saw with the shots we took was the lighting was very iffy in some shots because we had to use a flashlight to shine light on the characters since it was taken in pitch black. A few shots have a glare from the lights outside and our flashlights that I couldn't seem to get around, which is very disappointing. I will try my best to hid the glare, but it seems like it will be there no matter what I do. I will do some research however on how to remove it or at least make it less noticeable.

Here are the forms of stabilizers we used:

I will start the editing process soon and will make sure to update you guys through that!

Starting the Editing Process

I previously said that today I would start the editing process for the few shots that we were able to get and I have to say this brings back major flashbacks to film in 8th grade. I had done previous projects in aice media where I had to edit using premiere, but this project is more similar to the one that I had in film where we had to recreate a music video. I started by putting in the videos in a new project on adobe premiere and the first thing I did after was save it (the most important step) because losing this project when we are further along would be bad. I then researched how to make a video darker in premiere because as I said in a past blog post, turning the clocks kind of ruined our whole plan of shooting at night because most people in our film want to be home in time for dinner, so we have to darken the film to give the effect it is occurring during the night. I found this video that I will share here on this post that I used to help me darken my film and give off the effect I was looking for. 

I took a snip it of my editing sequence on premiere that showed the skills I learned in this video to darken the video and there is a side by side comparison of how it looked before editing and how it looked after.

As you can see, the video helped a lot and the difference is noticeable. I am not one hundred percent set on this look and will play around with the sidebar effects more to get the perfect look and I will record those numbers so I can use it on the rest of the lighter film, so they all have the same look. I wont be able to make it look completely like nighttime, but I can get close enough to get that effect, which is the goal.