CCR

And it's a wrap :)

CCR: https://www.wevideo.com/view/1667005803

Final Project

After hours of countless sweating and back cramps, we finally reached the finish line. I still can't believe it is over so fast. It has been a month since quarantine began and I can't believe I had my last day of school without knowing. I really took for granted the times my teacher would look at me weird for the stuff I said (I miss you Mrs.T). I hope I make you and Cambridge proud with this project. I want to thank you for all the headaches you gave me and for the opportunity to express myself in your class. I will be publishing my CCR next week and that will be my final post. 

ERASED Final movie

Website 

Postcard:

Front

Back

Postcard and Website

I am in charge of the website and postcard so while Pearse films this week I was making our digital components.

Postcard: The post was actually a lot more simple than I imagined it was going to be like. The process itself took a long time because I had made a poster for our movie and then we decided to make a postcard. I wanted to make a postcard with the poster in the front (I really like the poster I made) and a simple yet aesthetic message in the back inviting people to rsvp to the screening of our movie. I used a site called spark.adobe.com which gave me all the tools to make this. I first began by playing around with some pictures but decided on the image with the photos burning (looks super cool). After I went on YouTube and watched a couple of videos on how to use this site to its max. When I went back I finalized our poster and then I began the back. For the back part, I googled “movie invitations” and came across an invitation made for screening for the movie Les Misérables. I really liked the concept which was exactly what I was looking for so I wanted to recreate the poster on one side and information on the other. So far so good!





Website: For the website, I used wix.com which was super user friendly and actually helped me with the whole process. I made the mistake to use a fake email so I wouldn’t get notifications from Wix every day for the rest of my life. Why was this a mistake when it’s super brilliant? Wiz decided to use my fake email’s name as the website name. Besides that, the process of making the website was simple and so much fun. I mapped out on paper everything I wanted to include. For example, I wanted to show the poster and share a little bit about the movie. I talked about our cast and crew on a separate page. I tried including as many images as possible to give the website a legit look. So far it is coming together super well. I just need the final movie so I can put it on our website.

Song Permission

Since we decided to switch our storyline up there were some changes we needed to make. One of the most important changes was sound. We never really got permission to use “We Are Young” however it was super cool one of the previous band members, Andrew Dost, answered my Instagram DMs. The reason I love Instagram DMs so much is that people are constantly using social media and checking their feed. That’s why when Pearse asked me to get permission for the song Chapels by Giant Rooks I immediately sent a DM to their Instagram page. A few days had gone by and I actually forgot I had sent that message. Pearse texted me later Tuesday asking me if I had received an answer back (which I didn’t) so I felt bad and sent the same message again. I wasn’t too lazy to send an email. It was just a matter of time and I knew that Instagram would not let me down. However, Pearse had sent them an email the same day he asked me to get permission and they had already got back to him saying he had access to use the song as long as we didn’t make money (sad). But later that day I also received a DM getting permission to use the song so I was so happy that my methods worked. We are on track baby let’s goooooooo!!!!!

Bob the Builder

As Pearse continues to film the rest of our movie I decided to start our digital components with some of the images I received yesterday. For our website, I will be using wix.com which is a website builder that is super simple and user friendly. I have already used this website in the past and I really like it because:

1. it’s free
2. It comes with templates that I can use to build my website
3. Adding images and videos is super simple
4. I can share my password and Pearse can log on and edit as well

I’m sure there are plenty of website builders out there that I could use but I like the one I choose. I built a rough draft website and noticed that I needed more images of the movie and the characters so I could add sections about them on our website. I texted Pearse so hopefully, those images get sent over soon so I can continue with our masterpiece. I will also be starting on our postcard ad but I have not started it yet. I will after I post this so I’ll update you on the next blog.

Say Cheese

After yesterday’s filming, I texted Pearse earlier this morning to see if he could send me some photos I could start working with for our digital components. I will include below three of my favorite photos he sent over which I want to work with the most. The reason I like these photos a lot is because they don’t look like happy images but give off more of a sad mood. The photos that are on fire also foreshadow one of the major components of our film. However, some photos have more space to include the title of the movie (we are working on coming up with one) and credits. So although I like the photos with the fire more I believe I should use the one with more room to edit which would be the third photo I attached. Hope you like them!

My favorite one out of all the photos. I just love how the fire looks I think it came out so good.

This is my least favorite out of the three. However, I do like the combination of all the photos and magnets with a simple background.

This image gives me space to add our title and any other wording. 

Filming!!!!!!

Today was a big day for us. As you may already know from my previous blogs Pearse will be filming the project at his house. The reason we decided he will be filming is that he has a Canon camera and did not like the idea of me plainly filming with an iPhone. No discrimination to anyone out there filming with an iPhone it’s just that this is a really important project and we want to use the best resources we can.

Pearse began filming the beginning scenes today. The beginning shits of our movie will be where the credits are rolling so we wanted to capture some eye-catching shots that leave room for credit. Since I was not visibly there Pearse showed me later in the day through FaceTime how some of the scenes came out and I must say he is a really good filmmaker. Our beginning scenes also consist of many shots with picture frames because we want to foreshadow how important photographs are in this piece. So far so good!

A sample of what the shots look like

After Pearse was done filming the beginning scenes he moved on to film with his family. He filmed our largest dialogue scenes in order to get an idea if we should have cut down the scene or not. The scene came out good for nonprofessional actors which is extremely surprising given our pay experience having to have people in our movies. Today was a good day :)

Did Someone Say Progress?

So since we had already made a screenplay before this time we decided to make a quick outline of what we thought the shot sequence and timeline of our movie should be. This took us a couple of hours because we kept editing from our google docs but here we have the final draft that we hope is good enough for you guys to get an idea of what we plan on filming.

Scene 1 (opening credits)- close-ups shots of family photos
Scene 2 (MC room)-Establish the main character
-Close-up of calendar establishing the year
-Gets called in by Dad to the kitchen
Scene 3 (Kitchen)- Father reads notice from the government to family
Scene 4 (Parent's Room)-Initial reactions
-Father plans on hiding some important things in a lockbox
Scene 5 (Kitchen)-An alarm starts going off, loudspeaker starts playing instructing that any attempts to lock away any

materials will result in immediate arrest.
-The family is frightened by the invasion of privacy and begin freaking out
Scene 6 (Numerous locations)-Montage of family erasing all traces of themselves (throwing stuff away)
-Scene in slow motion
-Soundtrack playing in the background
Scene 7 (Living room)

-Next morning
-Whole family sitting in the living room waiting nervously for the inspection
Scene 8 (Front Door)

-A single inspection worker comes to the door
-Door closes behind the worker showing the front house
-The camera slowly drags away from the house as you can hear the conversation of the inspection worker and the father.
-A gasp is heard and you can hear the agent call for reinforcements.

We discussed having filming done by Friday of next week. Pearse will be asking his family and Irina to participate and help us with our movie so it will take a lot of time management for everyone to be available at the same time. Wish us good luck!

New Plot Part Five Thousand

We can up with a new plot quickly given that we had already talked about different things we could do from our house. So a few months ago we had been learning about postmodern theories and movies. We decided it would be a great idea to use our situation right now to our advantage. Since Pearse’s family is all home we came up with a way to create a plot about a family that lives in a unique society that has extreme rules for its citizens. Here’s our new plot:


So the movie is set in the year 2040, a year after a radical form of government rapidly gained control in the United States with a totalitarian focus on community and dismantling any sense of individuality. Normal Americans are forced to give up their sense of self and quickly adapt to the government's radical new rules in order to stay safe and avoid government eye.

The movie follows a middle-class South Florida family as they get an inspection notice from the government. Being only a year since these insane government rules have been put in place, talk of inspection has mostly just been a rumor. The inspection notice gives the family 24 hours to adequately remove all markers of individuality from their house or else they will face the full consequences of the national government. Over the course of 24 hours, life becomes a living hell for this family as they go through a soul-crushing journey to erase any trace of themselves. Photographs, art, and everything in between have to be trashed. Will they make it through the inspection?

Comment below what you think! We will be posting a “screenplay” later this week so stay tuned.

Woops!....

Given the special circumstances, I can't physically help Pearse with finding old footage to use for our film. However, we have been communicating regularly letting each other know what is going on and how to keep moving forward. For example, we have to talk over and over about the sequence of our movie since it is 5 minutes long and we want to have a good plot development throughout. I also shared my ideas of having his sister being the main character and we discussed it over and we agreed upon deciding when he found footage of his family. That way we could see who has more footage between him and his sister. He told me he would be looking for footage later on in the week since he has homework and work from home. We discussed it would be smart to get the filming done a little more than a week before April 19th in order to get started on the CCR, which if I remember correctly was a challenge last year. From my side, I will be waiting to hear updates and answer back as soon as possible if we need to talk anything over.

Update: Pearse went through his family footage and he didn’t find anything useful to us so we are back to square one. However, we had already talked about the possibility of not finding useful footage so we are not as lost but still this is getting really bad with our timing. I don’t remember last years project being so hard LOL