Media Studies Blog

 Here is the link to our finished project titled Sophia https://youtu.be/JIim-qAsJjg?si=E5ed2IuBs69JiqQU 

 I feel it was difficult planning the film at first but it became very successful in the end. I feel the only main problem we had during the project was finding days that we could meet up together and collaborate with each other. We switched the first 6 and 6th through 10 scenes of our story because we felt it flowed in the story much better. Ive learned how difficult it is to actually film a story is and how many components go into it. Information such as lighting, angles, and types of edits are things from class that greatly helped us during this project. 

  In total it took about 3 hours to fully edit the entire film. You can see in these pictures how we are adjusting the lighting/color of the these shots. Since we were not able to take some of these shots in the morning we adjusted the colors to make it look like it was. They were adjusted to have a more yellow hue, to contrast the blue it had. The second photo showed Hannah fixing some of the audio levels. Since the characters have some dialogue it was edited so she could be heard.  Hannah had done majority of the editing while myself and Salvador helped making some decisions while editing. Such, as feedback, choosing songs, and helping with lighting. Hannah had to do some of the nighttime filming because we weren't able to meet at night. I did some of the breathing sounds that were added in later on in editing as well. 

We changed the entire first 6 scenes with the 6th through 10th scenes because we felt the filmed bowed much better that way when editing. Instead of showing the fake gun we also only showed the bullet because we could not find the prop that fit the theme we were going for. We also changed scene 5 because originally it was going to show the title behind the girl as she woke up but we decided on putting it in front of the window when she walked away. Some of the final corrections we made was we showed the bracelet with his hand down instead of up. 

 We used lighting to create a contrast and moods in specific scenes. The first scene used blue lights which show her distress in the scene. We had blue LED lights when filming and the lighting was good without needing to fix it up in the editing. For the second and third scene, we had to change the lighting in the editing. Since the room that we filmed it in didn't have much light and we were not able to meet up early enough to get the morning light, we had to fix the lighting in the editing. We made it have a more warm yellow, sunlight light to it. The blue light contributes to the somber and nighttime feel of the first scene. While the yellow light contributes to the more happy and morning time feel of the second and third scene. These colors are opposite, so it also works to show a great shift in the differences of the scenes. 

      It has been going well and everyone has been equally contributing to the film. I have  filmed, Salvador has acted,  and Hannah has done majority of the editing for the film and directed everything. I personally felt challenged with being able to meet up to collaborate with my group members on the same day because we all have conflicting schedules but we found a date and filmed. In my opinion there were little so no problems throughout this entire project besides small disputes about little things when editing. Overall, we have barely had nay problems and effectively produced and edited this film. 

 In the project, Salvador chose the first song that was shown in the film, which was Living Waters by Brock Hewitt. He chose this song because it fit the slow, quiet, sad theme of the first scene. It also made sense with the events that happen in the scene, as the character appears to be reflecting on events that had happened earlier in the day. Hannah chose the second song which was Ain't We Got Fun by Doris Day. She chose it because it has a very bright mood to it, which is similar to the first scene because it is set in the morning. The lyrics also make it seem like everyday is going to be happy and great, but we can clearly see that this is not the case considering the pervious scene.  Hannah did most of the editing on the software. She used recordings of footsteps through the grass for the first scene, heavy breathing, and alarm clock sounds in the video. These all were recorded either in the video itself or added after, such as the footsteps through the grand which was d...

  The editing so far has been going very well. In this first photo you can see the Davinci editing software were we worked on the first scene of the film. In the second photo you can see us looking for the song that Salvador picked out to add into the video. In effect terms, the second and third scene were both brighter and were given a warm tone to make it look like it was filmed earlier in the morning. The other effects that were added such as the text that displayed the credits. Other than these, we didn't use any other effects.  The video starts fading in from back which leads to the next transition which is an abrupt cut from the first to the second scene. The rest of the transitions are just plain that aren't meant to be as noticeable. One of the biggest problems when editing was the music in the first scene. We had all the sounds for the rest of the scenes but we needed to find a good royalty free song that we could use, but none of them felt right. Then Salvador helped...

 Throughout our film we used mainly bright natural lighting because our film is very happy and bright. As the film continues it slowly changes to much more darker light toward the end of the film. For one scene when the girl is laying on her bed half of her face is shown with blue light along the darkness of her room. We used the blue to represent her sadness and to give a depressed ambiance. We did this to add to her clear emotional distress onscreen during the scene.

  This was our first choice, which is the font Agency FB. We were looking at different fonts and colors and got to this. But we later decided against it because it looked too futuristic for our story and the color was too dark for the happy vibe we were going for. We settled on this font which was Britannica Bold. The font had a very minimalistic but is still bold enough to jump out at you. The color was very bright to match the ambiance went for. We made it in all caps  so it would very uniform and bold. The title "Sophia is named after the main character in the film. Hanna directed it, Salvador provided equipment, I filmed, and Bella & Salvador acted. Their names are the girl and the boy because our film has no dialogue so they are not named in the film.  We almost picked this one, Times New Roman in a much lighter color. We liked the color of this one a lot more than the others, however, we felt it didn't feel very right. The font is also quite basic so it made the...

 There were only two challenges in filming, the first one was having complications with myself not being able to act so she had taken my place. Another problem we ran into was the lighting for the darker inside scene but we solved that with Hannah holding a blanket over the window. We also had some difficultly finding a good spot outside to film. We handled these challenges very well. Everyone is pulling their weight by myself filming, Salvador acting, and Hannah directing. 

Our first day of filming went very smoothly. First we shot the first scene in his room. Then, we went outside to shoot the second scene. We only ran into a problem with the darker lighting in the inside scenes, which was solved with Hannah holding up a blanket as shown in the third picture above. The sound and video went well because we used Salvadors camera which also recorded the sound well. We only needed two reshoots because of some background noise in the beginning scenes but then we learned how to prevent it and the rest only took 1 take.