Dennis Kaya AICE MEDIA STUDIES by Dennis Kaya

First Student Film/Reflection

kaya4162 — 2022-08-24 18:04:22 UTC

This is the first Media Studies Film I have produced with the help of my two classmates. Our movie was a short horror thrill called "Capgras Delusion" and is about a student at a school who has a nightmare of him getting chased by a copy/clone of himself, leading up to him waking up in the end at lunch. This film correlates to Capgras Syndrome, which is the delusion and fear of being replaced by an imposter or doppelganger. I was the lead actor and played myself in the film and I also helped write portions of the premise of our film.

The film was originally going to end with a scene of the doppelganger stalking the students walking to class; other than that our film has received much praise. Kudos to our editor, Tucker, for doing such a great job incorporating the illusion of me interacting with myself. He also did a very good job attempting to hint that the current situation that is unfolding, was all but a dream. Our camera angles and shots were made by our cinematographer, Noah, and his creative implements of switching scenes and conveying the drama of the chase scene was spot-on, his attention to detail and the amount of depth he put into his camera angles was amazing. The acting of both Tucker and I were believable and the way I was able to portray two different people at the same time was slightly scuffed yet turned out wonderful when edited. However, our audio cuts were quite annoying due to our attempt in merging two different clips and it did kill the illusion at times. Another issue with our audio was that it was quite due to us being outside. All in all, I am very happy with the way this turned out and I hope our past mistakes pave our future into making a better piece of work.

Student Film Remake and Reflection

kaya4162 — 2022-09-26 17:04:50 UTC

Our brand new movie project, although with many obstacles in the way, came out as a success. Our new project involved taking another groups film and recreating the script and story in any way imaginable, along with including 10 different and unique shots. The original film was made by a group who's film is about someone who is on the run from the law enforcement because of his tax evasion charges. The original had more actors and group members than ours, so it was a challenge to assign roles with only the three of us present. In order to compensate, we decided to change majority of the story and all its shots, settings, and scenes that portray it. The original story had two main characters along with two others that did not have specific roles or even names; we decided to compact majority of the roles and assign them to our only three characters. My role in this project was Directing, Script Writing, acting as the convict, and I even took over as cinematographer for a day. We worked on studying, replicating, and adding more new shots into our movie. The original movie had a unique POV Shot of the convict looking around, and we improved this specific shot by making it shorter and by cutting it with the police officer storming right up to the camera and punching the convict. The chase scene has lots of unique shots I wanted to add, mainly tracking shots and low angled shots of the convict running, jumping, and dodging, along with one shot I am quite proud of; shot with distinct depth of pillar passing over with the convict running. This shot I must give credit to Tucker, for editing it beautifully so that the pillar appears in front of the camera and passes over a transition from me running to him running. Very well done.

Another reason why our project was a challenge was because of our constant absences, mainly mine. All of us, at some point, went absent in our days of filming and editing, and I myself missed 3 days. In those days that I missed, my two group members had finished the movie and had it peer reviewed. They were not specific on what people said, only that it "was better than the original, for sure". But absence is not the only issue, there was also the weather. The weather affected our filming; on one day because it was too dark and moody and it suddenly became light again on our next day of filming, which made the scene look odd. Another major problem with our movie is that it technically is not finished. We planned to have a bit more dialogue on the scene of the convict getting his house stormed but was cut due to making up the time I missed, therefore we had to cut back on clips so that the scene looked more clean. We also cut some shots, including a bunch where there is a long tracking shot of us running. We cut those because we did not have enough space and we also had a lot of people in our shot. One specific shot we had trouble filming was one I had a hard time describing and one we had a hard time performing with our time and equipment. It was a shot of the officer kneeling down and "arresting me". The shot was supposed have the camera filming medium shot, flat on the ground, and tilted upwards, looking at the officer while he spoke on the PDA. We also cut one very important scene that was supposed to happen at the end of the movie, and it saddens me because I planned the whole thing out. It was going to start with a medium tracking shot of me walking into frame in front of the camera, then it will switch to an over the shoulder shot of me walking into the building, and so on and so forth. The scene was supposed to be me "blowing up" the IRS, but was then going to have the officer unexpectedly run into frame and apprehend me. This all was cut of course due to time. All in all, I am proud of our project because of how well it turned out and how well we did with so little time and people.

Student Genre and Representation Reflection

kaya4162 — 2022-10-26 20:30:29 UTC

1. Diving further into film study, we began to learn all the film genre's in cinema. This was done in class by listing all the genre's and then categorizing our class into little groups; the groups choose a genre and are required to research the genre and present it in front of the class. Through our own presentation along with my classmates presentations, I learned quite a lot of unique elements and conventions in film with genre. We learned how film makers can sub-categorize genre's and combine them together to create hybrids, how a genre influences audience reaction, and how each genre has their own code and element. While presenting, we showed three clips that fit our genre that explains the elements and the achievements of the film; each clip we showed are from different films from different time periods, conveying the evolution of film.

2. Going back to our previous films, my group and I (Tucker and Noah) watched and analyzed the films to try to put both of them in a category. We all decided that our film "Capgras Delusion" is a hybrid of Thriller and Horror, due to its engaging nature in its story and how the story revolves around a nightmare. We decided that on our second film "On the Run: Remake:" , we would put it as a hybrid of Crime and Comedy. It is sort of comedic in a way because the way the movie is told is portrayed in a satirical way and the ending of the film is a silly and comical getaway. The revolves around a criminal escaping the law, which fits its genre in Crime. In both movies, we did our best to incorporate rapid movement and fast paced camera shots, with our horror film incorporating its classic horror elements; having more close up shots instilling fear.

3. After learning all the genre's in filmmaking, I've come to decide that my favorite genre out of all is Comedy; preferably a Comedy hybrid with Action. Comedy engages the audience most and it brings them together for a good laugh, meanwhile the action gives an exciting element to the movie and is a great mix with having the joyous feeling of humor. With that in mind, my group and I have had many ideas on what film we want to create. I would like to re-create a movie I made last year in a TV Production Class called "Cubs of Learning Lane". The movie is about two high school students who watch Wolf of Wall Street together and become inspired by the idea of getting into the stock market, however due to their immaturity and lack of knowledge, they end up getting into trouble with the school and the law near the end; greediness plays an important role in this movie as the two characters begin stealing and sabotaging one another. Both characters and their overall stupidity and stubbornness gives comedy relief throughout the film. Although I am proud of the editing in the movie, I am still quite disappointed on how it turned out due to the fact that the movie was made with the help of only one other friend and so much potential was lost due to time. I hopefully want to get the chance to recreate it with improved editing, audio, and more engaging camera angles and shots that aren't always shot at a medium distance, along with more characters to ripen the story. Another idea that my group has discussed was a parody of Breaking Bad where the story is premised around Wheat and Yeast called "Breaking Bread". The story is quite similar to Breaking Bad, however we plan to change the scenes and scenarios to fit a school-like setting and having the main characters conflict themselves with their new found business and school, dealing with the situation on baking bread. Our group decided that if we get a chance to create these movies that we will have one other person and I edit together to mix in our styles and we have already assigned some roles for who acts the characters. Both movies are a hybrid of Comedy and Thriller.

Editing and Sound-Midterm Film

kaya4162 — 2023-01-14 20:21:24 UTC

1. Through out November and December of 2022, we began learning the behind the scenes editing process of movies and film as well as sound. We learned over 20 new editing techniques that editors use, involving many different kinds of cutting such as match cuts, smash cuts, and cutaways. To learn more about editing, we watched two short films; one called "Cutting Edge" and one that discusses the use of color. Both explore different kinds of transitions and cuts by interviewing many notorious directors and editors. We covered all the different uses of sound such as how diegetic sound differentiates from non-diegetic as well as watching a film about sound in movies. After covering both sections, we began learning how to write screenplays/scripts using a special software. We read the screenplay for "The Increbidles" to get an overview on how a professional screenplay is formatted and should be written in order for us to write our own. Our screenplay was to be a short horror film about someone having a nightmare, with the film length being 1-2 minutes.

2. Once we finished our screenplays, it was time to begin filming from what we have written. Our horror films were rather an opening to one than a whole finished film. This was our midterm assignment where we film our short horror film following a specific set of requirements such as creating an introduction to our film, using sound motif and music, and experimenting with different kinds of takes and other sound.

3. For my horror film, I tried to psychologically play with the audience with ambience, slow effects, and utilizing the environment and weather to adhere to the effects of dreaming. I also tried to set my movie so that it was as dark as possible to engage the audience to anticipating something horrific. Consistency was an important element in making this film, and I kept the idea of it raining in and out of the dream constant. I also added in a smash cut of a train blasting through the tracks and abruptly cutting it to immerse the audience into making it feel like you suddenly wake up from a dream. The basic premise of the film was that our "dozer" was dozing off and dreaming about a psychotic killer coming after them. But the twist is, the character himself is a psychotic killer and is having a nightmare about being overshadowed by his rival killer, who he fears is relentlessly stalking him. The ending was supposed to be the killer appearing in real time to catch his victim, with a dramatic cut of the light to signify the demise of our "dozer".

4. There was a landslide of errors and setbacks making this film. Mainly it was time and certain circumstances prohibiting me from following some of the criteria assigned. However, the sound editing I have done I am proud of and was quite successful. I experimented trying to edit in sound that felt diegetic but was actually added in, such as using reverb. I was also happy with how the first shots of my neighborhood turned out as it helped make the atmosphere ominous. The things I am unhappy with range from a lot of things. First, I originally planned to have my movie use the moon as an important storytelling device, as the light was supposed to shine on props that would give background on our character and what the nightmare is truly about. However, I could barely capture it nor its light. Secondly, the rain is all greenscreen and fabricated except for two shots and I hoped to go outside and stand and film in the rain throughout my entire film. Third, I was supposed to have an actor help me but he was out of town and nobody was willing to help me. This meant that I filmed and edited this whole movie by myself. Fourth, the shots filmed in the dream were not filmed in real places and were animated pictures taken and edited by me in distant locations. The part of the movie with the swinging light and "killer" was actually a picture taken by me in the dark with myself standing in a very long hallway. The light was added in, animated, and edited. This took a TREMENDOUS amount of time to edit. And finally, I could not film during the break I was giving because I was out of town and wanted to specifically follow my screenplay as accurately as I could. On top of that, the chance I got to film was ruined when I lost my project due to an auto-saving bug and had to restart which really aggravated me. The filming was done on my phone, the editing was done on Premiere Pro and OBS Studio, the writing was done on Arc Studio, and some of the sound was edited in Adobe Media Encoder.

Two-minute Film Opening Analysis

kaya4162 — 2023-02-03 13:42:35 UTC

For our film opening, we first needed to research the elements of how a film can be opened depending on how, where, and who is filming it. I decided that I would be researching a movie called "The Divide" (2011). The movie is similar to the one we are creating because it involves nuclear conflicts.

1. *First two minutes of the film*: The movie opens with a woman crying, a bright light shines on her face as she watches the nuclear holocaust unfold before her while everyone begins rushing and crowding together trying to escape. The woman along with a small group of people hurry together into a dark bunker as the door closes and it ends in complete darkness.

2. What is the genre and who is the target audience for the film?
A Sci-Fi + Thriller, target audience are mature adults (both male and female)

3. Describe the opening credits and title sequences, including company logos or idents:

The opening credits starts with a close up of a sail from a sail boat with the logo: "Anchor Bay Films". After the bunker scene, it cuts to a blurry shot of what is inside the bunker with the production credits rolling. The title of the movie ripples in and matches the colors and effects of the environment.

4. Describe it visually--shot by shot breakdown
The movie starts with a yellow hue, with an extreme close up shot of a woman crying. You can briefly see what she is looking at through the reflection of her eyes. There is a close up shot of her face and hand up against a window as she watches an explosion. Medium pan in shot of the woman from behind with explosion. Medium two shot of the woman being dragged by a friend down stairs of the apartment building. The camera follows down the stories showing every story being overcrowded. Crowd shot of people crowding up against an entrance as the light flashes and causes everyone to leave. Close up shot of people rushing and passing by the camera. Long shot of a bunker with the woman and a small group hurrying in as the door shuts and the shot goes completely dark.
5. Describe the sound- another "sound by sound" of the entire two minutes
The movie begins with a faint ringing sound as the sound of the explosion slowly starts to fade in as the blast causes lost of wind to blow against the window. People yelling and screaming as the explosion covers an even larger radius. Buildings and structures can be heard collapsing in the background as the group begins to huddle into the vault, shutting it tight.

6. Describe how you felt at the end of the two minutes.
The movie did a great job at presenting the beginning with the explosion and signifying that the rest of the movie plays because of the Holocaust, along with quickly moving along with the story on how, who, and where the movie will be set in. I also enjoyed the cliff hanger used at the end with all the characters hiding in the bunker as it closes and envelopes the mood with a quiet and dark atmosphere.

7. How did the first two minutes adhere to the conventions?
As mentioned before, the movie starts with a yellow and moody hue with the explosion, which sets the attention of the viewers and thrills them for the cause and effect. The hue follows a convention with the thriller theme, as the nuclear holocaust sets a future like apocalyptic atmosphere.

8. How did these first two minutes break with conventions?
Although it is a Sci-Fi Thriller, the movie is set back in California of 1976, which is not really a Sci-Fi futuristic-like convention.

9. How did these first two minutes represent social groups, people, or issues?
The first two minutes depicted an issue about the control of nuclear weapons and the impact that they can cause when used.

10. Why do you think this film was distributed on this particular site?
A simple search can find you negative reviews and feedback of the movie, so it is not surprised that it was released in theaters and then distributed on very cheap and small sites such as Tubi. This movie is however, accessible on Prime video.

(I would put a reference image here for what the opening looks like, but Padlet is having issues embedding images)

Preproduction Requirements- Cinematographer

kaya4162 — 2023-02-16 18:59:42 UTC

My main role during the production of our film opening is to be the Cinematographer, but since we have a lot of ambitious plans and the right skills for it, I volunteered to help the Editor with my own work so we can get movie-quality special effects for the main part of our film opening.

Cinematographer: I envision our movie to have a dark and moody setting in an office. I have the perfect location but I may need to work on lighting. The basic setting of our movie is in a country set back in a war around 1980 (Cold War). We want to use old props and we want to make it clear to the audience using our set design that the opening to our film is to a war movie without using specific dates or dialogue. I have a vintage oil lamp that creates a very solemn atmosphere when lit in a completely dark room. This light may not be bright or fit the mood to much because I'm afraid it is too dim. To counteract this I may need to use our other lamps and experiment with them. Sound in our movie may need to be re-created through our props, but is mainly diegetic. We have access to special microphones that can be hooked up to our phones but we do not need these as I have a better idea for how we will get our sound using our own microphones. I plan to only use two locations for our film, one will be my houses hallway/office area and right outside the house in front of a view with the sun setting. Our first shot will start with one of our actors walking down the hallway with a briefcase, this scene I may put in sound of shoes hitting the floor in a rush and echoing. The rest of our shots will be filmed inside the office with shoulder shots, panning to the left towards the window, medium close ups, and possible incorporate a dolly to get some more immersive shots of the room.

Independent Distribution and Film Marketing

kaya4162 — 2023-03-10 18:27:41 UTC

1. Our goal for our film is to be distributed and to be theatrically released. We will submit our film and compete in the Toronto Film Market because it is one of the biggest and is more convenient by location. Then, we will strive to get a distributor/agent from Warner Bros so that they can help us release it. We chose Warner Bros because they have a significant amount of successful war films that were released such as Dunkirk, which is one of the movies we took inspiration from for our own film.

2. The name of the film is called Zuerchergrad. Grad is a Russian/Slavic word meaning town, city, or castle, and Zuercher is the last name of our director. Since our movie is a war film depicting a Slavic country preparing to sign a declaration to attack, it was perfect to put in a name like our director and put in the Slavic word, similar to previous real life dictators.

3. The tag line for our film is also relevant to the name and theme of the setting/characters, "For the motherland!" Its short, enthusiastic, and patriotic.

4. Our general target audience are young male adults between the ages of 16-30 and older men between 40-60. Young people tend to admire the action of war movies and may come in groups to watch together. The older men are in our demographic because we feel that the older audience will have a deeper and nostalgic connection with a war movie like ours. Although not historically accurate, it is based on true war and we plan to film the accuracy of the battles between nations, the emotion captured in battle, the tension between powers, and the visual depiction of the despair and glory of war.

5. If our film were to be self distributed, we plan to target lots of social media to advertise such as Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook. We will release our trailers on more video based medias such as Youtube and Vimeo to catch more watchful eyes. In relevance to the upcoming question, we plan to physically advertise in our local theatres and clubs with our promotional posters which can reach all potential viewers that are visiting the theater.

6. We plan to have our movie be engaging online and in the real world. Many of our ads will be advertising the main premise of the movie in propaganda-like form. There will be authentic and promotional art that incentivizes the audience with the nation: Zuerchergrad. The art will constantly patronize and instigate the opposing side, but will never directly tell who they are and why Zuerchergrad is at war with them. This sets an impression on Zuerchergrad but also make them curious to see what the war is about. This propaganda will be put on our website online and will be made into real posters that audience members may purchase or win if they follow certain steps to help us advertise across platforms. We also want to shoot bonus footage for a video that will be shown on our website about the films the government drafting the citizens of Zuerchergrad and showing people the spoils of war.

7. The main colors that we want to use in our film are Red, White, Black, and Grey; with an eagle emblem. Our promotional art would consist of our emblem of Zuerchergrad issues uniforms with bullet holes and dog tags being thrown into the mix or our flag being hung over a wall. Our flag is an important symbolism for the movie, as its in the view of Zuerchergrad as a nation. Another idea would be the general and his right hand man overlooking something with the globe and flag behind them with dim lighting and the classic steel plated text of "Zuerchergrad".

Production and Editing Reflection

kaya4162 — 2023-03-30 11:11:45 UTC

The production and editing for our film "Zuerchergrad" is so far a great success. The only major problem we had with our production was having a missing member from the set. There were quite a few technical things we had to change about our film. First, our film had some lighting issues on set. Since our film is set during a cold-war like stand off in the 80's, we decided to have an authentic, old looking office with an oil lantern on the desk. The lantern was perfect for setting the mood lighting but was apparently too bright and had too much glare. We re-shot all the scene with the lantern but ended up encountering another problem: Audio. We did not use any fancy equipment but the room wasn't too big and empty, so it was easy to fix. I came up with a clever solution of using a phone as a microphone and setting up right near our actors talking. The microphone would record the entire time we filmed and can be used to smoothly cut and edit audio. The rest of the production process is mainly just editing, however we are not done with filming and we must get the rest of our b-roll for our film opening. The editing will be done by me and Tucker (mainly Tucker) and I will be in charge of getting the rest of the b-roll. The footage is difficult to get because it is technically not being filmed but instead created in a program. I want to capture b-roll of the nuke being launched and the aftermath of the destruction. So far, the main part of the opening that introduces some of the characters and gives brief insight on the story is complete and is almost fully edited.

Critical Reflection

kaya4162 — 2023-04-06 01:24:36 UTC

Zuerchergrad: Final film

kaya4162 — 2023-04-06 01:25:14 UTC

Weekly Blog Post Progression #1 (8/18/2023)

kaya4162 — 2023-08-17 15:08:26 UTC

For this years blog for A-Level Media, I will try to update everything that I do involving our work as a group and personal accounts for Aice Media studies. To start, I began learning about this years curriculum and requirements for the second part of the course. I was told about the end of the year project being divided into 3 (4 technically) "packages" where I can either create a film, two trailers, or a documentary. Before we began planning, I had to meet my classmates and learn about other subjects required for media such as the study of media ecology and the wonderful weekly blog posts. To plan for the year, I went to the media center with my A-level classmates and we started to get to know each other and our experience with film and the class. We all agreed that we were going to find ways to work with each other while following the criteria of working on our project in two groups of three. Some of us had different ideas on whether we wanted to do a film or a trailer and all of us seemed to like the idea of making a documentary. I personally do not want to make a film so I pitched my interest in the trailers and the documentary. We started to stray away from the project and we started focusing more on how we were going to work on the project in the first place. We started discussing our personal lives outside of school and whether or not it could conflict with filming. It was very intriguing to know that a lot of us seemed to have our own unique niche when it comes to our creativity. One of our members mentioned that he was good at animating and another mentioned that they had good quality equipment, all good tools for our disposal.

Weekly Blog Post #2 (Monday 8/21/2023)

kaya4162 — 2023-08-21 12:14:52 UTC

On the second day, we continued our discussion from yesterday. We gave our phone numbers to each other in case some of us needed something outside of school. Since our project was split into two groups of 3, I was now with my partners Noah and Bella. Our group, after a quick unanimous discussion, decided that we wanted to create 2 promotional trailers for an upcoming (non-existent) movie. Personally, I am fond of the idea but I was also interested in the documentary. I recently have been getting really invested in music, especially popular music genres from the 60s-90's. I watched one documentary on Netflix which tells the story of the formation of the hit British pop band "Wham!". I pitched an idea like that when I was talking about documentary's, but I was not sure if this would count as a documentary that is considered "popular and influential". So far, our group has not thoroughly discussed what exact trailer we were going to film or what movie it is teasing, but we all agreed that we would film it as a "action" genre. My mind is constantly buzzing with ideas that I want to throw out for our trailer, but its important to stay consistent and at least a little realistic with our ideas. I still am very excited to know that we have much more of a playing field with creating our film than last year.

Weekly Blog Post #3 (Friday 8/25/2023)

kaya4162 — 2023-08-25 15:19:54 UTC

Today, we decided to talk more in depth about our project with each other and to our teacher to get some insight. First, we talked about our movie genre being an "action" and a "comedy", along with other possible sub-genres like Sci-fi, stuff like that. Next, Bella and I both emphasized how we want music to play a role in our trailer as a way to tell the story and as a way to express our characters. Mainly, we wanted all the characters to have their own music taste that would play appropriately in each situation or moment the character has. Speaking of characters, we wrote the story to focus on an "iconic trio", who all have glimmering and diverse personalities, but all have a strong bond. We haven't fully discussed who exactly these characters could be which is important. Our teacher suggested that our trio be a more diverse group consisting not just of person but of age, gender, culture, etc. Personally, I imagined it as three guys or two guys and a girl. We began discussing on more movies that we could use as examples for story, characters, etc. Our teacher emphasized that we find a way to organize how we will write our trailers because the trailers must represent a story from a movie. We've decided that we were going to write a screenplay and a storyboard to have better ideas on how were going to film it and how it will illustrate the story. We also started organizing our roles for our members in the group, deciding that Noah is Cinematography, Bella is the screenwriter, and I will be the editor. Once we start collecting willing people to help us out, our cast will grow bigger. Noah has a good eye for cinematography and capturing depth, Bella herself says that she is a great writer and loves helping out, and I have a knack for editing.

Weekly Blog Post #4 (8/29/2023)

kaya4162 — 2023-09-06 02:28:13 UTC

Now that we have our genre down and our idea of our characters, we now want to start outlining what kind of story we want. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how I want the "comedy" aspect of our trailer to look like, but I'm having a harder time with action. I discussed with Noah how the trailers will specifically be filmed via camera shots and editing. We both have spent some time analyzing some trailers and I picked up on how trailers are editing and filmed in a way to briefly show the movies style and the movies story. Lots of trailers love having voice overs, establishing shots, and dissolves. These dissolves are placed between clips every single time a new part of the story is teased in the trailer. Meanwhile, the rest of the clips role smoothly or are overlapped over each other. After briefly analyzing the cinematography from the "Adam Project" trailer, I began thinking about this trailers purpose. If this trailer is depicting a moving story/film as a comedy/action, how will it convey its message through production and storytelling with comedy/action? Does it adhere to a message, convey a message, or challenge something? Since I want the characters to standout in their own way, but have the same ambitions, I want the characters and the movie itself to follow a story where its "rebellious" and it goes against something. As per other elements of the story, the story would take place with adolescent teenagers in our modern time period, at a somewhat middle class area, but financial situations would play a part in the movie to help explain the backgrounds of our characters and the story.

Weekly Blog Post #5 (09/06/2023) Trailer Structuring and Outline

kaya4162 — 2023-09-06 15:47:38 UTC

Our group began researching online for the elements that make a good trailer. We found several websites that give step by step guides, but the information that we've gathered that has stood out the most to us were the following:

In order to write our script and plan out how our trailer will briefly tease what kind of story our movie is depicting, we must follow a " three-art structure". Great trailers must introduce the main character(s), the setting, the premise, and the end should feature part of the climax. Since we are only assembling the trailer and should have a great idea of what are story should be structured as, its important for us to utilize storyboards

Scrounging remnants of what the story could be, I like to day dream on what kind of things you might expect in the movie. This is important because we want to include scenes and shots in the movie that look "unforgettable" and "iconic". Most of all, I want these scenes and shots to have little or no context at all. This is to surprise the audience and to make them think about why this kind of appealing thing would happen and to entice them.

Something pretty easy to handle and something that I have already somewhat discussed is the use of voice overs. I mentioned that when I analyzed trailers, the scenes and shots transition with dissolves and cuts to tell the story. Along with the story, the scenes continue playing audibly into the next. Easy to do and helps tease the story.

With a trailer like ours, we want to have flashy and eye-catching editing. Speaking on behalf of iconic shots and scenes, maybe things like slo-mo's to make the action more dramatic can help, having intense lighting, or even special effects could appeal to the masses.

Weekly Blog Post #6 09/19/2023 (Trailer Analysis #2 Guardians of the Galaxy 3)

kaya4162 — 2023-09-20 00:10:39 UTC

This trailer was chosen because most of its genres fits with our trailer: action and comedy. Although the trailer mostly focuses on its Sci-Fi elements, there were elements in the trailer that I caught on to that peaked my interest for our trailer. First thing I noticed is that the trailer and the movie series itself LOVES to adapt music.
The main character himself is notorious for having his own cassette player with all the classics that I love and would love to incorporate in my movie.

The movie series on its own has it's own way of telling its story through the perspective of a "group", which is exactly what I want. The trailer skims through some scenes and shots of all characters and the parts they play in the story and in the trailer, using close-ups, wide shots, and long shots of character(s).

What I noticed in this particular trailer is again, how it teases the story. In this movie, the characters are now returning for another adventure, making their entrance known with a long shot in slo-mo, which is something I could use to instead introduce my characters in my own trailer. All of the action and main plots of the story are quickly teased and shown at the end of the trailer, with fast paced editing depicting all the "action" the movie has to offer. Personally, this trailer has more of a use to work off of than with the Adam Project because this movie is focused on a plot with a group facing off with a villain and their stories.

Weekly Blog Post #7 (Credits in production)

kaya4162 — 2023-09-22 15:26:41 UTC

Although we've already decided on the roles of the movie, we must give credit to the work that is done when we create our trailers to present our movie. I decided to look through some of the trailers that we've picked to analyze how they've credited the work, edited it, and outlined it. For this blog, I've picked Violent Night (Action/Dark Comedy). The next blog post will probably be another analysis on the different trailers we've picked since they're all uniquely different, but still fit our style and genre.

Credits in trailers usually get overlooked and unnoticed. Overtime, I've seen credits change in their own ways to fit the trailers representation. In Violent Night, the credits have a christmas theme. For our trailers, I want our credits to have a unique font that resembles doodling or graffiti to fit our teen group being "rebellious". Some movie credits add in alumni such as "From the Producers of *whatever they produced*". Credits usually add the stars of the show and display them in action in the movie with their roles, along with the date (of course). This may vary though, I personally like the cast and the date being put somewhere in the middle of the trailer, but some movies put all of that in the end. For our trailer specifically, we will add our cast and show them around the climax of the trailer, we will credit our producer and maybe make up a company to hook the audience and create authenticity, and we will have our date in the middle AND end of the trailer.

Weekly Post Post #8 (10/2/2023) Summary of Trailer Comparisons

kaya4162 — 2023-10-11 23:31:58 UTC

This summary will be written as an "analysis of my other analysis' of the trailers" Most of the analysis' that I did for the three trailers focused on different aspects and elements of the trailer, but were still lacking some important details needed to fully understand its production. The first trailer that we analyzed was a trailer that was picked and analyzed by the whole class with the help of the teacher: Adam Project. The Adam Project was mainly written to focus on its purpose, story, and message. The second trailer we analyzed, Guardians of the Galaxy, was reviewed through its depiction, characters, and cinematography. I also made a heavy note on the main character and the way the movie uses music, but I did not touch on cinematography enough. Finally, Violent Night, was reviewed for how a trailer structures its credit sequences, its themes, and colors. I also paid some attention to how some of these movies are edited and I took notice on of course, the genre's.
All of the comparisons were done on a Powerpoint with content and information all organized and split. It is an open link that you may view.

Weekly Blog Post #9 (10/10/2023) Music in production

kaya4162 — 2023-10-12 23:50:41 UTC

Music is something that I am passionate about and something I most definitely want to incorporate in our trailers. From the trailers we've analyzed, music is used as something that can hook an audience due to its relevancy or nostalgia. Both Adam Project and GOG both use iconic, classic songs that are played usually to drive the story that is being teased forward. Something that I've seen in other movies is using music to hook an audience more by syncing it and editing it so that it synchronizes with dialogue, camera movement, or a sequence. This gives the audience an impression that this movie is teased to be a riveting viewing. This kind of editing and this kind of music, it being a classic rock hit, is something I strive to have. Of course, you can't have one song playing. Trailers usually have their own scores that are made and are played throughout action sequences, especially around jump cuts.

Planning the music is easy, however, getting the music is extremely difficult. I am fully aware that music regulation is much more strict on its USE instead of its production. I could go on a free trial program and "compose" my music, but that is a waste of time to do meanwhile we still need to properly structure our story, create poster designs, and understand our message and audience connections. Music won't be a huge priority and will be planned and done later on once we settle ourselves with our film trailer. In order to get the music that I want, I must research on copyright use. Last years song was snatched and credited, but this year is different. I must first attain special permission to play the songs that I want and I must credit them (as per usual). Secondly, I need to carefully choose a song. Even if it does not have explicit lyrics, I don't want to play a song that is too "suggestive". Movie scores and dramatic orchestral music is easy to find and play as there are several free domain sites that offer this kind of music for free, without pay or demand. The whole point of getting the kind of music that I want is because I envision our characters to have a vibrant and unique personality that stands out and does not confine to norms, doing whatever they please rebelliously while they jam out. I very much am taking inspiration from some movies that replicate this sort of behavior, much like Ferris Bueller because that movie depicts an iconic trio and has likeable characters that could inspire ours.

Weekly Blog Post #10 (11/4/2023) "Story Element/Screenplay Structuring

kaya4162 — 2023-11-05 19:24:31 UTC

Our group has spent a lot of time working on other work related to our class and we never got a chance to focus on building our story. When we first started discussing it, we only built small remnants of the story. We had a great idea of what small elements our story would contain such as the setting and the characters, but we did not form a full plot. Our teacher tried to review what we had and gave us key pointers on what we need to write about and to fix what we had. We took what we were given and held a 2 hour call discussing crucial points for what our story is and how we will tease it to the public.

Here's what we came up with:

Plot/Story line:

Setting:

Highschool
Takes place now

A plot:

B plot:

Subplots:

a. Max has an abusive household
b. Lissa is graduating and is hesitant towards getting involved with everything
c.

Visual Metaphors: having thought bubbles with follower count or friend count/ social status

Rhymes:

Rule of 3rds:

Theme: Man vs. Society

Juxtaposition:

Pov: 3^rd person

Conflict:

We need to work on what drives the story more, but we started to form ideas on what exactly the characters are going up against, which is basically our characters being up against a "superior" group that has better social statuses and qualities, but hold a severe flaw that our characters take advantage of. Speaking of our characters:

Character development:

Characters:

The main Trio:

1. Mike (Catalyst Character)

Mean, passionate, determined, humorous

Gender: Boy

Hair color: Brunette

Eye color: Blue/green eye color

Height: average-tall

Hobbies:

Dress style:

Character development: holds a higher status, but not popular status at school. He is upset because the other two are holding him back since they are considered “unpopular”. This leads to him to start separating himself from the friend group.

2. Lissa

Moral guiding voice, Sweet, easily fooled, nerdy

Gender: Girl

Hair color: Blonde

Eye color:

Height: average-shorter

Hobbies: Reading

Dress style: Preppy nerd outfit; Glasses, Skirt

Character development: Starts out all Girly and ends more tomboy like or more respected because she makes changes to her habits and overall style.

3. Max

Quiet, mysterious, stubborn, clever

Gender: Boy

Eye color: dark brown

Height: average-tall

Dress style:

Protagonist: The trio groups

Antagonist: The complete opposite; another trio group

Intermediary characters: The Principal of the school

Catalyst: Mike (involves his status and his opinion towards the school's social hierarchy + popular kids)

Sympathetic Characters: The trio we follow all share traits of a sympathetic character, all having emotional traits and being put in situations that drive the plot, brings forth character development, and can relate to viewers.

Overall, we did get a hold of what the story could be and need to still follow the conventions and write a plot. However, our characters and our plot are our biggest problem. The way we've written the characters has begun to deviate our trailers to teasing more of a "drama" genre movie. Either we could research into drama teasers and add it as a sub-genre or we would have to take components of what we have for our story and completely re-write it to fit our "action comedy" trailer. Our group agrees that the story we're beginning to write is a good story, but it does not fit or follow the research or genre we've chosen to do.

Weekly Blog Post #11 (11/10/2023) (Plot Restructure/General Fixing)

kaya4162 — 2023-11-06 12:44:38 UTC

As our group began writing our blog posts and finishing up our regulation assignments, we took the time at school to begin discussing how were going to create our trailers. We were hit with a road block on whether or not we, again, were re-writing the story or adding in drama as a sub-genre. Once we started re-structuring, we ended up creating new ideas that followed similar elements and character format as our previous story.

Our last story tackled relatable issues such as the constant need to fit in and breaking the norm, so we created a similar story out of the blue that took that to a higher scale that was less dramatic, more humorous, and focused more on the plot that is heightened by action. Instead of young teens in a trio at school, we started creating a rough draft of characters that were similar, older, and more "violent". This kind of trait comes from our idea of making certain characters in the trio more criminal. The plot of the story has changed but still follows the same idea, except it is no longer focused on social hierarchy at school and is not so much of a relatable idea, yet is still enjoyable to get behind. The story focuses more on a cultural and social tradition that our characters all despise. With this mutual hatred, they all get together to try to completely destroy its meaning and influence: They want to ruin Christmas! We started having fun with the idea of having a trio of older friends who have had a violent past that somewhat correlates to Christmas, coming together to destroy the fun of Christmas for everyone else as an act of complete jealousy and violence. We started envisioning ways we could shoot quick shots and scenes of our characters doing completely heinous things to ruin Christmas, with flashy effects for action in mind such as burning Christmas trees and accidentally starting forest fires, and comical moments for humor in mind. Although our characters need more writing (such as needing more information on why they all hate Christmas), it was a fun idea our group enjoyed discussing over and we all were motivated to finish writing. We wrote a bit about how the characters all take alias' related to other famous characters who hate Christmas and decide to ravage their town as masked vigilantes impersonating them (Grinch, Scrooge, Krampus, etc.) One key point of the plot, such as the ending, that I pitched was how the characters generically "learn its importance" at the end as a lesson, by discovering that Santa Claus is real and comes to bring justice to our trio. Of course, the comical part of that is that Santa Claus just beats them all up, teaching the characters that Christmas has an unbreaking influence and is truly a magical holiday that three resentful criminals could never change. Once we get the time together this week, we'll revise more of the plot and begin writing, planning how we shoot this, structure our characters more, and hopefully begin planning how we advertise (which I'm excited for).

Weekly Blog Post #12 (11/17/2023) (Script Structure)

kaya4162 — 2023-12-01 16:29:00 UTC

Our group went on thanksgiving break and took time off away from our project. We spent a portion of it discussing future plans and we managed to finish a script for one of our trailers. Today, we decided to get back on track and to begin planning, writing, and creating ideas for our endeavors following pre-production.

The scrip that we turned in was for our comedic genre and it centers around our infamous trio who, as mentioned, want to destroy Christmas. We have our characters named and selected from our discussion we had weeks ago and we wrote out some fast paced action sequences to match with our subgenres. We also spat out some ideas on what the name of the movie our trailers are teasing would be called. I had one idea that I'm unsure of but it was a take on Home Alones line on "Filthy Animals" and naming it just that.

Now that we are back from back, we overviewed the script with our teacher and began to adjust our story and planning. From what we started discussing, we were going to work off our script, add new scenes, jokes, and plan on our resourcefulness for the action scenes and our actors along with how we would document our blog posts. However, our instructor brought us all together for a more in-depth discussion and gave us helpful insights. We started to lead our story on more to its comedic nature by changing the stories motives and adding important elements to the characters relating towards their backstories and backgrounds. We brainstormed how we could change our act structures and we also began discussing our blog posts, and future plans for roles and preproduction. Another addition to our plan that will help the production of this project is future research posts on contemporary Christmas movies that fit into our nature.

Weekly Blog Post #13 (12/1/2023) (In-depth story review and research)

kaya4162 — 2023-12-01 16:30:49 UTC

So to put our plans into more perspective, here's what we began discussing when we brought up our ideas to our teacher. To put more comedic elements and to have a motive for our plot, we mentioned about changing the characters background. Our teacher mentioned this idea to help settle two important factors for our trailers: the plot and our theme. What we specifically started talking about is having three characters who are older than our previous story being brought together for their hatred of Christmas and for having similar interests. We plan to write the characters so that instead of hating Christmas for petty reasons and for reasons to come, we can give ourselves opportunities for new plot driven moments and jokes by making the characters diversely religious. We pitched ideas about having a muslim character and a Jewish character; both characters clashing their traditions with contemporary christmas. We also wanted to add in a character that would be an antagonist who is Christian, but I personally only find this character to be a good fit in the movie as another kind of role. Since technically our characters would be "anti-heroes" and are only counted for the story for doing heinous things as "ruining christmas", maybe that Christian character could play for something else. With all the religious aspects, we hope to bring a familiar tone to different religious backgrounds in our audience.

Sometime this weekend, we want to get together and begin planning ahead for when we begin filming and writing more. I plan to write in some of my ideas for skits such as having Hannukah play a role in the movie. Our teacher gave us a scheduled list of what should be done at what certain time, but we must back track a little and we want to put in our best work and to keep track of every minute detail we look into when we write our trailers. Our teacher also mentioned other important notes, some that I've mentioned before, about music and roles, mainly that we need to research more into what kind of music we are going to have to play that fits the christmas theme. Casting is another subject that I've thought a little about, and is to be taken more seriously this year. Planning auditions and gathering the right actors for the best representation will be a fun yet challenging task and is something we must worry about later in the year. For now, our group will assign roles and we will begin researching contemporary christmas trailers to get an idea of how we write our plot. Personally, I am looking for how jokes are delivered and how they can be specifically written for each character.

Weekly Blog Post #14 (12/4/2023) (Trailer Research/ Act Structure)

kaya4162 — 2023-12-04 16:12:22 UTC

Continuing with our research, we decided to add in some new Christmas movies for our trailer research along with keeping Violent Night. The info that we gathered from Violent Night is already relevant to the story and kind of movie we want to tease and we plan to look into its more derivative action scenes. Another element we've begun analyzing is social media and branding. We've created a presentation with brief definitions and trailers we've compiled that contain the media and its advertising. Were generally looking at how they brand with posters, what audiences they advertise to, etc.

More on contemporary research and how we incorporate soon to come. In the meantime, our recent blog posts have been compiled by our instructor to help better understand our current path and to spit ball ideas for our next challenges. So far, we must work on our plot (three act structure) and I have just finished compiling a log line. One of the only major things missing is a title for our movie, which I personally like the name of but I'm not sure what my group thinks because they haven't said anything. For our plot and act structure, the rough idea that I had was that at some point, as a way to drive the plot, the characters will begin having conflicting ideas about each others religions and working together to ruin Christmas. It's a good idea because it's a good way to have internal conflict, but it needs clarification and needs to be worked on. We soon must complete our rough drafts for both trailers and we must start on an idea on how we will present our second trailers for a more friendly and family-like audience. Here is our presentation on our research :)

Weekly Blog Post #15 (12/10/2023) (Story Writing/ Production Planning)

kaya4162 — 2023-12-07 20:19:17 UTC

I'm going to be splitting what our group has discussed into two separate blog posts that both will outline the things we've accomplished and issues that we need to address. To begin, we started to talk about our act structure and the issues that come with our story.

Something that I was not fully aware of is that my group was actually not 100% on board with the religion idea, since it seemed better than what we had and we were talking about it profusely before. However, it was decided that the story of our characters destroying Christmas with a "religious representation" to it was actually our template idea until we come up with something better. The more we discussed it thoroughly, the more I began to understand that yes, this idea is great, but it will be difficult to work with efficiently. The problem with it was the idea that I brought up of "What's the actual point of the story?" My group was pushing the idea that this must require some kind of intricate writing and more plot development/conflict, until we realized that we need to think of a way this story should end or what ulterior motive is this trailer trying to tease.

Although we had some hiccups, we did discuss other minor plans for when we shoot our trailers. First, our script writer was begininng to write a draft for the second addition of our trailler with the remnants of what we had, bringinig in more of a family aspect. We also decided that we would plan on capturing footage near the end of this week and all throughout winter break. Specifically, there is one notable neighborhood that many locals walk through to see the light shows, and we planned to get some b-roll. We may have to step up a bit this week to get our story set so instead of b-roll we can start filming legitimate shots that are going to be in the trailer. One of our group members is also going to be apart of a community event that he plans to film. Overall, we have rough outlines of our production in motion.

Weekly Blog Post #16 12/11/2023 (Advertising/Branding #1)

kaya4162 — 2023-12-10 19:10:43 UTC

While we were working on what our movie would be called, one of our members raised a bigger question on what's our company/brand name. At first, it was difficult to imagine what kind of name or image we would have that represented our company, so we stuck with something very basic; NBD (or any other order) which is basically the first letter of our names Noah Bella and Dennis combined together. We decided to choose this name in placement for when we come up with something better. But who knows, NBD is short, minimalistic, and does its job. Soon enough we will come up with a better name.

But in order to get a better name, it may help finding/making a logo. We began researching all different kinds of film company logos, attempting to find a pattern or general idea of what we would want. While we looked at different designs, one of our members began researching how famous movies, especially the ones we are researching, have advertised their trailers. We took keen notice into their instagrams, a lot of them had a corny and creative feel to them. All of them were holiday related and involved some kind of reference to the movie or to the real world. Some accounts create special posters for their movie formatted just for instagram, to give it a "limited" look. Since it looked more fun than the others we've seen like simple posts on other sites, we were going to find some "contemporary" posts and see what we can come up with in a similar style.

Weekly Blog Post #17 (12/12/2023) (Winter Break Plans)

kaya4162 — 2023-12-11 12:52:06 UTC

I told my group a couple of ideas I had about keeping track of our progress. I pitched to them that the script writer and I would work more on the act structure (we've been lacking on it) while our other member can help organize and schedule what we would want to do in our pre-prod/production phase. We already discussed ideas about what we could film, but we must organize what days, our availability, travel, etc.

We also decided that I, the director, needs to start casting actors and helping envision what our movie would be like based on location. The only idea I have for location is working with our current location so we don't have to improvise or imply a different setting with too many effects or "fake snow". It can also help with the comedic aspects, as having a boring hot Christmas in Florida can be a silly Christmas gag. For casting, I know a few friends who are in the theater department at our school who can help act. But the theater department can only go so far with their own projects and school events. I also want to take this casting gig a step further to imitate a real "casting call" using open flyers and advertisements to get real actors. Even if we cannot get real actors, we can always improvise how our character is portrayed. Speaking of casting, I had a silly idea of casting my grandfather (again) for our movie so that he can play our raunchy Santa Claus. I envision him being hilarious with his attitude, his thick accent, and because he's helped with my movie last year for Aice Media. He actively participated and improvised good lines in our last project and is very flexible to work with; he's excellent.

Currently, our big focus is getting the story right and our final drafts finished by the end of winter break. I personally want to hold off a little on final drafts because it's already taking a bit of time working on the act structure and we need feedback from our teacher. We need to scout locations, assign all potential roles, insight visions, etc. Our cinematographer is creating a list to keep track for us. List is above:

Weekly Blog Post #18 (12/15/2023) (Following our Schedule)

kaya4162 — 2023-12-12 16:25:04 UTC

One of our members has been absent for some time of the week, but that hasn't stopped us from working. I've decided to get with the script writer to help with forming more parts of the story and structure. Soon enough (maybe even before break ends), we will have our drafts ready for BOTH trailers.

We also began discussing what certain work we need to do that needs to be prioritized. One of our members even mentioned that we must start our casting and character designing, but I've decided to change that to something we should do after winter break. It's important we at least have an idea of who we would want in our movie, since we already have an idea of what our characters are like. Moving back towards advertisement, we started to discuss as a class with our teacher about starting on our "campaigns" early so we don't wait last minute. All we really have to do is finish our representation as a company and then make an instagram account. Maybe at some point, I can find others way to diversify our ways of grabbing attention.

One major thing in our schedule is to scout ahead and get ideas of our shooting and I heavily encouraged that we try to physically go to places, but I'm afraid I'm limited because I start work. I was thinking we use my actual work place as a setting but that is just a thought.

Weekly Blog Post #19 (1/2/2024) (Winter Break)

kaya4162 — 2024-01-03 12:24:03 UTC

It's the start of the new year and we just returned back to school. To be completely honest, I need a break FROM my winter break. It was a stressful two weeks away and I spent a lot of it doing college work, trying to work more at my job, and having family issues.

All of those and along with me celebrating Christmas got in the way of our projects. We genuinely did not work on our project and we couldn't do a lot of the things we wrote on our schedule. Even though I was working and I mentioned that my place of work is having a Christmas party, it was canceled and I was pre-occupied to film anything that looked nice as b-roll or as a scene. My other group members were just as busy as I was over break dealing with their families and even getting sick, and we had no chance to set up a meeting or a hangout spot to scout ahead for filming.

Even if we didn't get much done, were still on top of what still needs to be done and it is being organized. We began discussing today what we did over break and what we should start focusing on. One of the things that we need to finish as soon as possible is our script revisions. Once were done with having both of our script revised, our instructor will review them with us a group corresponding with our roles.

Weekly Blog Post #20 (1/8/2024) (New revisions and plans)

kaya4162 — 2024-01-08 16:40:14 UTC

Following the schedule and plans that we made for our trailers, we've begun cramming in a lot of the things we needed to do from winter break along with new assignments required for our mid term. Before we started finishing up our pre-production, we managed to finish one of our scripts and read it together to get a general idea of what the story is like and how we present it based on genre. Along with that, we also made several revisions which I will show.

Despite the revisions, we were generally satisfied with the story. We did not change any major parts of it and we only changed certain scenes that either better represent the story and also changed the order of scenes. We made a note that we needed to change the character dialogue because it seemed quite "bland", along with changing the beginning of the trailer that presents the "introduction" or I would call the "setup" of what will later happen in the story that drives the plot.

Our main focus currently is getting our second script complete for our second trailer and revising it. We hopefully plan to get this done today so we can complete our midterm. We also still need to complete our three act structure, which I am personally stuck on because of the way we've written the trailers. We did not base the trailers off a "complete" story, which is what we need even if the trailers and script is showing a part of it. It's difficult because we don't have any specific driving plots or anything that connects or lines up with the parts of the story we did write. We only have the basic idea of it down such as how the story starts, who the characters are, and how the story ends. There's no exposition or even subplots which I will have to figure out.

Weekly Blog Post #21 (1/8/2024) Three Act Structure

kaya4162 — 2024-01-08 16:40:34 UTC

Awhile ago, my group and I had a meeting about our story because it was messy and our teacher asked us restructure it properly. We had a whole document that we shared together and it contained a lot of our info such as who our characters were, main plots, an ending, etc.

However, it did not quite follow the three act structure of our actual story. I decided to recycle what we have and work off of what we had. Not only that, but the actual document is not complete and we left some spaces out. So I decided to add more parts of the act structure and finish parts of the sheet as part of the mid term:

Plot/Story line:

Setting:

Late winter in Florida
Takes place now
Mall
Neighborhood
Childhood homes of characters in the past
Streets of downtown...?
Diner
Decorated family house

ACT 1: Mutual Interests

Introduction:

Inciting Incident:

Rising Action:

Plot point 1:

Subplot 1/Obstacle:

ACT 2:

Descending Action:

Subplot 2/Obstacles

Visual Metaphors: A re-occurring gag for a Christmas decoration

Theme: Man vs. Society

Juxtaposition: "Love and War"

Pov: 3^rd person

Conflict: Society norms against holiday traditions and Christmas.

Character development:

Characters:

The main Trio:

1. Mike (Catalyst Character)

Mean, passionate, determined, humorous

Gender: Boy

Hair color: Brunette

Eye color: Blue/green eye color

Height: average-tall

Hobbies:

Dress style:

Character development:

2. Lissa

Moral guiding voice, Sweet, easily fooled, nerdy

Gender: Girl

Hair color: Blonde

Eye color:

Height: average-shorter

Hobbies: Reading

Dress style: Preppy nerd outfit; Glasses, Skirt

Character development:

3. Max

Quiet, mysterious, stubborn, clever

Gender: Boy

Eye color: dark brown

Height: average-tall

Dress style:

Protagonist: The trio groups

Antagonist: The complete opposite; another trio group

Intermediary characters: The Principal of the school

Catalyst: Mike (involves his status and his opinion towards the school's social hierarchy + popular kids)

Weekly Blog Post #22 (1/11/2024) Midterm

kaya4162 — 2024-01-09 16:30:13 UTC

For the past week, we've been working on a midterm for our class as mentioned. The midterm consists of basic questions that are aligned with the work we have so far at the time we move into the third quarter of semester 2. A lot of the work on the midterm was thankfully done with the help from these blog posts! I was able to back into our trailer research and answer questions relating towards our target audiences, trailer inspirations, genre's, etc. During our work on the midterm, we've been putting in a lot of work towards our scripts and stories. Mainly, we finished the second part of our trailer script and now we have two complete visions of our movies. We as a group will soon read them together and revise some issues and fixes. Another aspect of our project that we've begun discussing once again is branding, which is actually one of the questions on our midterm. We gave more ideas towards branding and explained how and why this applies specifically towards our work, such as trying to add comedic and festive elements that are similar to some of the branding research we've done in the past with other accounts. The research we had was conducted off of Instagram, which is our primary focus of where we push our trailers for viewing. Many of the questions questioned our primary audience focus and a more thorough analysis on more of a trailer research. After we finish our midterm, we will begin our script revision which I will post very soon and we will begin wrapping up our pre-production phase! Were excited to begin filming.

Weekly Blog Post #23 (1/14/2024) First Script Revision (in-depth)

kaya4162 — 2024-01-09 16:30:34 UTC

We spent the first day reading through our script and making revisions that were based on trying to make the two scripts we have properly coincide with each other. The script itself was written well and it properly followed the structure, creating an even flow, likeable story. A lot of our revisions were mainly feedback and opinions towards polishing the script and making additional changes. One of the main changes that we sought out for was dialogue. We felt as if what the characters were saying were extremely bland and boring, it almost seemed like it was auto generated and there isn't much personality or emotion. We made a note to try to be a little more specific with what the characters are trying to say to add on to the story and to of course make the dialogue more appealing.

One of the other small changes that we did was our order of shots. I wanted to change how we transition to the end of our script by switching some shots and "scenes", relating towards our trailer going from a scene of a mall santa to the "real santa" and I was afraid it may confuse audiences and it would look odd having those two scenes back to back. Along with changes to our script, we also made a lot of new plans specifically targeting how, when, and where we are filming these scenes. We mostly discussed the first scene where we introduce the characters and we decided to change how we film the setting aka the Houses, to make it look like each character is living in a different place whilst we use the same house on set. We made a note that the ages and the descriptions of our characters are subject to change, along with changing some of the dialogue throughout the story to invoke more emotion and to make it seem less bland and forced. One of the main problems in our script and our trailers themselves is we STILL do not have a title, and the title cards are somewhat complicated and are "improvised" because they are not basing off anything. Other changes involving how we film can include a scene where we have a christmas tree on fire, we discussed using effects since I know a way to implement effects and where we could film the tree getting engulfed.

Those were the main changes we made, not including some spelling and some script formatting, but we are overall satisfied and happy with how our script writer presented the movie and to film the trailers.

Weekly Blog Post #24 (1/14/2024) Second Script Revision (in depth)

kaya4162 — 2024-01-10 14:28:40 UTC

Our second script, which was focused more on the family audience for our campaign, had fewer revisions and turned out better than our first script. This script has a different start to the story than the other script and we've taken more of a liking to it because we have better planning for its shoot and is much more preferred than start of the script using a flashback. The only personal problem I had with the script was that some of the scenes/sequences were just repeats from the first script. It seemed like it was just filled in their just to finish the script. Other notes include locations to film such as the diner scenes, party scene, and mall scene. As with the first script revision, our main problem were are our title cards. However, we did decide to use our idea that I mentioned previously about our company logo: DNB Studios, which is being used in our credits shown in the trailer. To focus more on the family aspect, we did change/add some sequences that seemed more family friendly along with focusing more on the annoying cheery woman in our trailer, who is a re-occurring element that adds on to the plot driven elements to what our characters would do to ruin christmas and why they hate christmas.

Weekly Blog Post #25 (1/19/2024) More work on branding

kaya4162 — 2024-01-11 14:02:06 UTC

As mentioned throughout our script revisions, we had to work on a title of our movie, which for some reason has caused us much delay. I remember a couple weeks ago we spent a significant amount of time sitting together trying to form a name, but nothing ever started clicking. We even tried to use ChatGPT and Ai to help use find a catchy name, but Ai isn't perfect and can only think broadly. The ideas it gave us were so bad that we couldn't even take inspiration from it's suggestions.

I also remember somewhere around Thanksgiving break I was on a plane flying to Texas, when I suddenly thought of a pretty good name for the movie, but was unsure what my group thought. I told them about my idea being "Filthy Animals" when I returned, trying to get inspiration from the famous "Merry Christmas you Filthy Animals" line from Home Alone. I further added on to the idea that in the movie Home Alone, Kevin steals a line from the movie he was watching it and uses it and that we could do something similar, but this time it is now our characters stealing the line "Filthy Animals" from the movie, being our movie title. I have not brought the name idea up in awhile, and they never explicitly told me what they think about it. Personally speaking, I think it can be a great idea.

Another part of branding that we worked on is our company, which we have now decided on the simple "DNB" as mentioned. Not very long ago, the cinematographer was creating designs for our logo which looked very nice as shown above. I had an idea after class that the logo he was designing would be our MAIN one, but in our trailers, we sort of transition our "traditional" logo into a holiday themed one to further fit the mood of a festive atmosphere. When I get the chance, I will ask about his opinion and see if it can be done.

Weekly Blog Post #26 (1/20/2024) Midterm Discussion

kaya4162 — 2024-01-18 16:17:07 UTC

We spent a lot of time trying to work on our midterm for the course while trying to juggle the scripts and trailers. The midterm focused on making sure we were able to answer basic questions regarding our pre-production phase, audience focus, planning, etc. Once we submitted the midterm, our instructor went over what we had and I'll be writing about what she personally went over with me in relation to our trailers regarding my answers and research.

The one problem I had with the midterm was that our original document was deleted and I had some outdated information that was either already answered or changed, so most of the answers I had I tried my very best to answer with what I had. As a group, we split up some questions amongst ourselves into a total of 5 questions. I answered the first question regarding the primary genre and audience focus and how we integrated our research into our work. One of the issues I had with the research is that our group inexplicitly had done some research on the new Grinch movie trailer that I wasn't fully aware of, so I began to refer to irrelevant research. On top of that, our teacher recommended that we try to find another trailer/inspiration that deviates away from a trailer we worked on long ago; The Adam Project, because that was used as an example on how to research a trailer and is a waste to use as our example if there's better options, especially for Christmas themed-action trailers.

Weekly Blog Post #27 (1/22/2024) Script Revisions with Teacher #1

kaya4162 — 2024-01-21 20:39:23 UTC

We spent about 2-3 days reviewing our scripts with the teacher and we had to make LOTS of changes and we had to make the fast.

Our most pressing concern: What is our audience?

Our teacher questioned which scripts are targeted for which audience. The two scripts we submitted, as per our research, pertain to Y/A and family. The problem was, the way our scripts were written made it seem that both audiences were swapped with each other for each script. This meant that it was very confusing to read one of our scripts, one for example being family, actually sounding much more like a Y/A script. It was very confusing, but a simple fix.

Our teacher began questioning many parts of the story, asking for specifics such as "What is this character trying to say?" or "Where are they doing this?". It was clear that there were a lot of sequences jumping back and forth everywhere with little relevancy. The major problem was our intro for the script that was supposed to be for Y/A, but was written to sound more for family audiences. The intro did not at all sound like it was appealing to Y/A and was unorganized and not formatted correctly. Our idea was to have a flashback to introduce the characters and to hint on ideas on why they hate Christmas as an origin story. Our teacher said that the idea seemed a little stale regarding one of the back stories, and asked if it were to be fixed/changed.

Later in the script, our introduction to our trio beginning to wreak havoc and destroy christmas was sloppy and confusing to the teacher. She gave us more pointers on "logistics" on locations, dialogue change, and changing the slug lines. The ending of our script along with some of our sequences were crossed out and needed some work. Overall, there were several fixes we had to make immediately, and this was only one of our scripts. I think one of the main problems with it was that I didn't properly finish or format the full story properly and it made the script writer and I begin to add fillers in order to write an idea of a script, instead of fully finishing it.

Weekly Blog Post #28 (1/22/2024) Script Revisions with Teacher #2

kaya4162 — 2024-01-21 20:39:59 UTC

This meeting took 2 days as well, right after the first. This was supposed to be "family" oriented but was more Y/A sounding, according to the teacher. This script was the most preferred by the teacher and by my two other classmates. I said that the script felt more "lively" and it just flowed better. However, other than the issue with the fact that we confused our audiences with both scripts, this meeting brought up a major calling for change.

Our other meetings were all participated together as a class, but this one was different. It was just me, as director, and the teacher. We had a one on one while my partners were out of class for a school event. The teacher went through the script line by line to try to emphasize her statements on the many sequences, actions, and scenes that sounded off. The very beginning was fantastic in my opinion and opened up an appealing situation that our trio put themselves in where they were "attending" a party that they were trying to break into. The idea of the scene was that our characters were going to crash the party and ruin it in someway, but get caught in the middle of them trying to break in. The teacher suggested to make this more "specific" by making the party goers drunk, but the teacher got more confused when I tried to explain the scene.

The teacher and I began to change our conversation towards making a revision to our general project instead of the actual script. She suggested that the changes that need to be made are now subjecting to a change in our course of action, explaining that maybe our audiences and even the genre do not add up properly which could explain our confusion with the scripts and the blandness/mess of them. She made a great suggestion saying that we should instead create a TEASER about our characters and their backstories with a separate trailer that shows the characters in action. Once I pitch to my group these major changes, we hopefully can rewrite one of our scripts and begin filming soon.

Weekly Blog Post #30 (1/30/2024) Final Script Revision before Production #1

kaya4162 — 2024-01-23 12:56:34 UTC

The next day after the script meeting, I gathered my classmates and began going over the notes I had with them. I told them that major changes were going to be made towards our approach to how we advertise the story and what our story will be about, along with all the other elements my teacher mentioned. I told my cinematographer/partner that we both need to step in and help the script writer more, since it made more sense that we tried to combine our roles into the script so that we have ideas on how it can look and how it can be made to help our scriptwriter more.

The changes we made are as seen:

We changed and fixed the target audience for each script (family and y/a) keeping mind that it may be subject to change with ideas presented at the script meeting.
Characters are introduced earlier on (however, are only introduced by their names and do not have descriptions)
Setting in the introduction is changed to be more specific at a real location: Mel's Diner
Changed diner scene and dialogue, emphasized on what they are doing and what they are talking about.
Added an "apartment" with one of the characters scene relevant to a location in real life.
Switched some of the dialogue from the diner scene to this new apartment scene
Added a scene with a giant Christmas tree, with the characters looking at presents (confused on this)
Added a bit where a fake Santa makes a comedic entrance
Edited the Christmas tree lighting scene

Weekly Blog Post #31 (01/30/2024) Final Script Revision before Production #2

kaya4162 — 2024-01-23 16:24:44 UTC

This script, again, was the most favored by the teacher and by our group. However, I tried to apply the notes I had that I took with my teacher and gave insight to the scriptwriter to make changes towards implications and more specifications with this script.

Once again, changed the audiences so that they're corresponding with the correct story.
Changed the party so that the attendees are under the influence
Changed the intro scene so that it is implied that the trio is attending the party to ruin it/rob it.
Added a getaway scene
Added a comedic scene at the end of the getaway scene
Added a title card between said scene and intro
Shortened the script to write more lore accurate action sequences and to organize trailer towards what the rest of the movie presents

Weekly Blog Post #32 (01/30/2024) Set Designing #1

kaya4162 — 2024-01-30 16:03:17 UTC

After we finished making edits for our final draft (with edits subject to change), our group started discussing about where we're filming and what were going to use. We discussed locations before, but because of the scenes we added and changed, we either had to incorporate other methods or change locations. I mentioned awhile back that my work place is having several Christmas related events and is putting up festive decorations. Although it is the end of the first month of 2024, my work place is extremely lazy and a lot of the decorations are still up which is personally hilarious. Unfortunately, I quit, and we won't be able to use it for a scene I had in retrospect where the party we briefly talked about could have occurred.

Even though I quit, the place respects me since I've been a long time employee and I could arrange something. The party scene though was changed so that it's hosted at one of our members houses; the scriptwriters house. In all honestly, it could be easier to film since the club I worked at is an active business and the house is a free space. Other things we discussed for "set designing" was helping each other go through our old Christmas decorations for scenes and discussing more locations.

Weekly Blog Post #33 (02/06/2024) Set Designing #2

kaya4162 — 2024-01-30 16:08:48 UTC

This post is more focused on ideas that we are set on doing, ideas that we are already pushing for as of this date. As mentioned, we have a diner scene. This diner scene is going to be shot at a real life diner that we chose because of it's very contemporary look of an 80's classic diner. The diner is downtown of where we live and is called Mel's Diner, which is open all week from 8 am to 9 pm. Our idea is to attempt to call up the diner to ask if we have special permission to have our little spot near a window to film. While we film, we guarantee our crew and actors a paid meal, along with the diner getting some business and service while we do our own business. However, there is one thing standing in our way: our scheduling.

Mel's diner is completely flexible and is usually never closed, yet we still cannot find the time to film. Ever since I quit, I started a new fast paced job that requires much more of my time than my last job. I usually work several days in the week and the weekends as well. As of now, our crew consists of four people, and it is crucial if everyone shows up as I am the director. The fourth person in our group is a confirmed actor that we have, who is going to play the girl in the trio: Lissa. As of now, we do not have a specific date planned, except that it may happen in the next two weekends.

Weekly Blog Post #34 (02/15/2024) Plans for Production

kaya4162 — 2024-01-30 16:09:28 UTC

I am creating this post to update our plans and I plan to make a separate post with a schedule sheet/plan of what we plan to do. Our plan WAS to film this weekend, but my work schedule keeps switching and now it apparently says I work late at night the whole weekend. The reason why this is a problem is because were planning to film the party scene which is planned at night so that we can capture the lively colors and because it just looks boring during the day. I have yet to call Mel's Diner, will plan to sometime at the time of writing this.

In the beginning of February, we had to submit what we had as a rough cut. The problem was, we haven't filmed anything because we kept changing our script and it was difficult to adjust. However, that doesn't mean we don't have a rough cut. I did compile together a fabricated set of something online and imported into a sandbox game to play around with. This is exactly what I did last year to create our final movie, all I did was find a diner set, tweak the maps set, played around with camera settings, and began filming what our movie could look like. I have those saved somewhere and they are used sort of like a storyboard, but I haven't submitted it yet. The idea is to use the set I made online and to combine what we film on day 1 into one clip.

Here's a snip of what the diner looks like:

Weekly Blog Post #35 (02/19/2024) End of Pre-production

kaya4162 — 2024-01-30 16:09:51 UTC

As we move towards filming our trailers, were now about to start the real production of our project. We've finished our scripts, timelines/schedules, trailer research, target audience, and we are just beginning to create our posters and social media pages. The rest of our pre-production includes the set locations, costumes, actors, props, and storyboard pictures.

To elaborate more, the storyboard posters are what I uploaded previously of the diner. I haven't gotten a chance to finish the rest, but I already have visions of what the rest of the script will be like and I will play around with how I want the shots angled with our cinematographer. We don't have specific costumes, but I feel as if the actors we have that play our characters already dress well enough to represent our characters. I plan to call the diner we are filming at today and we already have the house we are filming at ready.

Weekly Blog Post #29 (01/29/2024) Personal Group Discussion

kaya4162 — 2024-01-30 16:17:00 UTC

Another important thing to mention that the teacher told me in the script meeting was a more personal setback she noticed in the group involving the scriptwriter. It seemed that due to the story being a "mess", we weren't putting in enough work into involving ourselves with the story or scriptwriting process. This sort of caused the script writer to begin writing a lot of "filler stuff" just to have something in the story that fits. I promised that I would try to help branch the story to a new direction and help the scriptwriter more (since I am the director), but it may be a little difficult due to complicated personal matters. I have all my notes ready that point out specific problems with each script and I have a separate tab following that with lists of ideas and info I have that can help fix our issues, such as the suggestion my teacher made about changing how we advertise; using a teaser instead of a trailer to focus more on the characters and introducing them/past backstory & context.

Weekly Blog Post #36 (02/22/2024) Schedule/Roster #1

kaya4162 — 2024-02-06 01:48:04 UTC

Planning a day to film is very difficult for us at the moment, most of us are just extremely busy. Not only that, but we also need to film in a specific location, at a specific time, at a specific date. At this point, I might drop that much effort into making it "perfect" just to afford time, but I'm not sure I'm ready for that yet. I've been very busy with my new job and our writer has been very busy with hers as well, along with extracurriculars.

Although we are slammed and stressed out, our cinematographer decided to print out a custom roster/schedule to help keep track of what we could do. The roster also includes names and contact info for actors. While we try to free up our time, I'm going to try and get in contact with our actors and I'm going to try and call Mel's Diner soon. The problem is, I won't be able to call and just give them a "heads up", we need a set time and date to let them know. My next post I hope to update peoples status on their roles and availability.

Weekly Blog Post #37 (02/22/2024) Schedule/Roster #2

kaya4162 — 2024-02-06 01:48:21 UTC

Here is the second schedule and roster, this focuses more for our cinematographer, as he is also the set designer. We are trying to keep track of locations, decorations, props, etc. so that we don't forget and so we can remind ourselves on what stuff we have and what we can buy. We're also gonna focus more on other specifications, such as costumes and clothing, which I feel like we've been partially ignoring. So far, the actors on the roster from the previous roster are not available this weekend, and we won't be able to film this weekend unfortunately. However, we alll seem to be available next weekend except for our script writer. We made a note that we need a little more time to discuss our plan thoroughly. The plan as of now is to call Mel's Diner during the weekend or on a random meeting we'll have before Friday of next week. Our two actors are going to be playing Mike and Lissa, they both will attend the meeting and are very excited to play them. I was thinking we try a bit of a "casting" meeting to get an idea how they would look playing the characters. The filming we plan on the upcoming weekend is also planned to be fully accomadated, with rides if needed and paid food for everyone we're inviting "on set". I'm tryinig to give people an incentive and to make this more fun, since this is really stressing us all out because our progress seems to get slower by the week.

Even if we end up not filming the next weekend, I have another plan up my sleeve. During our planning of the filming for next week, were also going to take the time to get our posters done, since it is something we've completely neglected. Even before we finished our script, I thought about what our posters would look like and how we would do them. I never really discussed them with my group and they're a little hard to describe, but I will say that one of the poster ideas that I have is more of an "art" then a picture or photo. I thought it was something that was very fitting back when we first started, but now that our story has completely changed, I need to change how I want it to look.

Weekly Blog Post #38 (02/26/2024) Poster Planning #1

kaya4162 — 2024-02-13 14:55:30 UTC

Poster planning was extremely slow and we barely even started any of it. We're trying to focus more on the class subjects and assignments instead of trying to work on our project. We are nearing March and we are talking about plans to film on the upcoming weekend, but we haven't made any plans during the week to begin our drafts and ideas for our posters. However, I have personal plans that I've made that will hopefully go into motion soon.

To make our posters, I've decided that I will help edit and finalize the posters, our cinematographer will capture the posters or even create the poster ideas I have from scratch, and the scriptwriter will draw out some ideas that either I have or drafts that she can make. I wanted to make this more cooperative because I've noticed that all of us have unique skills that can be applied to this part of the project to make it fly by faster. The main problem with some of the poster ideas I have is that we need to get our decor and actors ready, along with a good time to get all of our things to photograph. I at least know exactly where I'm doing it; inside the film room in our school with a green screen and provided lights.

Once I talk to my group more about the plans I've been brewing, hopefully we get this in motion.

Weekly Blog Post #39 (03/10/2024) Spring Break

kaya4162 — 2024-02-23 14:32:17 UTC

Following our schedule, we were supposed to begin filming our diner scene on the 17th. Unfortunately, we were not aware that Cambridge regulations state that everyone must be present at the site, even if they are not needed for "participation". Most of us were away on vacation, including our cinematographer who was away on a cruise ship, so we were unable to gather our group to film. Nonetheless, we still have enough time to get all the other scenes done. I have tried to call the diner during break, but they did not answer me. With our permission granted from the diner, our groups presence, and our actors, we'll soon get this done in no time. We prioritized getting our posters done once we get back from break because it will also help us get our social media page done.

Although spring break we technically did nothing because we were too busy, I at least tried to do something for our rough cut, which has been butchering our time and grades recently with the class. I did some more work on the diner scene that I mentioned that I made, and I played around with camera work and blur. I attempted to make shots that could focus on close ups, which was difficult and I only managed to pull it off once. I also made an establishing shot of the house party scene. Soon, we won't need what I made and we can hopefully film these in real life. I made all of this to at least have something once we return, it is also useful to use as a storyboard.

Weekly Blog Post #40 (3/17/2024) New Revamped Scheduling/Planning

kaya4162 — 2024-03-20 13:26:26 UTC

Once we came back from break, we focused on our in class assignment and case studies for our future essays. In the meantime, we spent as much class time as we could writing our case study and discussing our current plan for our trailer project. We've made major strides to our schedule and overall planning, starting with our poster shooting. We are to begin shooting at our schools greenscreen room starting this Wednesday. We've also confirmed with our actors on new times and dates, since my work schedule is getting in the way. We realized mid-planning that were able to fit a bonus day unto our schedule because were all available on a day off from school to film. We're currently trying to schedule our days to help set up our scenes separately from the days we shoot to help build authenticity.

Our big plan for one of our scenes is the party scene that is the intro to one of our trailers. Currently we are on the step of trying to gather our props to decorate one of our members' house to look like a "Christmas party". It's been difficult because, well, it's March. I am also having a hard time reserving days off for shooting from my manager at work, but hopefully I'm able to help show up and work. I'm expecting this weekend to film and write at least 3 blog posts from just the filming, with all the other parts of our project following up.

Weekly Blog Post #41 (3/20/2024) Overview of Trailer/Movie Study

kaya4162 — 2024-03-20 14:54:56 UTC

As we planned our project and scheduling, our teacher decided to give us a pointer about our previous research and how we will apply it to our project. She asked us if we skimmed through our previous marketing research on other trailers and potentially analyzing different/more examples. This is done to further help us apply more examples and to help us stay on track while using more accurate research. So far, our research consists of trailers that are more christmas related rather than something that's specifically or closely related to our movies contemporary style: a raunchy holiday action comedy. I was hoping for our upcoming research we further cite our current research to help freshen our minds while we hopefully look for a movie/trailer that is targeted more towards one of our movies main messages: hating on christmas and conflictions with religion.

Our previous research findings are still linked to our old blog post, which was combined into a powerpoint presentation. We initially had 3 different examples, along with a bonus example that we mainly examined on for it's marketing. However, I want to look more into how our other examples marketed and I personally don't enjoy using the new animated Grinch movie as a research citing because its animated and is nowhere near similar when it comes to style, production, and even story. I don't want to use just "christmas movies" as a scape goat and excuse that it's similar to our trailer research and is only "good enough, I want something much more specific and relatable.

Weekly Blog Post #42 (3/22/2024) Set/Script Editing

kaya4162 — 2024-03-20 14:56:00 UTC

Aside from our trailer research, we've begun making major strides with our planning for the set and beginning our poster shoots and our filming. To start, our party scene is currently being set up and we plan to invite at least 10-15 people to gather for a "party". The party is set so that it is an actual party and guests won't be gathered just for a project. We're decorating the house for the party for the theme, providing food, and even service hours for just participating.

The best part about the party is the custom invitation we made to advertise, which our cinematographer made on his own spare time. The idea is that enough people will come and gather in a specific room inside the back of the house. With camera work and positioning, we will be able to create lots of crowd shots and to make our production look more pristine, having the ability to have this many people as extras. Our invitation was sent publicly to some of our members' instagrams. We ask that the party members wear colors related to our projects color themes such as green and red, and they are welcome to bring decorations of their own, costumes, and food.

One major change that we made to our script and story for the sake of convenience and purpose was that we had to change our characters. It used to be a trio consisting of two guys and a girl, but because we could not find a suitable actor for Max, he was replaced with a friend of ours who will play Max as a female character who's name is short for "Maxine". We preferred making this change in the end because the group thought that it made the group more likeable in a way if there were two girls and one guy instead of the other way around. Additionally, I know the actor replacing Max and I feel as if her attitude as a female replacing the male character fits better.

Weekly Blog Post #43 (03/23/2024) Poster Shooting #1

kaya4162 — 2024-03-20 14:56:37 UTC

Today was the first day of shooting pictures for our posters! We ran into a little discrepancy in the beginning because the room we needed to borrow in order to shoot our posters was being used for the school's coaches for a meeting, but we eventually booked it today. A repeating trend among our project was that there was at least one absence whenever we got together to work, but that finally ends when we were all able to work together and finish this portion of the project. We finally managed to get a scheduled date and time that adjusted accordingly with everyone.

When we showed up, we planned to shoot different shots with the trio and maybe some independent portraits of the characters. Sadly, the short time we had did not let us try out all our ideas we had for our actors. However, we are still very happy with what we shot. I wanted to get serious shots of them together looking disgruntled and moody to outline the sourness of the trio. The script writer and cinematographer had their own ideas that we played around with, such as having two of each different character posing together and doing different things. Something I wished that we did was having portraits of each character, which I've seen before in different advertisements for shows and movies where they have a dramatic poster close-up of the character posing or staring directly at the camera.

The shots looked great, our only concern was the way the green screen was positioned and how we would edit it. We've decided that our cinematographer would help edit and put together the content of the posters since he has many tools to his disposal that can help us.

Weekly Blog Post #44 (03/23/2024) Poster Editing Ideas

kaya4162 — 2024-03-27 11:56:01 UTC

Since the beginning of the year when we first started this project, I always envisioned how we would advertise our movie and what our posters could look like. I had an idea that one of the posters would be an outline of our characters in a graffiti styled drawing. Since we've completely changed our story and script several times, this idea began to fade and I couldn't find a way to pull this kind of concept into our current marketing plan, which bothered me because I really wanted to make it. I tried to pitch this idea to our cinematographer, drawing a picture of what I would think it should look like while fitting in with our theme, characters, etc.

So to try and give our cinematographer a better idea on what I'm trying to picture, I drew a rough draft of what I wanted. I'm nowhere near being a good artist, but it looked good enough for him to visualize what I wanted. What I was thinking was having our trio's shadows and outlines being drawn out more cartoony than being portrayed in a graffiti style. Next, I added visuals and put pointers on what colors are going to be used to fit the Christmas theme. I drew Christmas lights on the top of the page that are hung across the paper and I emphasized that the characters are standing under a starry, snowy night. Finally, to bring back a forgotten idea, I decided to draw a giant fire behind the characters that hints towards the trio burning a Christmas tree. I gave it to the cinematographer as just an idea that he could play around with, but we needed to take more pictures in order to get the outline drawn. So far, we are working on scheduling another day where we can all meet at lunch to shoot more pictures.

Weekly Blog Post #45 (03/26/2024) Poster Shoot Day 2

kaya4162 — 2024-04-02 14:09:32 UTC

This day for poster shooting was a personal disaster for me. We did get what we needed (sort of), but there were so many things in my way that I wasn't able to be fully present to tell the actors how I wanted them to look and how I want the pictures to be shot. Firstly, I had personal things to do around the school such as taking care of prom and I had to run around the school with little to no time. Secondly, one of our actors could not show up to the shoot and we only had two of them. Having only two of our actors show up was not as bad as expected, but we still needed the three of them for our other poster ideas. One of our ideas was a celebrity shoot that our writer was going off of that we wanted to try, but we decided to play around with what we had at that moment.

When we planned to shoot on this date, we asked if the actors would wear more festive clothing that is color coded with the theme and the clothes they wore for the first day. Once our actors showed up, we realized that we had plenty of photos with Max and Lissa together, and we thought that it would be a good fit to have another set of two characters together. Mike wore a sweater and a hat and Lissa wore similar clothes from the last shoot. Although I was absent for most of the shoot, the cinematographer managed to pose them well enough so that the characters can fit the rough draft for our Y/A audience posters. With this shoot included, we now have an excellent picture of the three of them posing and laying together, a poster of Max on (her) his own, Max and Lissa posing together, and now Mike and Lissa together. We plan to begin our social media account right as we start filming and as we begin editing our posters together, which will be fun to do with the green screen.

Since our social media and marketing campaign has largely been finished for now, all we need to focus on now is our filming, which we have set for our writers house for our "break in" action sequence tomorrow. As far as we know, we will all be present and we hope to bring our audio equipment for better sound.

Weekly Blog Post #46 (03/31/2024) More Marketing Research/Day 1 of shooting

kaya4162 — 2024-04-02 14:09:53 UTC

Now that we've thoroughly researched the fundamentality of our marketing, our teacher told us that another aspect of our marketing is how expendable we are. She asked if we begun researching how far and wide we would take our campaign, which is something we haven't really thought of. The only thing that we are worried about as of now is our social media page on instagram, which is one of our "techniques" for mass marketing since it has the opportunity to reach global users.

As of now, this step to our marketing research is put on hold for our filming day, which was today! We started filming at our script writers house late in the evening for our break in sequence. We had tons of fun filming and we got the entire sequence done in the span of a couple hours. Although everything else was in order, we forgot to bring sound equipment and we were quite nervous that the footage may not sound as bad. Once I begin editing, I'll be able to see what I can do. Another problem was we underestimated how dark our set was and a lot of our most important shots were all extremely dark. The camera was having a focus bug and it sometimes would either be too blurry and bright or clear and dark. Fixing how bright it looks is less of a problem than fixing the audio, so I'm not too concerned. We decided to improvise a scene in the very beginning where we had one of our characters try to break in by going over the fence, without realizing that the fence was already open. We also tried to shoot shots of all our characters' shadows to have a more ominous intro to our characters. Other than that, we are very happy and I will begin reviewing the footage for editing.

Weekly Blog Post #47 (04/01/2024) Editing Day 1

kaya4162 — 2024-04-04 15:10:31 UTC

My cinematographer sent me all the footage that we shot on the same night. It took a significant amount of time for it to all come through but here is what I could revise from the footage that I got:

The footage was indeed very dark. Turning up the brightness makes the footage more grainy, but I managed to salvage some clips back by turning up the contrast and brightness to an equal level. One clip I wanted to use was the clip with the shadows of our characters sneaking into the house, which I managed to brighten enough for it to be visible. I synced up all the clips starting from the characters entering the house outside and the characters stealing everything and running away. The only problem that I ran into was that the sequence of Lissa hopping over the fence seemed a little incomplete, and we didn't have any good shots of her climbing and falling off the fence. Instead, I made my own little work around and I decided to take a clip of her on the ground and reverse it, making it look like she fell off the fence instead of getting on the floor.

Next, I put together the clips of the characters approaching and breaking in. The clips were shot wide enough and far enough to now get all the characters in view, walking up the stairs and being revealed by the security light. As the characters break in, we had one of the actors pretend to use a lockpick on the door. We also tried to have the camera pan and follow all in one long take all the way until the door closes behind them. The rest of the clips looked excellent, the cinematographer filmed different shots of each character stealing presents and running around. He filmed them in such a way where I could put together clips that cut back between each character smoothly to make it look like we had more than one camera focusing on all of the movements in the room.

Finally, I put together the rest of the scene together, ending the first part of the trailer sequence and day of the shoot. We have our next date planned for shooting at the diner and we called them in to confirm our permission to shoot in the evening. The cinematographer is planning to have a field day with creating things to use as visuals for me, such as title cards. He has already made some major strides with our poster and I began to critique some of the rough drafts he has made, which look absolutely stunning! The only feedback I gave him was to change them up a bit to fit the style of the different genre's we are attempting to market.

Weekly Blog Post #52 (04/13/2024) First Rough Cut of Teaser

kaya4162 — 2024-04-08 11:30:45 UTC

Weekly Blog Post #48 (04/04/2024) Commentary from Group/Teacher on first Rough Cut

kaya4162 — 2024-04-08 15:23:42 UTC

There was not much said on the feedback, but it is still important to mention. Firstly, the feedback I got was that it was dark, which was widely agreed upon and we discussed briefly about re-shooting (this may not be possible.) Secondly, I was told that the rough cut looks like the opening instead of an actual trailer. This feedback confused me, because I assumed the "rough cut" was in its name; a ROUGH cut of product. All I did was go through our footage and put them all together to see what we had for our first scene. We didn't even have all out footage yet, we still needed to grab the scenes from the apartment and diner, the first rough cut was just the first scene of our trailer.

For post editing of the teaser and trailer, I was already planning what shots I would use and put together for both the teaser and the trailer. I know for a fact that I want the teaser to be more comedy and y/a oriented and our trailer to be more action oriented to be more amusing. I also got a chance to look at the title cards that my cinematographer was working on and put them in my project. I also began re-arranging clips to plan the rough draft for the teaser, which should be around 30 seconds. I plan to use a lot of the footage we will be getting of the diner and all it's dialogue from that scene for story telling purposes.

Weekly Blog Post #49 (04/05/2024) Diner Shoot

kaya4162 — 2024-04-08 15:24:25 UTC

We successfully got what we needed at the diner. As promised, we took our actors out and we paid for their meals while we finished the shoot and filmed our dialogue. The only issue was that I unfortunately had to be absent, which meant I wasn't able to direct and coordinate the actors or crew. The crew seemed to stray from the dialogue we originally wrote to something more inciteful and shot several iterations of the dialogue relating towards the trio discussing the party that they intend the rob the house of and discussing their winter break to introduce the setting. The cinematographer also shot several panning and long shots of the characters walking around and driving, simulating their entry. He also shot parts of the restaurants interior to make the scenes more lively and he also shot the giant glowing neon sign in several different ways to give me an opportunity to play around with how I want to transition this scene shot-by-shot.

Unfortunately, we once again did not come fully prepared and we had a noticeable problem with audio. The diner was unexpectedly packed in the evening, which also meant that we had limited room to be more flexible camera angles and shots. Watching through the footage and listening was frustrating, knowing that this audio was nearly unacceptable to use. The only solution I had was to try to adjust it so that it's almost loud enough to hear our characters speak and just quiet enough to not pay attention to the busyness of the diner. Also, because of the tightness of the "set" my cinematographer tried to improvise some shots that could pass off as b-roll, but I don't understand what they really are and it's just close ups of our characters eating, which seems like a waste of time to me personally. Although we have enough to work with, I still would have preferred to have gotten more shots of the characters and hopefully better dialogue.

Weekly Blog Post #51 (04/07/2024) First Rough Cut of Trailer

kaya4162 — 2024-04-09 16:31:48 UTC

Weekly Blog Post #50 (04/13/2024) Editing Day 2

kaya4162 — 2024-04-15 11:23:33 UTC

Weekly Blog Post #56 (04/13/2024) Final Cut of Teaser

kaya4162 — 2024-04-15 11:27:49 UTC

Weekly Blog Post #57 (04/13/2024) Final Cut of Trailer

kaya4162 — 2024-04-18 11:54:49 UTC

Weekly Blog Post #55 (04/13/2024) Official Poster

kaya4162 — 2024-04-19 02:30:14 UTC

Weekly Blog Post #54 (04/13/2024) Social Media Page

kaya4162 — 2024-04-19 02:30:20 UTC

Weekly Blog Post #53 (04/13/2024) Creative Critical Reflection

kaya4162 — 2024-04-19 15:03:40 UTC