Week 3 Reflection

Week 3 Reflection

Last week, we finally finished our rough cut! During one of the 45 minute classes, we used the Infoflow studio to shoot the part where Eliza takes the gun out of her purse. We dimmed the studio lights and set up a lamp that pointed directly at her chair. We got an extreme close-up of the purse so that it wouldn't show that we weren't shooting on location. After we imported the clips, the lighting in the insert shots looked a bit funky next to the natural light that we used in the diner, so we figured out a way to fix the color balance for the final film.

We also put in the revised soundtrack for the graded rough cut. We found a good volume so that the music sounds like it’s coming from a jukebox and the combination with the ambient noise isn't too overpowering for the dialogue. Before, the music selection that appeared in the story didn't exactly fit with the setting and with the events in the story, so we had to make some more changes in the adaptation.

Now that we’re done with the rough cut and with the poster, we have this last week to make our final tweaks and make cool opening credits.

Week 2 Reflection

Week 2 Reflection

            Since last week, we've made a lot of progress on the rough cut. The opening sequence with our main character walking down the highway is complete with transitions and color correction to show that it is a flashback. We've spent a lot of time going through each of the diner clips and deciding how to fix some of the sound and lighting issues we unknowingly encountered on set. Some of the background noise of the diner is a bit distracting with clanging plates and such, so we have a few extra clips to use for slightly dimmer ambient noise.

            Rather than going out to go shoot a photo for the poster, we took a still frame of our main character’s silhouette walking alongside the beltway entrance. The lighting is interesting, but the shot isn't too busy to distract from the writing on the poster.

            There are specific songs mentioned in the story, so the job of the sound technicians is basically to find free CC versions of the songs that we can download and use in the film.

This week each of the group’s members found some task to work on and I think we’re being a lot more productive. We have two people on music, one on the poster, and two at the editing station.

Reflection Week 1

Week 1 Reflection

            Our group finished collecting footage on location last Saturday. We went to Tastee Diner with our camera and microphone and got some pretty decent shots to use in our film. When we went back though our camera roll, some of our shots were out of focus, but most of them had really good quality. There were a couple of shots that had weird lighting since we weren't able to set up lights inside the diner. It was a problem when we only had one take of a certain shot and there was some sort of weird back-lighting  We had to rush through our shot list because our cinematographer had to leave early and we wanted to be as efficient as possible so we weren't there during the dinner rush. We've already started brainstorming ways to color correct some of our footage and place cutaways wisely so that we can do without some of the shots we took that were out of focus.

            Since there have been a lot of computer problems, it took us a couple of days to finally get our clips onto a machine. We've just started assembling the rough cut. As the artistic director, I've been sitting with the editor at the machine making suggestions as well as going between rooms to look at the progress of our music searching and poster-making.

            In the next week, we hope to finish our rough cut so we can get ahead of schedule. We want more time to tweak our footage and add in extra inserts shots of the purse/gun scene that we didn't have time to shoot in the diner.