LAST MINUTE CHANGE

Guys!!!!

As you know I had planned to do a presentation and an interview-style video for my CCR. Due to the timing and also the fact that I need another person to interview me, and no one can, I decided to change that idea to do a podcast.

With the resources I have available, this change makes everything much easier for me to do by myself. I have seen podcasts that are about just Q&As which is what I went for. For example, Kelsey Kreppel, Tana Mongeau, and Brooke Schofield, all do very similar-styled podcasts that don't rely on a fancy set.

https://youtu.be/gGOxCnfoURU?si=9IPMmWA8rr_fgmVY

https://youtu.be/QoRHBHDG0-8?si=RQa36ByFCpLFNCyF

I needed to let you guys know of this minute change, and I know it is definitely not the time to make a big change like this but I needed to do it. I know that this change is for the better, for both myself and my grade.

I am almost done with my first CCR and I will be completing this one right after, with this podvatas style it will definitely be much easier to execute. See you all soon with all my finished products, I am so excited to show you all.

Honest Update

Hi guys!

Today was one of my group member's birthday celebrations, Alex. I will be honest, this and the fact that it is spring break have made me lack in my progress. Although I am good with time, I wish I had my CCRs done already. The project as a whole is due in 3 days. Our opening is 99.9% done, only needing the addition of music which is being done by Lucia, who was unfortunately feeling a little sick this week, but she has been working on it. We are pretty set on that part and we should be posting our finished opening between tomorrow and Monday.

Regarding my CCR, yesterday I worked on the presentation from my first CCR, and tomorrow I will continue with filming the actual talking part of it. I have most of the interview one planned out and will begin filming that tomorrow and editing both.

We are at the last steps and I am super happy with what we have accomplished together and with what I have learned from all of this.

I will update you tomorrow, hopefully with the finished opening scene, and with how editing my CCR is going. It feels weird that this will be one of my last blogs, it has honestly become such a fun and cool way to document this project and I think I will miss it at times.

See you all soon!

CCR Inspiration

Inspo for my CCR

I have spent the last couple of days chatting with my group and doing the finishing touches as well as thinking of how to answer these last 4 questions, shown below.

I going to be answering these questions in two separate manners, which means I will be answering two questions per video.

I feel like the first two questions require much more professional thought so I chose those to be answered in a more put-together manner, which will be a presentation that I will talk through.

The other two, which also require a lot of thought, can be answered in a more light-hearted or fun manner. For these, I wanted to do a silly way to present the answers and I thought of doing some sort of interview. As I mentioned in my last blog I had a good source of inspiration for this style of interview which is the "Chicken Shop Date" hosted by Amelia Dimoldenberg.

It is hugely popular on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, which is where I see it the most. I love the style of these interviews, it is not only about the questions but they have food. Although I am still thinking about whether I should or should not implement the food, I love the way that these interviews flow. It honestly just seems like good friends hanging out instead of such a strict and formal interview situation, especially wiht the amount of humor and sarcasm.

Below I will insert an interview from this channel and the one I will be taking the most inspiration from.

This way of interviewing shows a lot of personalities while still doing what I was tasked with, which was answering these questions fully with the necessary details.

I am going to be writing notes for myself, somewhat a script since I will be filing both my CCRs between today and tomorrow which I have the weekend to edit.

I will be back soon to let you all know how the filming went. I will also be posting both the final products of my CCRs and the opening itself.

CCR Ideas

Hi guys!! I am back with another quick little blog. I had the weekend to brainstorm with my team but also by myself for my CCRs. I wanted to put my ideas out there with these blogs.

Regarding the CCR, I have been thinking of creative ways to answer all 4 questions. For this social media has been very helpful because there is always something new and creative going on. For one of my CCRs, I am certain I want to do just a presentation, either PowerPoint or Canva. But for the other, I do want to be a little more creative and I was thinking of doing some fun little interviews, which I will post a blog talking a bit more about and explaining it further. But here is a little sneak peek:

I also wanted to give a quick sneak peek of how the opening looks right now. All editing has been mostly complete and I think the only thing we are missing is sound, or the music we are going to have, which is still something we are discussing and working on. 

In this little clip, you can see the fonts we decided on going with. As well as the names of the actors, that we made up, and of the production and distribution company, which I did mention we were discussing in a previous blog.

I am honestly super happy with how everything has been going. I am super proud of how me and my team have been managing our time, like in no moment have I ever felt super stressed about our timing. I really appreciate all the hard work my teammates have been putting in and I love how we work together. Now that our opening is at its final stages I have to direct my focus on my CCR and so do my teammates.

I will be back very soon with more details on my CCR and when our movie opening is complete. See you all soon!!!

Updates

Editing

Hi, I wanted to come on here to post a short blog about how editing is going. Alex, who has the role of editor, put all the clips together. As a team, we went over it and had some comments, like fixing some cuts, which were all fixed. Some good news is that we had the perfect amount of clips, a common mistake we avoided by over-filming.

Sound

Our next focus has been the sound and music in our opening. Although we know what type of music we want to be heard, very low, but we have not found it quite yet. But we have reviewed all the other noises. I will insert some notes below.

I will be posting a blog soon discussing websites for copyrighted music and what we end up choosing as a team. Sorry for the short blog today, I just wanted to give a quick little update on how everything is going regarding our movie opening.

Production and Distribution Company

Fonts

We have decided on the fonts for our opening. More specifically for our credits and title. Below I will be inserting screenshots and a video from the opening itself.

Name Ideas 

I have found two websites that generate company names. https://www.shopify.com/tools/business-name-generator and https://www.squadhelp.com/business-name-generator .

Although it isn't the most important part of our project, I do think coming up with these names is something that needs to be thoroughly discussed as a team. It can literally be anything, but in my opinion, it should be something creative that goes with our group.

This next week, which is spring break for us, I think is the perfect moment for us to be doing these finishing touches. Especially since we will have to drift our focus into our CCRs, which as we know are individual work worth a lot.

I will be back soon to discuss CCR ideas. I'd like to begin and share my CCR progress with my blogs here. See you all soon!! 

Editing Update & Font Ideas

Editing

Our editing process has officially started!!! Both Alex and Lucia, my partners, are splitting that role. Alex will edit the actual scenes while Lucia will edit more with the sounds. I wanted to give this quick little update about how our project is going. I will be linking Alex's blog which goes into detail about how editing has been and a slight issue we came upon on. 

https://alexportfolio5.blogspot.com/2024/03/editing-problems-already.html

Font Ideas

Now onto some font ideas for our credits and title. Since our project relies a lot on a written letter, Mara's suicide letter, and Val's letter back. We thought it would be a great idea to mainly use a handwritten font. That way we show more of a connection to the letter.

We also did agree that when we begin to show the first stage of grief, denial, we won't be using that same font. Instead, we will use more of a basic font, which can be seen in many movie titles.

Here I am going to link a website with fonts we as a group will be discussing. I went through the website and saw a bunch of good options. All that is left is to discuss as a group and pick our favorites and the one that seems more fitting.

I will be back soon with more updates and when we pick a font. I also want to research music in movie openings since that is an element we will be using in our project. See you all very soon!!

What is a CCR??

CCR Lesson 

Last class, we went over what a CCR was. Although I always knew it was a big part of the exam, I wasn't really aware of the details and what I had to do specifically. I wrote down a lot of notes, that I will include in this blog.

I will definitely be using these notes and looking back at them a lot. I am super glad I took a bunch of notes on it. Especially the ones that describe each of the 4 questions in more detail, stating exactly what it asks.

I know I will have to put all of my time into these CCRs after the editing is finished. As a group, we agreed on trying to finish with the opening itself as soon as we can so that we can all individually focus on our CCRs, which isn't done in groups.

I will be back soon with updates on how editing is going and with details such as fonts and music, which my group and I will be researching and discussing the rest of this week and the following week. See you all soon!!!

Dear Mara

Filming

So, yesterday we filmed. We came across some issues beforehand meaning we had to change the actor for one of our characters. Originally our roles looked like this:

Director: Lucia

Producer: Alexandra

Writer: Andrea

Cinematographer: Lucia

Editing: Alexandra and Lucia

Character-wise the roles were like this:

Valerie (Val): Andreina (a friend of ours)

Mara (Mar): Andrea

Isabella (Bella): Gabriela (a friend of ours)

Due to schedules mixing our friend, Andreina, wasn't able to come so Alexandra stepped in as Mar and I played Val. Although it was kind of annoying at the moment to have super last-minute switches, everything ended up fine and we definitely had a lot of fun.

BTS

I also wanted to share some photos of us filming and how we also filmed some extra sounds we needed.

Now, as a team, we are going to be revising our footage and seeing what we need. I am confident we got exactly what we needed yesterday since we made sure to over film so we have more to work with. I will be back soon with more updates, see you all soon!!!

Script is done!

After many drafts and slight changes I, with the role of being the writer, have finalized our script. With much help from both my partners, Alex and Lucia, we all really liked and agreed that this script was perfect. Although this might be a short blog, I thought it was really important for the script to have its own post.

I apologize if it looks blurry, I tried inserting the pages in different ways and it still looked this way. I will link the script file here just in case. I will be back soon to let you all know how our filming day went, see you soon!

Filming "Dear Mara"

Location

After some consideration, we decided to film at my house. Our decision was based a lot on the vibe or mood we wanted our opening to give. We also needed to show two rooms with a lot of contrast, to show Val and Mara's contrasting personalities, which I think are shown well with the contrast of my brother and my room. Below I will insert pictures of my house, both downstairs and the rooms, to give you all an idea.

Filming Day

Now onto our decided filming day. We had a few issues figuring out a day that fit each of our schedules, as well as the ones of our friends helping in acting. We will be filming tomorrow Sunday, March 9th. We knew we needed to film this weekend so we had the rest of the week to review our footage and see what we needed or what we did not need, that way it was easier for the editing process.

I know this was a short blog but I did think it was important to update you all on these big decisions we made this week.  I should be back very soon to show you all our final script. I am super excited to film, especially since I am working with people I already have a good bond with. See you all soon!!!

Stages of Grief Research

 How will we show these stages in our opening?

Yesterday in class we thought of a really good idea. Lucia, who is in my group, suggested that we briefly include the well-known 5 stages of grief in our opening, although we will only show the first one as the opening ends. After showing that Mara has died, Valerie will be seen going through the first stage which is denial.

After thinking about this new idea we also thought it would be a good idea to research this concept so we know how to express it better in our project.

I am going to show each definition of the stages, but I will go into as much detail as possible about how we will show Val's denial stage in our opening. The definitions shown below come from this website, which I feel does a really good job of explaining.

The idea we had in mind of showing Val's denial stage after her sister's death would be the last clip, instead of Mara's death being the last clip. After we show the pills on the bathroom floor, insinuating Mara's death, we will cut to black and have "Denial" written on the screen. This next part has not fully been decided, but I think we will show Val completely numb, maybe just staring directly at the camera or something similar. I really think that something like that will show Val's feelings exactly.

I think including this makes a really big difference in our movie opening and although I know it needs to be discussed a bit better, I am really happy with this new concept in our project. It gives some emotional value and takes into consideration the feelings of someone who experiences it in more detail.

I'll be back soon to discuss our script and the start of filming, see you all soon!

More Research

Dialogue Research

As the person in our group responsible for writing the script, I realized that I needed to better my knowledge of script writing by doing thorough research on common dialogues used in movie openings. Given that the characters in our opening are teenagers, I decided to focus my research on dialogues specifically for this age group. After an extensive search, I came across a website, which I will be mentioning throughout my whole blog. The website shows five elements that must be taken into account when writing dialogues for teenagers. I have linked the website here. 

Here are the 5 elements:

Of the five elements, I feel that the first one is particularly more important, but I believe that I won't be using it in our opening due to the sad topic of the movie. However, I might add a touch of humor to lighten the mood, but it won't be my highest priority. 

I already knew that no formal vocabulary would be used in the script. I want the dialogue in our opening to sound as natural as possible since that's how dialogue should sound in movies. 

The third element really stuck out to me because it reminded me that I could draw inspiration from the conversations I engage in daily to write the script. I want to incorporate the way people talk in real life into the script. 

Although the fourth recommendation is good, I won't be using it. I don't think our movie opening needs to include much humor, as I mentioned before. Including a meme or joke wouldn't be appropriate for the subject and story being told. 

The fifth idea reminded me to have the characters interact casually. I want to make it seem like people are having a natural conversation without any scripted lines.

After looking into and researching dialogue I do feel much more confident in writing the script for our portfolio project. I am glad I was able to find research specifically on dialogue in teenagers since that is the exact age group shown in our opening. Now that I know how and what to write, my next step is the actual writing. I will be back with a blog about our script, see you all soon!