Blog 5 - Next Film Plan

 Next Film Plan

To start off! You all should remember me as Tatiana from "The Lost Bird" film. Now, we are working on our second film as a group! Here's what we're planning. It's going to be more of an ery film that the last one, which keeps you on your toes to find out what the final product is going to look like. I hope you're excited because we are working hard on these films just for you guys! Now, let's really get into what the film will be about.

Setting the Scene

The film starts outside on a rainy, gloomy day as the main character played by Adrian pulls into the driveway, wearing a suit and carrying an umbrella in hand. This is suppose to confusing to the audience and reel them in more. ("Why is he wearing a suit?" "What is his motive?") He walks into the house with small props that seem like small little cups filled with what seems to be BLOOD! But in reality it's really just strawberry jam. This gives the audience a sense of mystery and give them hints that something is going to happen.

Suspenseful Costumes and Props

The most important part of any film is how the character is dressed. How the character is dressed represents who they are, and what role they play in the film. So, for the "murderer" or "hidden character" is a beaver onesie, jason mask, and yellow gloves. This keeps the characters face hidden and ultimately making the audience be more on edge because of the fact his face is hidden.

Bringing It All Together

How everything is put together in a scene, or even throughout the whole movie, MAKES the movie good. So here, with a mix of setting, lighting, colors, and costumes, we are creating an atmosphere FULL of tension, suspense, and mystery. Each detail in costumes, lighting, and setting like the opening on a rainy day, to the eerie shadows inside the house, all works together to create this amazing scene plot and setting to set it up for the big 'reveal'. Our group is excited to share this movie with you in hopes you will see how these major elements come together to keep the audience on the edge of their seats, WANTING more!

Inspired by Terrifier 1

If you've never seen this movie, one of the scenes is about this clown stalking these two girls who look like they just came back from a club. One's drunk and the other one is trying to get them both home. Somehow they end up in a diner getting food, the clown sees this and walks in to sit right across them. It was rainy and the clown is dressed up in white and black, carrying a trash bag. Now keep in mind the audience doesn't know what's in the black trash bag. The sober girl points him out to the drunk girl and the drunk girl thinks its funny and goes over to the clown and sits on his lap and takes a picture with him. The sober girl keeps telling the drunk one to get off him and that it's not funny. The girls end up leaving without food to go to their car, but their car tire is POPPED! The terrifier kills the diner man working there, runs out and kidnaps and kills the other two girls too. The scene is left as one of the girls phone ringing, with her PARENTS CALLING. Then out of nowhere, the terrifier smashes the phone to pieces.

Blog 4 - Sound

Sound

Let me give you a recap on what is happening in class (theres a lot). So! I left off at the very beginning and haven't really caught you guys up in a while. Since I last did a class blog, we were just starting out fresh. Since then We've done a thing called a digital notebook where we write notes from our textbook but online on canva. Then, we had a 5 photo story that I had done a blog about, and a 30 second film which I ALSO did a blog about. 

Our next unit is 2.3 Sound. For me, I started taking notes in my digital notebook about this topic so I'm gonna share what I learned.

The difference between diegetic and non-diegetic sound is that diegetic sound originates from the world of story, meaning the characters in the story can hear these sounds too. This can be something like dialogue, footsteps, or even a door slamming. Now non-diegetic sound exists outside the story world meaning only the audience can hear these sounds. This can be background music, narration, or sound effects. It's hard to tell the difference between non-diegetic and diegetic sometimes so I'll give you some real show examples.

In the show 'How I Met Your Mother' the main character Ted narrates through the whole show his life before he had kids. The other characters can't hear him narrating, so this would be non-diegetic sounds. And Ted talking with the characters would be diegetic sound.

Some common elements of sound in media are sound effects (enhance realism and evoke emotional responses), Sound motifs (recurring sounds associated with specific characters or actions), sound bridges (smooth transition between scenes using overlapping sound), voiceovers (narration that provides info or insights from a characters perspective), soundtrack (music and sound that accompany the visuals, including score, incidental music, themes, and stings), and ambient sound (background sounds that create atmosphere and realism).

Now let's talk about them because I get confused too. A sound motif is a distinct sound repeatedly associated with a specific character, object, or event. This includes things like the iconic 2-note motif from Jaws.

A sound bridge smoothly connects two scenes by overlapping sound. The sound from the first scene continues into the second, creating a seamless transition and often foreshadowing events or linking thematic elements.

Our group in class, has done this soundboard assignment to display different types of sounds. In our group we have Tatiana (me), Adrian, and Savannah. The main goal of this project was to make a story solely based off of different sound clips. Here's how it turned it out.

Blog 3 - The Lost Bird

 Oct. 17, 24

The Lost Bird

To start off, our class was assigned to make a 30 second film (which might seem easy, but here's the catch) with NO dialogue. We had to make this film tell a story, without actually telling a story. Now here's how we did it. As you can see from the Title, our film was called "The Lost Bird". The bird's name is Chicki, and you'll find how we discovered he was missing, and what mysterious place he has hidden himself..

See now I hope you liked the film, because let me tell you it was a mission to try and film this. With the variety of angles, and difference in sound techs, it's a lot to digest, so lets start with some Behind The Scenes photos (bts).

Behind the Scenes

This is the photo of the textbook assignment. Our plan was to build up our ideas first, then start working on an actual video. So by looking through the textbook, I was able to find camera shots/angles that I wanted to fit into the film. Me and my partner Adrian both had different roles for this project. We both agreed that we would both agree on the film together, but I would be doing the planning of the shots and angles, while he was the one who edited. So I can't say much on the editing and sound aspect, but the camera angles/shots is where I got you covered.

This is the paper I just mentioned with the "we wanted to plan out the film first" so that's what I was doing to plan for the actual film making process. As you can kind of make out from the picture, we needed all of these shots to be a landscape shot, which basically means we need to hold our phone sideways if that's what we were filming it on.

This is a photo of him editing the scenes we had just filmed, and putting them together using Cap Cut. During the editing process, we decided we didn't think one of the scenes matched with finding Chicki, so we decided to redo it, adding the final scene you guys saw perviously of him flying out of the cupboard above the fridge. Our initial plan was to just find him on top of the fridge, but we didn't end up doing that because we thought it was too "obvious" or "boring". So, we decided to put him in the cupboard and find him in there. What we DIDN'T expect was for him to FLY out of the cupboard. That was a complete accident, and Chicki earns extra points for that one in my book. Once we had this shot we were satisfied to finish up editing the rest of the film.

 You can see in this shot this is where we were planning to "find Chicki on the fridge" but we thought it was too plain and needed some extra flavor so we put him in the cupboard. Sadly, we don't have any pictures of him being in the cupboard, because we needed to do it quick as we didn't want him being in there for so long since it was dark.

Here, you can see me on the floor taking the shots needed for the "he's not here, and he's not there, WHERE COULD HE BE?". As you can see from this picture and the one above, that is how we are suppose to hold the camera and do the shots, or else it wouldn't come out good especially if you were going to be viewing it via computer. This was filmed in Adrian's house with his brother, and that's whose in this picture. His name is Alan, and he's the one that filmed us during this whole thing so he was the director for this process.

Concluding this assignment, we didn't win any awards for this film but we are hoping to win some for the next film. We hope you enjoyed watching this film as much as we did filming it, and I rate this assignment 12/10 just because of the fact we got so many good reactions out of our teachers and classmates.

Blog 2 - Five Photo Story

Oct. 17, 24 

Five Photo Story

The backstory

In this assignment, we had to make a story using 5 photos. My group which included Adrian Diaz, Tatiana Jimenez (me), and Savannah Foster. We decided to make this story about a new student getting lost, but then a student who was there for longer decided to help out the lost student. It took a couple tries to find out what camera angles worked best and what we should do for each shot, but I think it turned out pretty good for one of our first ever photo assignments.

See now this photo took a couple tries. It kept not being the right angle, or it was just me being too high up or down low on the stairs. We took I believe 10 pictures of this one shot just so it could look like this and be perfect. I wanted myself not to be so in the middle of the frame to give it more of a distorted look.

This photo was relatively easy, we wanted a wide shot to show the whole aspect of the many hallways and many doors and walls. We wanted this shot to show a maze type feel, where it could be easy getting lost with all the painting on the walls.

For this photo, we wanted to make the background show up more blurry than the two characters in the middle, to really focus on the characters. You can see Adrian still has a smile on his face while showing around the "lost student" to her class. This provides a sort of comfort to the scene, as it shows that he has no problem going out of his way to be nice to someone. You could see the girl (me) still being confused but having a light smile on her face because of the fact that someone was finally helping her. This scene wasn't more of the shot we wanted to capture, it was the story the characters were trying to show.

In this photo, you can see the whole scene in focus. We wanted to capture the room number, as well as the full body of the characters, and the paintings, so the audience could really see the full aspect of the picture. You can sense an accomplished feeling with the way Adrian is standing, and a happy feeling from me standing with my thumbs up.

To conclude this blog, I would personally rate this project a 10/10. This was a great way to start using camera angles and not only reading about them in the textbook. For me, doing hands on activities like this help me learn better than just sticking to a textbook and learning from there.

This photo was relatively easier, but we did end up having to go to opposite side of the building to do this one just because it was the more cleaner stairwell and it was also the one less packed with students. I don't really think this one makes too much sense since the door literally says fire extinguisher but it was one of our first photo assignments so we're working on it.