AICE Media Studies Blog

I have finished my movie. Our assignment was to make a 5-minute movie. This was very difficult. We had to learn new editing and filming techniques. One new thing we did was adding in an ending. Last year all we did was create the beginning. This time we needed to add an extra 3 minutes. We also had to have a completed story. Not only did we need to make a beginning but we also needed a middle and an end now. This meant my group needed to create a whole story. Luckily I had my groupmates. They were all very helpful. I also had my teachers. They guided us and taught us a lot of what we needed to know. With this team, my groupmates and I were able to create a whole story. This project overall was very fun and challenging. I have learned so much from this class. I learned how to write a complete story. I also learned how to create full stories. I put everything I learned into use during the making of this project.

 Today I finally incorporated the suggestions I got from people. I will be mainly incorporating tips from my dad. I will also use suggestions from other family members. People I will also incorporate suggestions from will also be my mom and my sister and even my friend Arthur. This is because I used his review for my 'Viewer Comments' blog. I already stated why I used his review in the last blog. It was because he was the most knowledgeable about films. This meant I took his critics very seriously. The first fix I did with my group was adding more music. This was because he said we needed more. In order to do this I found more free music. To find this free music I found more royalty-free music from stock music sites. One site I found was called soundstripe. It has a lot of good upbeat and atmospheric music. I plan to show these songs to my group to find one everyone likes. Another site I found with royalty-free music is pixaby. It had great instrumental-only music. Once again I

Today I showed people the current state of my movie. I showed a few friends. I also showed my family members. I showed my mom, my dad, and my sister. They all had lots of compliments to give. They said it was a very nice film. They also said they could tell I put a lot of hard work into it. I am going to focus on what my dad critiqued. I am having him review it because he watches a lot of films so he will be a good judge. My dad also is very honest. This means he is a great person to ask. He will tell me any problems my movie has. He will also tell me how he thinks they should be fixed. Luckily my dad said the movie was very good. One critique my dad has was the music. He said it needs more music in it. This is all good news because my group plans to further edit it. I am already planning to add more music. Hopefully, after I make all these changes my dad will have no other critiques. Sometime soon I and the rest of my group will incorporate the rest of the changes.

Today I want to add music to the movie. The music helps the viewers understand the tone of each scene. My group plans to use more than one piece of music. I spent today searching around on music and video sites. Some places I checked Spotify for music. I also checked Soundcloud. I even checked YouTube for music. I also looked at some royalty free websites. I was looking for exciting music. Any music found may be used more than once. It might also only be used once. I ended up on a royalty free music site. this site was called bensound.com. I then went to their 'cool' music section. One of the first songs I listened to on that site was called Legend. this was created by the Polaroids. It is a cool song that makes use of instruments like the guitar. The issue is that is costs money to use. This means I will have to find a different song or site. This was a learning process however. Now I know what to look for when searching for other music. Overall, finding the music was a fun pr

Last time I added all the shots. I edited the shots as well last time. I cropped, zoomed, and cut them together. Now me and my group get to finish the rest of the editing. Today I added the title cards. This was one of the most difficult things to do while editing. I had to find blank spaces on every shot they were needed and sometimes there wouldn't be enough space for it. It was also difficult to make them pop out. Sometimes they blended too much into the background and so I would have to do slight changes throughout the editing process. My group also had to make sure all the titles appeared within the first minute. This was hard as many spots in the first minute had no room for a title. Luckily though I was able to find spaces for them all. This was because of the storyboard. While filming I used the storyboard as a draft to follow. When my group was filming and anyone noticed openings I wrote them down on the storyboard where I should add a title. With this I was able to fit th

We have finished filming. This means we have all our shots collected. This includes singular shots and group shots. Now that everything is filmed we can edit. We started by putting all the shots into our editing software. We used iMovie to edit. We have used iMovie before. We used it for our projects last year. Because of this, we know how to work it. Once all our shots were in the iMovie we started editing them. We cropped them first. We started by making some shorter. We also made a couple longer. We did this by cutting off the end or making the shot slower so it takes longer. Another thing we did was crop it which changed the size of the video. In the editing process, we also cropped the size of it to make them smaller and more zoomed in. We also artificially zoomed in so you can see better. We still need to add the music and the title cards. We plan to do this soon when we finish all of the editing. That is all of the editing we were able to get done today.

Immediately after filming, I started re-watching the filming. I found a few errors. I needed to re-film any scenes with errors in them. They had errors like too small of a zoom. In some, an extra person was in the background. In some, the camera was flipped the wrong way. These were all easy fixes, however. I had a simple plan. Friday after school my group met up. The group then decided whose house to start at. The group began at mine. I had to reshoot the opening scene.  I decided to make it wider. This was so that everyone was visible. Another issue at my house was that Sean was visible. He was not supposed to be visible in this scene. Unfortunately, I couldn't crop or edit him out either. This meant I had to re-film the whole scene. Luckily this worked and he wasn't in the corner again. Through this method, I successfully re-shot any mistakes from my group's film.