AICE Media Studies

How did you integrate technologies in this project? Technology is very important in the filming process. Every aspect of recording and completing the process is immersed in it. More than filming, editing, or research, the most challenging aspect of this project was blogging. Putting my thoughts into words, trying to describe the process isn’t easy for me and sometimes my brain just can’t find the words. Trying to type out the events that took place was a challenge even though I knew exactly what happened. It was not the longest part of the project, but I had the most difficultly with it. The part of this project that took the most time was the editing. My final task included the most comprehensive editing I had ever done. How I was going to order the footage was my first task, and this changed several times. My scenes were often long and contained footage that I didn’t want to include. Cutting these pieces and ordering the ones I wanted to keep was the biggest task of the editing p...

How did your production skills develop throughout this project? I think the biggest change I’ve made as a film maker is focusing on the perspective of the audience. Visual impact has become important to me in the production process. Focusing on perception and implication has forced me to reconsider how angles, lighting, location, and costumes play a role in bringing a character to life. The personality of a character can really shine through the details in a scene. This project has made me very aware of the fact that any role in acting or editing is not suitable to my skill set or character. The nature of these roles requires intense patience and emotional inference and expression. Memorization and repetition are key for success. These are not my strengths. I did, however, enjoy the directing process. Creating and building an image outside of my own mind is something I wasn’t aware I would enjoy, but very much did. Taking a story and being able to share it with people, the same way...

How would your final task be distributed as a real media text? I believe the most influential marketing tool is social media. As action movies are typically focused on a younger audience, I believe popular social platforms will be the most effective advertisements. Of course, other methods of marketing would be used; however social media would be the priority as its influence has risen in recent years. Sharing the trailer of my film on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok could be influential in terms of viewer turn out. Its important to focus the marketing to the right people, otherwise its simply money wasted. And social media is filled with an accurate target audience. Short clips with intense visual impact are most effective in drawing in viewers. The attention span of modern society is dropping so the first few seconds of a clip should be high impact. Another aspect of social media marketing is the cost, or lack of therefore. In essence, it’s free way to raise awarenes...

How does your final task engage with audiences? For my final task, I really wanted to focus on angles. It was important to me to get more dynamic perspective than I did in any previous projects. Because of this I tried to get as much detail through angles as possible. This means showing the same scene several times from different angles. This is reflected in one example where multiple angles are used when recording a scene in which Navier is falling from a cliff. *show scene* I believe this kind of ranged filming gives a more in-depth and professional feeling. I also think that the plot line was fairly interesting. The idea of a female heroine is something I hope will get the attention of the audience, particularly one with a larger female percentage. Action films tend to be pretty popular because they are faced paced and don’t get boring. I believe my final task successfully maintains that constant progression people enjoy in this genre. Some of my scenes allowed viewers to make in...

How does your final task represent social groups or issues)? My final tasks feature a female heroine. In doing this, I hope not only to represent a gender, but also to break several preconceived notions. For example, Navier, my protagonist, is a skilled fighter and talented combatant with a silver tongue; however, I also hope to establish that she is also someone who also enjoys things that fit into a typically feminine stereotype; something that has recently become something for girls to be shamed for liking. Navier can kick a bad guy’s butt in a ball gown and prefers if her knives have pink handles. By implementing aspects of femininity into a role that would be usually masculine, I hope to encourage little girls to be whatever and whoever they want, without having to worry about roles or stereotypes. As a result of Navier’s powers and past, I also hope to establish that her humor and personality was born after enduring intense trauma and suffering severely from PTSD and depressio...

How does your final task use or challenge conventions? My final task is an action film. The genre of action usually contains violence, romance, weaponry, defined character roles, dominant gender representation, faced-paced editing and a fairly predictable chain of events. Many of Hollywood’s most beloved productions are action films. For example, Deadpool, James Bond, Mission Impossible, the Avengers, Ocean’s 8 and John Wick. Action movies are typically high budget productions due to the costs of mimicking action scenes realistically along with the high-tech nature of these films. However, as a result of the high costs associated with filming, there are also high profits. Avengers: Endgame was one of the highest grossing action films in history with a $890 million in profit, but the budget of this major picture, Hollywood production was a whopping $356 million. It is the nature of action films for there to be conflict and to accomplish this there are several key roles in every actio...

I have linked my final project above. This project has been something that I have both sincerely enjoyed and genuinely struggled with. Because of COVID and other circumstances, filming the later scenes was impossible and resulted in a change in plan. This is something that caused a lot of stress for me as I did this project alone. However, I do belive that the resulting video turned out better than I planned, and I loved the filming process. Even the editing, which I had a lot of issues with was something that I appreciated by the end of the project.

My timeline was delayed due to a sudden change in plan so I am adding my sound later than expected. I recorded my script on my phone. This process took a couple tries but eventually passed. Then I saved it to an email and sent it to myself. This way I could access it from my computer so I could add it to the video. Then I inserted the script and started separating the lines based on where they need to go. After a little while, I managed to organize and align all the audio to my standard. Then I relistened to the couple of music tracks I found and picked one. Then I added it to the video as well. I cut the song down to 2 minutes to match the length of the footage and then fixed it. In certain parts, I lowered the volume more on the music and increased the sound of the audio or background noise. Slowly but steadily I finished the audio portion of the video. The next day, I started working on the titles. This took longer then expected because the glitching happened again. Due to the pro...

I have been working on ordering the scenes and the digetic sounds and audio. I have changed my mind about the order of the scenes several times. What scenes to put at the beginning, which to put at the end, what scenes to separate - all of it has been complex. I also recorded the audio for the voiceover. Because the voice of my actor is not established in the digetic sound, I will use my own voice for this portion. This was something I had to do before I put in the background music. Otherwise it would be difficult to decide where to overlay. Due to being overwhelmed with getting the footage and editing it with sound and audio, I completely forgot about adding text for roles, titles, and staff. For the duration of this project, it's been very difficult to make the progress in the time I initially planned. Once again I have been delayed. Originally I wanted to finish the project this past weekend; however, that did not happen. Last minute, my close friend had a surprise birthday pa...

The last couple of days have been less about editing skills and more about patience. The software I am using for editing has been causing me a lot of issues. Previous projects I have worked on with this software have no exceeded 60 seconds. I suspect that the software is overwhelmed by the amount of data (and will continue to be overwhelmed until I pay for an subscription). While I appreciate this software helping me test my virtue, I will be looking into other available editing programs for the future. The first day was spent figuring out how not to cause the severe lag and blackouts which required quite some time. After I got it figured out, I took a break. The next day I started again, and got 1 minute and 45 seconds of edited footage and audio. At this point I still had about 26 usable scenes with various lengths and uses. Of course, I will not include everything but it is reassuring to have enough footage. Later, I finished adding all the footage I planned on using. I still got...

With just over 30 minutes of raw footage, getting to the two minute marker shouldn't be a problem; however, a lot of editing needed to be done. A lot of the footage had background noise, extra content and other factors that will require cutting and redoing. Any portions where audio from me or other external influences was audible, muting and voice overs had to be done or discarded entirely. Over the weekend, I spent my time picking out the footage I wanted to use. This meant shortening any recoding I had down to the necessary scenes. This amounted to around 8 minutes of usable footage. The large amount of content I was editing caused some issues with lagging. The load time was very slow as the software got overwhelmed and resulted in several delays as I had to wait for everything to process. This was very frustrating and made everything very complicated. My intentions were to get through the 30 minutes of raw recordings I had and pick out audio and scenes I wanted to keep. This p...

In my last blog, I mentioned that I would have to reach out to my main actor to see what was possible in terms of filming. Unfortunately, it will not be possible to meet again in time for this project. Because of this two thing will be happening over the next couple of days. One, I will be reviewing the footage I have. This includes this I've previously filmed which match the storyboard. I will also be looking over the additional footage I shot before our location change to see what can be used. Right now I'm looking to meet the two minutes requirement and to make sure the project content is align with my original design. The concept of this video has not changed, it is just certain scenes have to be adjusted. The second thing I will be doing is filming long distance. If I am missing key footage or need something in order to finish this project, I will reach out to my actor in hopes she can film even while I am not there. When I look over the footage I have, see what time I h...