week 15 final

As I turned in my film today, I reflected on all of the struggles that Devin and I over came this past semester. I feel like we have done so much in such a short amount of time. I am proud of the way our film turned out. I think it's funny, relevant, and has some real truth and meaning that will resonate with people. Although I do feel like it could benefit to some sprucing here and there, I still think it's a good film that holds its own.

I enjoy seeing it, and I think that all of the stylistic decisions we made were the right calls. We had every problem on set that you could have for a film, but every single shoot we learned something. I think there's something to be said for overcoming obstacles on set. It helped us learn. I think if everything went right on set, then we wouldn't have the same amount of experience that we do now. Every time something went wrong, we fixed it to the best of our ability, and even though it wasn't perfect - it worked. That's the thing with documentary, it's never going to be perfect, because it's real. You're dealing with people and places that you can't plan for, so not everything can be perfectly lit or mic-ed. You just have to roll with the punches.

In the end, I think Devin and I are extremely happy with the structure, edits, and flow of our film. The only thing I would add if I had more time would be more b-roll.

Thanks for a great semester!

week 14

This week Devin and I did a lot of editing. We thought a lot about what our graphics should like for the panel and thought that having them have little speech bubbles that imitated the chat rooms was a really cool idea. We also met with Michelle who helped us out with color correction and Anthony Guevara who did the sound. We added a lot of music, and really thought about what the audience was seeing, and how we could make it make more sense to them.

I think trying to watch it as if you haven't seen it 40 times is the hardest part about editing. It's hard to know what people are going to get and not going to get, because you get it all since you've been involved with it for so long. I also think it's hard to cut, because some of the shots you get so attached too, but you have to cut them for the sake of the film's clarity and brevity.

I also learned from editing that you are going to struggle with some sort of technical problem that you may not know how to solve. It's just going to happen and you are going to have to go and find research that tells you how to solve it, ask someone, or mess around with it until it works.

The title cards we put in the film didn't work because the lines were so small so we looked it up. Apparently you need to put an edge blur effect on them in order for them to appear.