Cambridge Portfolio Week 8 4/6; Creative Critical Reflection

 

Cambridge Portfolio Week 8 4/6; Film Opening

 

Cambridge Portfolio Week 8 4/6; Reflecting on the Project

 Hello, this is the final week of my Cambridge Portfolio film opening project, and I am finally done with my film opening. For a recap, my film opening is the intro to a Thriller movie with some horror elements. A man wakes up in a ruined house with no recollection of how he got there. Upon exiting the building, the entire world is shrouded with a warm yellow hue. After investigation, he finds human remains on the ground, and after a panic, he is suddenly killed by an unknown entity, with only a ear remaining of him.

Throughout the process there were many changes, revisions, hardships, and many problems in getting the film to how I wanted it to be. The finished product of my film, although staying true to the original, has changed so much to the original, and it did not turn out the exact same way I expected it to. I would like to start off with the length of the film. When I initially made the product I did not think so much about the 2 minute maximum time limit that the film needed. I only realized this problem late in production when I had compiled my footage. My footage far exceeded 2 minutes, causing me to panic, and unfortunately, make some sacrifices. Some shots were completely cut, some sped up a bit, just to compress the film into 2 minutes. Personally, I think after some careful editing my film did not turn out so bad. In fact, I think some of the scenes I cut out were for the better.

The main scene I cut out was the scene in which I go into somebody's house. I did this shot later in my production because I needed to go inside a friend's house. We were hanging out at his house anyways, so I took the opportunity to do a bit of filming, but his parents did not allow some of the circumstances I needed, so after trying, the shots did not turn out well at all. They contrasted the care I had put in the other shots. In this scene the character would see the eye on the ground and run out, and then get attacked by the entity. I replaced this by the character running from the finger instead, which was meant to precede the second house scene. I think it makes more sense, because it's strange that the character takes no notice of a human finger, but does so when seeing an eye. This did mess with the logic of the other shots just a bit, but it wasn't anything extremely noticeable.

Another problem I had was the lighting. In the house, the lighting did not turn out exactly the way I liked it. I expected the light to be dark enough to not see the background, but light enough to see the character. I was unable to find a perfect balance, so I thought it could be fixed in editing. I was able to remedy it, but it's not exactly the way I wanted it to be. For some reason, my iPhone's camera would make lighting strange depending on the scene's focus on the character, creating some weird "flashing" of lighting, but it wasn't a huge problem.

About the blogs, I was not too fond of having a blog for my project, but I understand it was necessary for me to do. Without blogging, I would have procrastinated on one of my most important grades, and since I needed to make posts, it forced me to make some kind of progress to post about. However, I still think it was asking for a bit much. Making 3 blog posts a week did not feel possible, and I had to rush a few of them. There's no way I could do so much in just one week, enough to make 3 entire blog posts about. However, I did them, and I think it was actually somewhat fun to do a few. It was nice to get away from the stressful filming and just let out what I feel about the project, what I plan to do, etc.

For some things I'm proud of, I'm happy about the way the finger turned out. I was worried I would have to use Photoshop to edit it in, which would have to be a still image in the film, but I was able to make my own in less than a day, and it was quite convincing. It was probably the most fun part of the project. I'm also generally fond of how the project turned out. I expected it to be an absolute disaster, because I don't have a lot of experience filming and I was sure that grading would be strict. It did not turn out the way it did in my head, but that was okay. I showed it to some family members, and they liked it. I guess that when you have a vision for your project, and your final product doesn't live up to it, you feel bummed. But viewers don't know what your original idea is, they just know that it's a pretty decent movie.

This project is one of the hardest I've had to do. I took over free time, my Spring Break, and my head as I tried to film the best I can. But I've learned a lesson in filming, and that's that films don't need to be masterpieces. I had a budget of 0 dollars, I only filmed it with an iPhone camera, and it turned out fine. You don't need expensive technology to create a good film. I'm going to admit that I came up with the idea for this project in a few minutes, almost on the spot, when I needed something to put in the blog, but I think that I would not have come up with this idea and had a good story tell about it if it were not for that. Despite the stress, I look forward to any future projects relating to filming.