Creative Critical Reflection

    After 8 weeks of work on the project, my CCR of the process is finally done. Without any further ado I am pleased to present to you my 2 reflections: Presentation and Director's Commentary

Film Opening

    8 weeks of work and my group's film opening is finally done. Without any further ado my groupmates Miguel Mendoza, Hayden Jalazo, and I are very pleased to present it to you: Dopple

Finishing the CCR

     With the presentation done all there is left to do is make the director's commentary. For that, I will be using clips from my opening as well as the script I wrote for it for the audio. I will use crossfades for each clip and will color-coat the audio so I know what clips to add to each part. I also plan on doing the voicing of the commentary with the voice-over function in Premiere that I used in my opening for the friend's audio. When adding in the clips if I need more footage for my audio I will just loop the clip so there is still some visual stimulus on screen while I am answering the questions. Finally, I will use the essential graphics panel to create the credits with scrolling text for my sources.

    After about 2 hours of getting the clips and doing the painful takes for the audio I finally finished the director's commentary: 

Voice-over function used on Premiere to record the audio.

Finished timeline of Director's commentary

Screenshot of my editing timeline after finishing the commentary. 

Link here to view it on my drive: link here

Completing the Presentation

     After creating the scripts for the questions now all there is left to do is create the media products to answer them. I wanted to start with the presentation because there is more to create for that in terms of content having to create an entire presentation and voice-over. I will be using the presentation to answer questions 3 and 4 and will likely split the slides up by the paragraphs I answered the questions with. I will do the voice-over using the answers I wrote and I will be using images from my blog to make it interesting to look at. For the voice-over, I will be using the voice-over function on PowerPoint to keep it all on the same platform and make it easier.

Screenshot of the function I used to do the voice-over. 

    After about 2-3 hours of working on the presentation and doing many many many many takes for the voice-over, I was able to finish it just to find that I cannot do a share link to anyone so I am going to screen record myself on Powerpoints record function and upload that to Google Docs and produce a share link here: Presentation CCR

Finishing off the Questions for the Presentation

     In preparation to create my presentation for the CCR, I wanted to answer the remaining 2 CCR questions. Just looking at the overall aspects of each question I believe I will likely order it where I start by answering question 3 "How did your production skills develop throughout this project?" and add the aspects of how I approached pre through post-production. Then I will move on to question 4 "How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware, and online – in this project?" which will be directly tied to the production processes I just spoke about. Then I will double back to question 3 and answer how I have improved during this process to end the presentation. I also plan to supplement the words with images representing what I will be talking about. So, until I actually work on the presentation here is the reflection I have done and will be adapting to the presentation medium: link here. 

Script for Directory's Commentary

     So, after working on the director's commentary script I think I have inputted all the information I need to successfully answer the questions and have made a script that will help guide me through the process which I will be putting on here. 

You gotta know what is first

    So, obviously, since I have never done anything like this before I had no real idea of what a director's commentary even was. I knew that I had to comment and that I had to use clips from my opening but that's about it. So, I used the resources I had (Youtube) to find an example on me to base it on. When doing this search the first result was for the Knife's Out director's commentary but that one had no visual stimulus to go with it just the director talking which I thought was quite boring so I went to the 2nd result which was from a director that specializes in the exact genre I was doing: Jordan Peele. In this one, he used a lot of clips from his movie get out and analyzed them as he showed them on screen. I like this approach but I had to condense it for the sake of time picking out the important parts to talk about not all the parts. 

The Director's Commentary by Jordan Peele

Script done

    After working on it for about 1-2 hours I finished the script for the directory's commentary I will be doing. It totals out to be about 5 pages and 1.36k words. I do not know if I will be able to say all that in the time frame and if I am not I can definitely cut out some parts of it to make it shorter and more concise. 

This is the link to it: Script

Conclusion

    I will now start to work on the presentation that I will be doing for the 2nd part of the CCR to answer the last 2 questions. I plan on recording the audio for both of these things through voice-over on the weekend and getting them on the blog in time. I am excited to almost be done and will see you in the next update until then stay tuned!

Sources for commentary:

https://www.qualitylogoproducts.com/blog/5-horror-movie-marketing-tactics-you-can-steal-for-your-brand/ 

https://digitalcommons.liu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?

article=1030&context=post_honors_theses#:~:text=Chapter%202%2C%20“Mise-en,scene%20and%20create%20specific%20techniques.

https://raindance.org/6-common-horror-film-tropes/

https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-horror-definition/

https://www.slideshare.net/Amber2805/conventions-of-the-horror-genre-67172644

https://www.savannahgilbo.com/blog/horror-conventions

https://www.omnicoreagency.com/youtube-statistics/#:~:text=54.4%25%20of%20YouTube%27s%20total%20users,the%2025-34%20age%20bracket.

https://filmfreeway.com/atlantahorrorfest

Peer reviewing

     With the editing basically done for the opening I decided to send it to my groupmates so they could review it and tell me what I needed to change. From this, I got feedback that helped to make it so the opening was better produced and had fewer errors. 

Change #1

    After showing the video to my groupmates they said that they could not really hear the audio coming from the friend and asked me to increase it. Although it sounded fine to me on my computer when I opened up the opening on my phone the audio did become hard to hear and I could see where they were coming from by recommending the phone audio go up. Although the fix for this was very easy, only requiring me to up the audio gain of the phone segment audio from -20 to -15dB, it is still great that we were able to remedy this and make the experience for the viewer better. 

the audio gain at -15dB now

Change #2

    When we were watching it through again we noticed that in our opening in the dialogue Miguel had said see you tomorrow instead of asking if he was coming over. This was very frustrating because in the ending we decided to have the friend call back and say he was about to get there. Also, the fact that a close-up is done when he says this makes it impossible to cut away without it seeming awkward. So to remedy this I decided to change the voice-over for the friend. Instead of saying that they will call them back like was originally intended the friend asks if he can come over later tonight since he was busy with something. Although this seems a bit redundant and unnecessary considering that he says see you tomorrow it was the best fix that my groupmates and I could come up with. There is enough space for that dialogue to fit in there and does not really mess with the pacing and removes the confusion of the friend saying he is coming soon later in the night despite being established to be coming tomorrow. 

New voice-over to remedy the dialogue mistake

Change #3

    This error came up as I was trying to fix the dialogue mistake where after I inserted the new dialogue I had forgotten to add the parametric equalizer preset to make the phone audio seem like it is on the phone. That contrast of it not having the phone audio effect made it sound auditorily jarring after hearing how the guy sounded earlier over the phone in the same scene so all I had to do was apply the preset again but it goes to show that you should always double check your work or else there could be lingering mistakes that were not meant to be there. 

The audio now has the preset and is fixed. 

Conclusion

    With the peer reviews done, I will start to consider the CCR as I said earlier in the week, and begin to answer the questions so I will be prepared to film. I am thinking I will for sure do a director's commentary, but I do not know what other medium I will select. I am thinking of something like a presentation or a podcast but I will have to decide. Until next time, stay tuned!