Wrapping up the short film

Hi, blog! This is the last blog of December! In this blog, I will be looking back on my journey of the short film and reflecting on what we did. This process wasn't easy. But it was fun. It was a lot of work but we managed to get it done. Since last year I've grown as a filmmaker in many ways and I'm happy about that. My partner and I were able to create a short 5-minute film to our liking! Reflecting on everything, there was a lot of hard parts. The planning phase and the editing was the hardest for me. The planning was hard because we had no idea what we wanted to do. I'm glad we were able to settle and be able to make a great short film. The editing phase was hard for me because of the constant technical problems. Being worried about whether your computer was going to run into problems was very stressful. However, I'm glad it only happened once because we were able to get it fixed and finish our film. The hard parts of creating the short film did make it very stressful but the easy parts also made it fun. The easy and fun part of the film creation was the filming itself. Directing and being an actor was fun and I'm glad we were able to bring our idea to life. Looking back I'm happy with what my partner and I created. In my opinion, I think the short film is good and I'm glad we made it. 

Finishing up the editing

 Hi, blog! In this blog, I will be talking about how my partner and I finished up editing our short film. This didn't take too long but it was eventful. After the trouble we went through last time we tried to edit we had to get it done now. First, we had to recover everything we lost the day before. We imported all of the files again and started editing. While doing that I noticed that we were missing a scene. This scene was the beginning of me in the closet. My partner and I just decided to leave it out and work around it and that ended up working for us. A problem that we ran into while editing was the time. Our film was severely over the limit. 2minutes and 30 seconds to be exact. We had about 7:30 worth of film and we needed it to be at 5 minutes. As a result, we had to cut all of the shots we didn't need. After that, our video software stopped working. My partner and I didn't know what to do because we wanted to see each other's screen but we met a compromise. We ended up using Facetime for iPhone. After that, we were able to finish editing. We ended up making the video around the time limit.

Errors we ran through while editing

 Hey, blog! In this blog, I will be talking about the problems my partner and I ran through while editing. Everything was going well for about 25 minutes. I was cutting all the shots, moving them to the timeline, and editing the movie. Then everything went bad from there. My computer started glitching and there was nothing I could do about it. While I was editing pixels started to randomly pop up on my screen. It got to the point where I couldn't see the video I was editing and I just had to wait. Then even more things started happening. My wifi went out. So that meant that my call with my partner dropped and I couldn't talk to him over discord. I had to go on my phone and facetime him to tell him what happened. So after that, I tried to troubleshoot the wifi problem on my computer and even more went worse. My computer froze. That meant we lost everything and we had everything gone. I tried to restart my computer but it wouldn't work. I ended up getting very upset and I had to take a break. My partner and I decided to just wait until the next day to start editing again and to let the computer have some time. We lost a lot of time, but we ended up getting some of the work back. 

Editing on Christmas day

 Merry Christmas blog! In this blog, I will be talking about the editing my partner and I did on Christmas eve/day. We didn't do a lot but it was enough to get some work done. We needed to get work done though because of the time limitations on us. The first thing we did was get on a discord call and start sharing our screen. Then we started to work. This process took a while. We decided to revert some of the file's composition. The reason why we did this because we could run into trouble while editing the film. We had to revert all of the files to a lower quality so it could be compatible with the editing software. The only reason why we knew about this is because of the trouble we ran into during our last CCR of freshman year. After that, we had to delete all of the files that weren't good. As a result of all the retakes we took while filming, we had to delete a lot. We didn't know what shots were retaken or not, so we had to go through each video to see which ones were good. This made my partner and I frustrated but we eventually calmed down. During this, my partner and I were doing more planning to see how we were going to construct our film. We talked about how we were going to put it into a film. We decided to start editing on the last couple of days of December. After this discussion, all of the videos finished converting, and we decided to import all of the shots into the editing software. This did take a long time, but it was enough time to be able to finish early and spend time with our families.

Planning for editing

 Hi, blog! In this blog, I will be talking about the planning me and my partner did for editing our short film. This was a long process because of the circumstances we are in currently. As a result of the upcoming holiday, My partner and I had to stay home and wait for the season to be over. We couldn't do that because of the upcoming deadline to submit the short film. I was originally supposed to go over to my partner's house and just edit on a single computer. But because of the holiday, we had to improvise quickly. After some brainstorming, my partner and I decided to use video chat software to talk to each other. It allowed us to share screens and see each other's faces at the same time. This program is called discord, and it ran very smoothly. The program also allowed us to edit together at the same time so that was a bonus too. The editing software my partner and I decided to use was called Hitfilm Express. Its a free software but it allowed us to do everything without a watermark or paywall. I've been familiar with this program for a while so this helped planning easier. So after getting everything installed, we decided to get everything on the computer. To do that I had to transfer everything from my phone to the computer. So I downloaded all the clips to google drive so I could access them on my computer. After that, I went to the website on my computer and downloaded them all. When I finished my partner and I decided to stop for the day and edit the following day. We are confident we can finish in a couple of days.

My final day filming

 Hey, blog! In this blog, I will explain the final part of the filming process. This took place on Sunday, and it took us about 3 hours to finish everything. That day was a better filming day for us. The weather was clear, no traffic, and the place where we needed to film was empty. The first thing we did was film the dialogue we started filming on Friday. This took a while because I kept forgetting my lines but eventually we got it done. The next thing we did was the box thing. In this scene, I open the treasure box and inspect all of its contents. We also had to redo it a couple of times because there was bad background noise. After that, we started to film the outdoor scenes. The first outdoor shot we filmed was me leaving the house. My partner has a tortoise that kept getting in the way but we just improvised and made me jump over it in the shot. The next shot we filmed was of me riding a bike to a nearby tree and reading a clue. This shot took a couple tries because it was windy and I did forget some lines. After that, we walked to the nearby lake and filmed the lake scene. This shot also took a couple of tries because of the wind, but we eventually got through it. After that, we went back to the house and retook the shots we needed to. We finally finished after three days of filming, and we were very happy. 

The reason why we couldn't film on the second day

 Hey, blog! In this blog, I will be explaining why my partner and I couldn't film the weekend after the first filming date. After school on Friday, I was able to bike to my partner's house after school and try to get all the work done that day but we ran into a big problem. That problem was rain. Most of the shots left required us to film outside, and we wouldn't be able to film while it was raining. We decided to wait for a while, but we realized the rain wouldn't stop any soon. My partner and I decided to just figure out a new date to film. After discussing for about an hour, we realized we needed to film soon. The date me and my partner decided on was the Sunday of that week. My partner had plans already on Saturday so we figured Sunday would be the next best thing. After that, my partner and I remembered there were a couple shots we could've done inside. The first shot we decided to do was a shot of me walking down the stairs. After that, we got a shot of me walking down the hallway to the kitchen. The lighting was fairly dim, but we managed to fix it with a small ring light. After that, we filmed some parts of the dialogue in the kitchen. After we finished there still was some time left so my partner and I just planned what we would film on Sunday. We marked all of the shots left on the storyboard and screenplay and I left after that. There were some shots that we forgot about but we just decided we can finish that on Sunday. Even though not filming everything that day was annoying, it still allowed us to get some work done.

My first day filming

 Hi, blog! For the next 8 days, I will blog about my filming, editing, and everything else. In this blog, I will be talking about my first day of filming! Before the filming days, we were able to plan and set up everything the week before December. The filming days were split over 3 days, and on the first day, we only had about a couple hours to film before sundown. I just got out of school, and I realized that we could fit some filming in so I biked to my partner's house. I live around 15-minutes away, so I managed to get there quickly. Since we only had around 3 hours to film before sundown, my partner and I decided to plan the next filming dates. The later filming dates were decided to be moved to somewhere in mid-term week because we would have more time after school. So for filming, originally we were going to film in chronological order, but we ran into a slight problem. My partner's dad had work to do later on in the day so we decided to do all the shots with him first. Filming all of the shots with his dad basically allowed us to get most of our movie done because he was in so many scenes. The first part that we filmed was the part when the main protagonist was first talking to his dad in the room. Then we were able to film all of the parts where Wallace (the main character) was talking to his dad downstairs without having Wallace talk. We decided to film the shot like that becuase we felt like it would be a cool idea to switch to each other's POV during their conversation. After that, we went back upstairs to film the part where Wallace finds about his mother's most treasured shoes. After that, we finished all of the scenes with my partner's dad and decided to film the ending scene after that. By the time we finished, the sun barely started to set. I think the first day of filming went well. It allowed us to get a lot done in a short time and it put me and my partner in a good position to finish the movie before winter break.