CCR script

 

                                                             CCR Script

    Hey everyone! I hope everyone is good! just letting you guys know it's a national holiday, aka.... MY BIRTHDAY!! Sorry but I am FINALLY 16 so I think everyone should celebrate. Anyways, I wanted to come here and share my CCR script which took me quite a while to make. I had to consider essential questions during the development of the script. I mentioned several details about what it was like working with Hannah, how I felt during the process, and how the concept would entice audiences. Below is my script, let me know what yall think about it. 

CCR

Creative Critical Reflection

Hey everyone! I'm back and back with more news! Now that I am finished with the film's creation and opening itself, it is time for the project's creative, critical reflection portion. This is basically the independent part of the project, where we choose a question about the process of the project and explain it through different forms that can range from podcasts to talk shows. Although I have not begun this part yet, I have been looking at each question with careful consideration. From my options, I am definitely leaning more towards the talk show and podcast just because I can make these more engaging for my audience. My AICE media teacher was kind enough to teach us more about this and give examples of past CCR's to help us understand how to complete this in more depth. During class, Mrs. Stoklosa highly encouraged us all to take detailed notes of everything being discussed in class so we can look back at it later on, and it can help us through this process. I also looked at the questions options that we can choose from to answer which are....

• How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?
• How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?
• How did your production skills develop throughout this project?
• How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware and online – in this project?

I think I want to choose the last two questions just because I think it is easier for me to elaborate on my experience of what happened and how it developed the overall outcome of the whole project. I am planning on beginning the CCR sometime since Hannah, and I just needed a break from all this since she has been in pain after her surgery, and I have been on vacation and have been doing online classes.  I also have a dance competition later on tonight at 10 pm, so I have to find a way to begin at least the script and overall schedule tonight of my CCR development. 

Editing journey

 

                                                        Editing Journey 

Yolo queens! Wow, Hannah and I have not gotten a break from all this yet! After hours and hours of editing in Hannah's room AND mine, we finally finished our film opening.  This was probably the most time-consuming part of the whole project, but I think that using CapCut, it was much easier and faster that way.  For me, editing has never been one of my strongest skills. I am good at developing an idea, acting, filming, creating the set design, and thinking about costume design.  After discussing it, Hannah openly told me that she knew how to edit and was actually good at it. So we got right to work after filming everything we needed to.  Hannah and I spent about eight hours working and playing around with CapCut, in other words, Hannah did most of the editing while I was next to her for moral support since every time I tried to edit, I would screw something up. 

The very first thing Hannah and I did was take all the footage and insert it into the editing platform. We wanted to cut any unnecessary footage that didn't work out or was useless. We thought it was better to have an excessive amount of time than less so that all we had to do was cut down on numerous clips. I actually made an album with my phone with every piece of content we created because, more most of it, it we used my phone as the main source of filming tool. Below is the album of all footage and content created by yours truly. 

After everything, all clips and audio were in order, and we added the credits and title to the project. Hannah and I included all information wherever we needed to, including at the beginning of our fake film. When it came down to choosing a font and animations, Hannah admitted that she wasn't good at that stuff, so she told me that I should be the one to do so, considering the fact that I'm a student government kid and I live for that stuff haha. Anyways, that part was actually fun to do as I had to choose a title and font and font color that represented our film expressively. 

I knew from the beginning of the brainstorming process that the title of the film opening should be "Stella." The name itself means "star," and that is who she is. Originally,  Hannah was not very on board with the title option but eventually agreed to it the more I explained why we should incorporate this as the title. After creating the title and playing around with the options, the final product looked so good. Check it out below!

Honestly, I think I slayed that!

Also, yall must be thinking, "girl, what happened to the audio?" Wellll, Hannah I was not going to incorporate music into it because we did not want the response from the company to be super late. So we found a website that would offer copyright-free music. We played several tracks until we found one that fit the "vibe" of the film opening. 

Now that Hannah and I finished editing the video itself, it's time to work on my CCR! I will be discussing this in my next blog so tuned hotties!

Film shooting extended

             

                                                      Film shooting extended

    Hey ya'll! I'm back with nothing but more and more updates on me and Hannah's film opening project! So although Hannah and I are mainly finished with the process, we still had a few clips that needed to be filmed in another location... 

                                                           Change of scenery

    So as you guys know, Hannah and I wanted our character to be watching a film that inspired her to follow her dreams and become an aspiring actress regardless of her unfortunate circumstance of being in a wheelchair after looking at the directions again. Hannah and I realized we screwed up and had to make EVERYTHING from scratch. So we knew that using the "Rocky Balboa" film could not be an option; we would have to make our own film.  So Hannah and I were brainstorming about what kind of film we could do.  Originally, we were going to make a film with me being the lead, and it would mainly focus on a girl and a man in the kitchen; this would be set in the 50s in black and white when women were meant to be housewives. The woman was going to stand up for herself and her rights. But we realized that I couldn't be the star in the film we're making and the film I am watching in the film opening.  Also, making this would require a male role; we did not have that in our favor. So, developing the concept would take too much time and require too much effort. So, we decided to make a documentary with Hannah's mom as the lead role. She would be acting as if she was an actress and sharing her story with fans in an interview.  She would be inspiring young people to follow their dreams no matter the circumstance.  I wrote the script and held it up as she read off of it while Hannah filmed with her tripod.  

Some things we did when shooting this portion used different angles and shots to create more of a realistic and entertaining documentary.  We cut each line of the script so that each line had a different angle or shot so that the footage was not too continuous.  Examples are shown below...

This did not take that long as all Hannah's mom had to do was read off a script, but we did run into an issue with audio. When we recorded the footage, we listened to it and realized there was too much background noise occurring in the very audible video.  Since we were outside, of course, there would be tons of noise that would make the actress's voice from being audible to the audience. There were cars passing by, birds making chirping noises, and kids playing outside. So Hannah and I had to fix the audio issue. We ended up refilming and while I held the script and filmed, Hannah used her mom's phone to voice record her voice as she spoke so that later on, we could sync the audio to the corresponding clips when we started editing. Below is an example of our audio being synced to the footage. 

Lighting/mise-en-scene

     

                                  Lighting/ mise-en-scene

    So I wanted to quickly go over with you guys what we did for the lighting and mise-en-scene elements of the opening. I will be discussing what we did, how did it, and why did it so that ya'll get a little bit more insight. 

                                                 Blue hues

In regards to the lighting of the film, Hannah and I used more blue tones to portray the emotional aspect of the film.  Blue, being the dominant color used, can signify a lot of meanings to the audience. It can mean coldness, isolation, calm, loyalty, melancholy, etc. In this case, it would be melancholy.  Our character is dealing with self-discovery and when Stella looks is at the movie theatre and watches this film, it inspires her but also makes her realize that she is unable to chase her dreams and be the star she was born to be.  Below is an image of part of a clip that we filmed which it involves our main subject and the blue reflecting back at her. 

                                                                  Further issues

      Along with many challenges faced, Hannah and I yet obtained another one.  So after we finished filming, Hannah and I realized that everything within our film opening had to be originally created from us.  That means that we cannot use another film to make it look like she is watching it, we would have to create our own fake film for our opening to work. So Hannah and I plan on meeting up this upcoming Tuesday to make our fake film. This will be quite time-consuming but we have to try. 

Filming using technique

                                 Filming using technique

So I want to continue with explaining to you guys what me and Hannah's vision of using technique was. I will be discussing examples of shots and angles used to ultimately set the mood of our main character. 

                                                  Shots 

Within shooting the film, we used several, and I mean...SEVERAL close-ups. After using the research of our chosen, we had to incorporate shots that would be used to distinguish the chosen genre. Close-ups are commonly used in the Drama genre in order to demonstrate significance in a specific scene, in this case, the emotional aspect of the character would be considered the important factor in the movie's opening since the film surrounds our main character and her feeling towards becoming an actress. Below are some examples of different shots we used to give our film opening the dramatic feel we desired it to have. 

Extreme close-up of Stella's eyes as she is mesmerized by what she is seeing on the big screen. We see just her eyes and this moment really speaks dialogue through the expression of the eyes, it can be inferred that she is really into the film and doesn't get distracted whatsoever. 

Medium shot of Stella tearing up with the film because she is just so engaged and so inspired by the film. She is consumed by her dream that she forgets she is even in a wheelchair. 

Filming day!!

                                            Filming Day!!

   

     Hey everyone! So yesterday we filmed in our desired location! It took a while for this location to be available to us, but as soon as it was vacant, we took as much time as possible to work with what we had. We spent around two to three hours filming in the auditorium. My mom, Mrs. Roca, helped us make this happen after school hours. We used the wheelchair as well, which was really helpful in portraying our character. 

        We did struggle at first to figure out how to use certain things in the auditorium such as the lighting, projector, and equipment. First off, we wanted to make the room dark but it took us a while to figure out lighting and even try to find out where the lighting panels were located, but eventually got the hang of it. Then the projector was not enlarging as much as we wanted to and the screen kept turning off so that was another issue that was resolved by having Hannah stand by the laptop and projector, making sure things were running smoothly. Below are some pictures of us struggling and attempting to figure out how things work around the auditorium. 

We also ran into some issues with sound from the chosen film that we wanted to project on screen.  For some reason, the film was playing just fine on screen, but the sound was not audible so when we begin working on editing the project, we have to include the dialogue from a specific part of the film a match it up with the scene. We tried numerous amount of tries to fix this when we had the chance but we knew that we still had a lot of footage to capture for the project so we did not want to waste any more time. 

Getting to work

After most of the technical issues were resolved, we began developing our storyline. When looking at our storyboard, we realized that we were missing a key component which was the father and the brother figure. This was very important to me and I explained to Hannah that using a dad and brother would really capture the essence of the girl and her life.  Hannah told me that we couldn't be focused on that since not many people have time to be in our project and it would be very times consuming to spend time asking others to be in our film.  It honestly took a lot for me to see eye-to-eye with what she was saying but I knew that this conflict would not be solidified and that Hannah's mind was already made up so I had to surrender my brilliant idea, sadly.  

We just began with clips of me (Stella) being completely intrigued by the film. I had to really spend some time putting my acting cap on and focus. When I tell ya'll it was so hard not to laugh, I mean it. I kept telling Hannah to look away because I knew that I wouldn't be able to keep my composure, but she kept doing it anyways to mess with me.  We needed scenes of me crying but it was so hard to do that since I couldn't think of anything sad since we just kept making jokes about how trash my acting is. 

Location scouting

     

                                           Location Scouting 

Hey guys! So for weeks now, it has been a major concern to search for a good location that depicts a movie theater setting for the scene.  Originally, Hannah and I thought about renting out a movie theater so that it would look as realistic as possible but then the budgeting and cost fees came into consideration and Hannah immediately disregarded the idea. We called the nearest theater but they said that it would cost money and we would have to schedule a day and time to do it which was a problem since, at he time, we had no clue when we would be available to do this so this option was out of the question, sadly.  The auditorium at school was our number one choice after this since all we had to do was ask Mr. Franks if we can borrow the auditorium and if he can help us project a film scene on the screen.  We plan on asking for this on Monday morning and then utilizing the auditorium after school with Mrs. Roca's help. 

Shooting process

         

                                           Shooting process

As I have said before, the shooting process has not been an easy one. Hannah came over to my house to film the bedroom scene.  We tried putting images on my wall for decor and putting star jewelry on the nightstand but it didn't look good when shooting. We tried lots of angles and shots to see what would work but nothing did. The process has been a little rocky considering we've had to wait for our location to be available to us. We have been considering Hannah's bedroom rather than mine since mine just didn't seem as fitting as hers. The shooting got delayed because of how bad the turnout was shooting in my room. Also, we want the quality to look good so we wanted to use my phone since I have the iPhone 14 pro max which has a better quality camera and has autofocus as well which helps with the bedroom scene in demonstrating the details of the bedroom. Hannah's phone does not have as many camera settings for some techniques we wish to utilize. Overall, we have had many obstacles during the shooting process but this week will be the week where our shooting process becomes a lot smoother and more is able to get done considering time, tools, and software. 

Prop/ set design

 

                                        Prop/Set design

Hey everyone! So I know I said before that Hannah and I were hitting major delays, well, that delay is still preventing us from starting our filming process. The "Legally Blond" production took all week-long practices after school so we couldn't use it. Although this happened, Hannah and I decided to start another part of the film another scene of Stella's bedroom which will be included in the film after the film title.  This would be much easier to begin creating as it does not take time and effort to get the design done. Below are images of the bedroom that will be utilized. 

This bedroom seems very minimalistic but we plan on putting decor in some places to add pictures of her dreams and demonstrate specific detailing to show her aspirations and she's really like to get to know her more. Again, we are using two sets but this one is what we have been using in the meantime while we waited for production week to end. 

CCR

     

                               Creative Critical Reflection

        Hey guys:)) I'm back and wanted to get back to you guys on my project and what is going so far. So today our teacher went over the Creative Critical Reflection component of our porfolio project. We sat the whole class and listened to feedback that Mrs. Stoklosa gave us for it. I made sure to take thorough notes the entire class to help me remember some key points from the lesson that could be helpful for the reflection. As she was speaking to us I tried to get all the points on paper and make it as organized as possible but it was hard considering the amount of information given to us. Below are all the notes I had taken in class! 

Starting next week, Hannah and I would have begun our filming process so stay tuned so some awesomeness happening very very soon! See ya'll next week:)

Down a bumpy road...

                                 

                                               Down a bumpy road...

    Hey ya'll! So since my last post, Hannah and I have been discussing the "when" and "how" our project would be developed. When discussing our location of filming, we have been having bit of difficulties with beginning filming. Reasons include the "Legally Blonde" production hosted by the Drama club is being held in there. We asked admin if it was possible to use the auditorium for a couple hours (at least) to do the project and they said shooting in the auditorium would most likely be possible next week, so our filming that we were supposed to begin this week has been postponed until next week. Basically, now our plans had to be altered. 

    Beginning next week, Hannah and I will start being more productive with our time management. Although this circumstance is not our fault, we know that we have to an our A game starting next week and get some filming done after this setback. By next week, our screenplay will be written, character costumes will be chosen, and we will have at least the begging of our film recorded. I will be sure to update you guys next week on what is happening with our project and if our problems are resolved yet:) Thanks for sticking with us through it all guys!