Production Process

So today was our 2nd production day and well lets just say it did not go so well. We ran into two problems and basically we had to reschedule the day. So originally we had planned the production to be at 10:00 AM but I had a doctors appointment in the morning so we had to reschedule for later in the day around 3:30 PM and 4:00 PM. So we got to the shooting location around 4 and we got dressed and everything was ready. We started shooting but as soon as we started it started raining. We could not do the shots that we needed now because last time when we shot all the scenes were sunny and it was nice weather. If we did the shots today then it would have looked different and would have made the scene weird. The only shot we were able to get was the one inside the house and that took about 5-10 minutes. Overall, the production day went kind of wrong but the good thing is that we started editing the clips that we have so we dont get cramped with time. 

Starting editing

 We finally sat down to edit our film, but we spent way more time than we expected on the beginning.

The opening was our main problem. At first, we started with the driving scene because that’s where the story technically begins, but we didn’t like how it turned out. The audience doesn’t know the characters yet, so having them argue for thirty seconds felt confusing and random. Even though our original plan was to start with the TV news report scene, we tried the car scene first just to see how it looked. In the end, we decided to put the TV news report scene at the beginning instead.

After that, we spent about 20 minutes lining up the clips, cutting them, and making sure the transitions weren’t too sudden. It wasn’t hard, but it was kind of boring and took time. Still, everything came together nicely in the end. 

The editing was brief because my group and we were careful during recording and thought about how the clips would turn out. This made the editing process much easier. However, we still need to figure out the music and audio tracks, and that has been a big challenge for us.

Picture of Timeline:

Research for CCR question #1

Question 1 of the CCR is:

How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues? In this we essentially have to talk about the genre conventions and how we challenged them or why you did not, and we have to talk about representation. 

Here is what my answer will be for this question

We used the usual genre conventions for our action comedy genre, fast pacing, a storyline which involves crime and comedy. The case with the fraud creates tension in the movie and the comedy and humor comes the characters mistakes. The film challenges the conventions by making the characters stupid and unskilled, usually the characters are very confident and strategic. The characters in our movie solve their cases by accident which makes it different and makes the movie funny. The characters are shown as like regular everyday people, they dont look like agents so it relates to our younger target audience. The villain is a greedy and corrupt guy who is doing fraud and we have seen this in the real world before as well but in the movie it is shown in a funny way. Overall, we challenged and used the the genre conventions while mixing the action and comedy together in the best way we could. 

 

For question 1 of the CCR I was planning on doing a snack wars type of thing but it will just look like I am answering the questions while doing something else. After brainstorming, I want to do an interview type of thing where the interviewer is going around knocking in a community and then he knocks on my door and ask the question above. I think this will be a good way to do my CCR and it will be interactive. 

Group Meeting

Today we had a group meeting with people from my class. We had a group meeting before this as well but this time we had it with different people so we got a bunch of different inputs this time. We talked about the production and how it went. I told everyone how it was and how my project is coming along. I got some tips on what to do with the CCR's and Production. 

Tips:

• use final cut camera app for best quality video
• film each CCR scene with each angle first
• develop CCR idea!!!!!
• different costumes for each "character"
• purposeful imperfection
• imovie on desktop works well
• uppbeat.com for non copyrighted audio
• play on phone speaker rather than importing, sounds more authentic (?)

These helped a lot and will help when we do our second production day this weekend. I am sure the others in the group also found this very helpful. We all talked and discussed the ways that we can improve our projects and it turned out to be a great and big help.

Production Process #2

 After the news shot, pretty much everything else went pretty smooth and we got all the shots that we could. After the news shot we had to another shot with the agents speaking in like a meeting room, so we had already decided before that we would do it in the library meeting room. Fortunately, not many people were there at the library and we got the meeting room quickly and were able to do our shots and take our time. In the meeting room we reorganized the chairs and table a little to fit them to our needs and set up the props and everything that was required for the shot. By the time we got all the things ready, our actors also arrived which was perfect timing. We gave them the costume they had to wear and guided them through the script and what we need from them. One of the dialogues needed a little emotion and some anger and our actor executed it perfectly which was great and we really liked the scene. This shot also took some time, from setting up to getting what we needed it took about 25-30 mins. It also took multiple tries to get the actors to get the emotion shots correctly and overall the perfect scene we needed.

This is a photo of us at the set which was the meeting room. 

Once we finished the filming at the library we went to one of our partners house to start on the shots we needed from there. We now needed a shot of the two main characters in the car and a funny start to the movie. Once we got to the house, we had to dress up in our costumes which was a white shirt, pants and a tie. We also had to get our prop guns and put them in the car so it could be visible. We had one of our friends call in the car so it could look like the two characters boss is calling them and giving them an assignment. We gave the caller a really funny name and put a funny photo along with it too. This scene took us about another 30 mins but it was really good and we got what we need. We did not finish the whole production but we got about 1- 1:15 min of it captured. We have another production day sometime in the next week or next Saturday which is the 28th. Overall, it was really fun being with my friends and making this project and look forward to the next production day. 

Production Process

 We started filming the movie opening today and it was not as easy as we thought. The process took much more time than we expected it to and we had to redo multiple shots to make them perfect. At first we thought that the group would use an actual proper camera but at the last moment some problems happened with the camera and it would not work anymore. So, we decided to just use our iPhones because they also have pretty great camera quality.

The first shot we had to do was the news report shot, and we had to find a good background for that shot. We used the fountain at the library and the pillars around it. This made the shot look professional and like an actual news report which is what we were aiming for. The dialogue for the scene came in very clear and the very soft sounds of the waterfall in the background with the scenery make it look very professional and realistic. The scene took multiple tries because the actor was one of our friends and he messed it up a couple times but in the end we still got the perfect shot. The process of recording just this one small scene took like 15-20 mins. We realized that its not easy at all to do this stuff, it requires patience and a lot of hard work. We also ran into a problem the day of production in the morning where our friend who was going to act that day fell sick and then we were scrambling to find another person who was available to do that shot for us today. We then later proceeded to film some of the other shots. 

This is a picture of me and my friend who was doing the news report scene and I am the one who is recording him with my phone. He had a prop microphone in his hand to make it realistic and now we will use the shot in the opening and add some news editing to it.

Planning for production day

Today my group and I discussed the production day and what we need to do on that day. We discussed the locations, where we are going to meet up, how we will record and etc. The main thing we needed to do was finalize the costuming and props. We only had about the last 20-25 minutes of class to do it since we had a lesson that day as well. We created a group chat with our friends who were acting for us and also a private group chat just between the partners so we could discuss the scenes and plan thoroughly for production day. We made a list of all the props we needed and the costume that needed to be ordered, and nowadays with delivery and shipping being fast we would get it by tomorrow which is Friday. 

This is the list that we made with all the costume pieces and props that were required for our production day to go good and be productive. We encountered an issue with timings and what days we can film, because I could only do Saturday and I had to leave at 2:15 PM and my partners were not able to do it on Sunday. We all had to agree and find out some time where we could meet up and get some of the production done. Another thing that we did because of this is that we set up another date to record just in case we could not finish in the amount of time that we had. So we set a date to record on 2/21 from 12 to 2:15 and 2/28 around the same time.