Film Class DW Entry

Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Basically, we hopped back to our original project - "Recap Scavenger Hunt" instantly when we got back to our groups. Working with one less member unfortunately (Joyce is absent), we have no choice but to take extra responsibility to cover up and fulfill the quota she initially needs to cover. Today's lesson was predominantly capturing footage and editing, leaving a less but reasonable amount of time to catch up on filming the other scavenger hunt objectives. Upon editing, we found out that our skills and techniques with Final Cut Pro has depleted over months of lacking practice. Fortunately, Elliot and I slowly managed to piece together little by little of what we learned last year into mastering the basics like the bevel tool, speeding up footage as well as capturing and maneuvering clips. Overall, we developed thinker and risk taking skills from the IB learner profile to overcome problems and refresh our memories.

As a start, we captured footage from the previous class into the computer. Capturing was indeed successful, as experienced members like Elliot and I ran Final Cut Pro and started with the editing process. This reflects upon the caring and communicator factor of the IB learner profile, since we took initiative to work and help first-time amateur members like Justin Tay by guiding him through the basics. Justin Tay seems to have good progress with learning thanks to the help of me and warm-hearted Elliot. Jing-Ting was also very helpful, giving useful hints and suggestions when we were out of ideas and when we stumbled upon difficulty. Overall, we were balanced learners of the IB profile.

The first scene we edited was our superstar - Justin Tay's solo scene of him crumpling paper. There was not much to edit, since the techniques used during filming was suffice to cover both sub-objectives of our first objective. All we did was cut and seperate the desired footage to eliminate flaws at the beginning and ends of the clip. Under such circumstances, we moved on to our second objective - student walks up the stairs and looks up in surprise. Since colour filters were not meddled on the camera features, we tried looking for the tools on Final Cut Pro. Eventually, we excavated the RBG colour spectrum contrast tool, which basically highlights the whole clip into the desired colour by tampering with the filter in terms of Red, Blue and Green shades. This system was hard to master, however we managed to achieve red for anger and orange-green for sad, melancholy surprise. Moreover, to enhance the dramatic effects, we slowed down the footage to make it 50% its initial speed the instance where I launched myself at Elliot. This not only allowed the viewers to observe the quick-paced action at a slower time frame, but also see every detailed change on Elliot's face as he gets traumatized.

With approximately half an hour left, we decided to work on filming the third scene and augmenting the effects of our "work" sounds footage. We started recording sounds for the "work" sounds footage, since we did not need to relocate ourselves because the mac lab's background sounds provided the background noises for "work". Together as a group, we attempted to generate more ideas into what contribute to the noises of a working environment. Ultimately, we ended up with several new creations - phone ringing from mobile phone ringtone and calculator clicking using a real calculator. Respectively, we assigned roles and generated a top-notch quality clip of a working environment. We were being extremely good risk-takers, thinkers and open-minded when we tackled this situation. We analyzed the situation logically and ended up with descisions that fitted perfectly into our context. To improve the atmosphere, we combined our two footages, tuning down the volume of our previous one to allow our main soundtrack to stand out.

Following, we spent our last minutes tackling the third task on our objectives. Our third objective is to film a conversation and by using LIGHTING, we have to show "harsh, unforgiving encounter" and "upbeat, happy encounter". Without a script, we decided to improvise due to the lack of time. Improvision not only saves the trouble and time to fabricate a script, but also makes the conversation flow more naturally as the characters within exchange words. Clueless on what topic we want the topic our two characters (Elliot and Justin Tay) to endulge in, I suggested a hot topic which guys will discuss on - girls. This required much courage and to advocate and embark on this plan, yet again the risk-taking skill from the IB learner profile was greatly in need. The target "fantasy" girl was later decided to be Yumiko Shaku, a Facebook commodity that is 'coming' to our school. In this way, audiences will understand the inside story and yet will not harm the person in any way. The filming process was unexpectedly fluent and stupendous, as Elliot and Justin Tay were able to generate typical 'girl-discussions' in front of the camera, as I handled it alongside Jing-Ting. We handled this filming procedure in just two takes! Staggering accuracy and speed. Similar to the second task, we plan to leave all the lighting effects during the editing process on Final Cut Pro since it has better tools to generate the most suitable effects.

In conclusion, we explored many of the IB learner profiles during today's lesson, mainly risk-taker and thinker. I was glad that my group members were open-minded, who accepted many of my berserk or swank suggestions to improve our work. We worked as a group nicely, being caring and principled, and strived towards learning as a whole.

Special Thanks:
Yumiko or Shelby, whatever your name is :D thank you for the inspiration! <3