Helloo!! Welcome back or welcome to my blog!! In today's blog, we are going to be covering some of the struggles my group and I faced during our filming process. After about 2 months of filming and hard work, we were bound to face some problems... and boy did we!
1. Match cut alignment
On the second day of filming, we prepared to film a match cut of Vale moving boxes in her room and a flashback of the girls getting ready for a party. When we had this idea, we thought it was the perfect segue into a flashback scene. However, this scene was more difficult to achieve than we thought it would be. For one, mid-filming our main filmer James had to unexpectedly leave, leaving us to fend for ourselves🙁🙁. Luckily, we still had Jason to help us out. Because the shot required all four of us to be on screen, we had no choice but to ask Jason to film for us. Although at the moment, we thought we lucked out because we still had someone to film for us, Jason did disappoint😠😠 Just kidding!! He did what he could, we just didn't get the outcome we needed (thank you for your help Jason). So, the one piece of equipment that we didn't have was a tripod. Looking back, a tripod would have been really helpful, especially for this scene. For the present day scene of Vale moving boxes, we had Nahomy hold the camera super super still at the angle we wanted. This angle was intentional because we wanted to show the mirror, the floor, the corner of the bed, and the door.
Now moving on to the flashback match cut, we needed the camera to be place in the EXACT SAME position to get the transition as seamless as possible. The girls and I quickly changed our clothes and redecorated as fast as possible. Once we were all ready for the shot, Jason seemed to have focused on the camera placement rather than the actual footage we were recording because when we looked back at it, IT WAS ALL BLURRY!! We had around 6 minutes of footage fully out of focus. By that time, the sun was already going down and we were all rushing to film the next scene, which needed natural light. This setback was quite frustrating and stressful because that meant that we had to go back and refilm another time. We even tried to go on CapCut (our editing software) and sharpen up the footage to see if it was still usable, but sadly... it was irredeemable. Although it caused a delay in production, we refilmed the scene with James the next shooting day. We didn't get the alignment exactly perfect the way we wanted to, but we tried our best
🙂
2. UCF Camera Mishap:
Another thing that we struggled with was an issue with our camera when we visited The University of Central Florida on our school college field trip. To preface, the one thing that really inspired our idea for this entire film concept was the fact that all of us were going on this college trip- We thought it would be a good idea to film at these colleges for the story, making it seem realistic and also showing the longevity/ versatility of our filming locations. Given this, we assigned each character a school that they would be attending in our storyline and planned to film at each one when we visited them during the trip. When we went of the trip, the first one to film was UCF for the main character Vale. When we get there, everyone gets off the bus and my group and I were all pumped to film until... we realized that the camera was still on the bus. By the time we realized, it was too late to get it back. This was a majorrr setback because not only did we not film a school we had planned to film at, but it was also the MAIN CHARACTER'S school (the one we should've gotten the most footage at). When we got back from the trip, we needed to do something to make up for this lost footage because yet again, we were on a time crunch. We had to think quickly, and to solve this problem we asked Jason to take us to The University of Miami, which is about 40 minutes away form where we were. We took the drive and finally got the footage we needed for Vale!! Due to this mishap, Mariana's characters' school went from UCF to UM.
3. Editing!!!
Editing, editing, editing... By far I'd say that our editing issues were definitely the most stressful part of creating our film. As I have mentioned in a previous blog, we faced serious issues with our editing software and availability that hindered us from making progress quicker. For the most part, Mariana had taken up the job of being the primary editor of the film, and due to this, she used her father's Ipad to edit. Each time we got together to film, Mariana would immediately take the footage we wanted to showcase and start editing it all together little by little. On our last day of filming, we had planned to film Vale's UM scenes plus a few more present day scenes, and then get straight to editing. We even thought we'd be completely done by that night! Looking back now that would have been very hard to achieve. Once we got all of the scenes filmed, and started to edit, we ran into our first problem. We did not have the Ipad Mariana had been editing on... Mariana's dad had left for a business trip for one week, taking the Ipad with him. Trying to work with what we had, we switched to using Phi's laptop since she had the most storage to hold all of the footage from the camera. Since we didn't want to lose all of the progress Mariana had made, we were on back and forth phone calls with her dad trying to figure out how to transfer the video. This is when we ran into yet another problem.
The editing software we used called Capcut has the option for a premium membership called Capcut Pro. Of course, this costs money, and in order to share an edited video through the software, you would need to buy Capcut Pro on the device. This meant that we truly had to start from square one. Due to this issue with Capcut, we tried to switch to another editing software called Premier Pro since we had to restart the editing anyways. Issue number 3: we didn't know how to use Premiere Pro!! It truly felt like every solution we tried to come up with was failing + a 2 day time crunch. Just when things couldn't get any more stressful, Phi's computer began to lag and delay due to it being overworked with all of the footage being stored and apps being downloaded. At this point we all felt discouraged. This situation definitely put our team morale to the test because none of us knew what to do However, we devised a plan to recoup together the next day early in the morning and ask Phi's grandma if we could borrow her Ipad to start anew. On this day we worked sooo hard to get everything done, and through blood, sweat, and tears we did it.
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