i am losing my mind send help

 As you can see from the title, this is a really big call for help. I only have four days left of this project and I'm not done editing yet 👍 my teachers have been drowning me in homework and assignments and tests and I am so done but this project needs my full attention right now. I'm really trying here but I can only record my foleys tomorrow because I'll be home alone and it's just the best time to record audios, so I've taken it upon myself to finish every other audio and the credits/title by tonight. It's 11:30 pm right now and I wish to scream. BUT I HAVE gotten a lot done today. Aneesa sent me most of the voice-overs and I was able to add them to the film which is looking great, and also I added the music!!! And I got the low pass filter to work!!! I have to think the guy from this video for helping me along the way, you're a real one dude. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNBEaZMcD48&ab_channel=LearnHowToEditStuff

I also got the music from this website!! https://www.epidemicsound.com/music/search/?term=edm%20party%20music Royalty-free!!! It was so hard trying to find a song that fit you have no idea, because all I wanted was a simple electronic beat to play in the background, nothing else, but every electronic piece I found was so elaborate and just would completely distract the viewer from yknow the plot of the film. But I did I found one that worked and I messed with the low pass filter and the level of the audio and finally got a good balance!! 

But anyway, I got a lot done. Not as much as I wished to but a lot nonetheless. Tomorrow I'm getting a haircut, exciting but unrelated to this. Once I get back home I'll immediately go record the foleys and then go record the CCR. Which I already have an idea for, and I'll be posting the questions and everything (preparations) tomorrow so stay tuned for that. But yeah I still need to do the script for that as well, though I doubt I'll follow it I like to speak more naturally. 

Guess who layered like 7 tracks of just voice-overs tonightttt and had to alter the volume and everything for every since track 😀 just a hint they're writing this post right now. God, I'm so tired but it'll all be worth it in the end!! Hopefully!! Or I'll cry!!! I had to layer the voice-overs because of the one-shot where Rhia's all overwhelmed and the voices get too loud and stuff so I wanted a lot of different voices saying different mean things one over the other to create that feeling of being overwhelmed, and for Rhia to snap. 

Guess what I also decided today!!! Fonts and titles!!! I am never liking fonts ever again oh my goodness it took me a good 20 minutes to decide on fonts I remotely liked. I know I made a whole post about fonts but I had no idea how to add those fonts to premiere 😐 so I had to go on creative cloud and download some fonts from premiere itself, googled how to do that btw. 

But anyways after this whole fiasco, I had to decide what fonts to use (totally just went by vibes ngl) and I!! Had to!!! Decide!! A title!!! I'd been trying to think of one for so long but I seriously couldn't think of anything. So then I thought, my piece is mainly about anxiety. What about something with anxiety medication? I googled some of them (Lexapro, Zoloft, etc) but they all looked like Lord of the Rings character names to me. But then, I had one, brilliant thought. Medicate. It's perfect. It's simple, it's catchy, it fits the plot, it's powerful. I loved it so much. So that's what I went with :D  The fonts are still not 100%, might change something idk yet but I really hope I can finish this on time I Am Stressing So Much.

 

it's finally fonts time

 It's the last day of spring break today so I still haven't had much time to work on the project and it's killing me. I'm so stressed about all the work I have it's insane. I still need to edit all the audio in the film and record the foley audio and Aneesa still has to send me the voice overs and AHHHHHH
See? Stressed. So I thought I'd relax for tonight since I just got home and its quite late and just browse for some fonts which is something I've been wanting to do for a while now actually.

So I wanted bold fonts. I wanted them to call attention specially the one I will use for the title, I want it to be bold and big and all in capital letters. The reasoning is it will match the tone of the piece because everything about it is loud, the fonts needed to be loud, to be heard, which is exatcly what Rhia's clones try to do during the scene. 

I searched for my fonts on the website dafont.com and was quite happy with the results but they have s o many its so hard to pick and even harder to see them all, I was constantly worrying that the perfect font was there for me somewhere I just hadn't seen it yet so I browsed for a little too long 👍 but its okay.

All the fonts I chose were in all capital letters and quite bold but all in different ways and I honestly like all of them, I particularly thought the 4th one gave me a lot of Euphoria vibes so I picked it out jsut cause its fun. Theres also one more font that was actually from Canva from when I did my productions company opening and I really liked it but I couldn't find it in the previous website. (It's called Gagalin)

I haven't decided on the font yet and I'm probably just gonna decide it out of impulse or what looks/feels best when I get to that part of editing! Which is pretty close now! Wow its crazy how fast this has gone by, theres literally like a week left of this project I Am Freaking Out Right Now 😀👍 (send help).

UPDATE AND REALLY GOOD NEWS

 I FIXED IT I DID IT!!! I fixed the brightness on the phone screen problem!! I went online and looked up multiple different videos and tutorials and read articles (all listed below) and finnaly I got what I needed. I went on Lumetri color (yeah, funny thing I discovered existed) and all I had to do was switch up some controls like the shadows and highlights and the brightness, and also adjust the curves of the shot. If you dont know what a curve is it just basically adjusts a bunch of different things for you at the same time and you can mold it however you want, here are some reference pictures. 

I didn't really follow any patterns i just went with what looked nice and tried to replicate it in the next shot, but it ended up looking really nice!!! 

Another problem I fixed was with the still shots in the beginning. Remember how I had like a thousand different little shots one after the other because my shots were too shaky? I noticed they were still shaky :(  so I had to take a screenshot of the shots and send it to myself and add it to the film as a jpeg, which got rid of some of the quality of the shots but I think with the credits showing up on screen and the audio added it wont look so weird. 

 Speaking of audio, Aneesa got started on the voice overs today and she should be sending me them any second now! So I will try to get them edited by tomorrow, gotta get things moving yknow.

Sources:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro-discussions/my-edited-video-is-way-too-bright/td-p/9990208 

https://www.flexclip.com/learn/fix-overexposed-video-in-premiere-pro.html 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvNf6La5d1c&ab_channel=HistoryofStarWars

good news and bad news

 hi!! It's been a minute!! It's currently spring break and I'm enjoying my sweet sweet break from the craziness of school so that's why I haven't posted this week yet, but it also means I have a lot to update you on. Of course, I still had to work on this project during my break which isn't the best but I'm managing, and while in a hotel in Orlando (very convenient LOL) I picked up my laptop and decided I had to get something done this week. So I did, and I got good results!! Buttttttt also bad ones.

Starting with the good ones for some positive energy! I settled on a timeline I liked for the film (visual editing only) as well as created my production company logo thingy! It's called Plumeria Productions because I love flowers and I liked the alliteration, plus the design looked adorable with the little flower theme! (I mean cmonnn look at it) It's quite simplistic but with just the right amount of detailing for it to be memorable :D (I also used Canva for the design)

Now onto the bad news :(  I've encountered some problems that I'm not sure how to fix yet. I'm gonna start working on it right now searching for tutorials or coming up with alternatives anything to avoid having to refilm this one part of the film. Anyways, when I got the timeline done and ready to go I exported it and sent it to Aneesa so that she could start working on the voiceovers, all good till then. Except once I exported it the film lost some of its quality, which didn't look so bad and wouldn't be a problem. But the shots where it was supposed to show Rhia's phone, which was the whole purpose of the scene, got messed up too :(  The brightness was too high and you can't read anything off the screen. This made me really upset because when I'm inside the editing software the shots look perfectly fine, the screen and text are readable, but once I export them they get messed up.

On editing software:

On exported file:

I texted some of my friends asking for help and they gave a few ideas, but for the way the scene was shot, I still think that showing the screen and reading off of it is the easiest choice and one that makes the most sense. They said I could type whatever Rhia is typing on the screen off of the screen and have it like it's popping off of the screen (idk how to explain this) but that would be hard and I'm not even sure how to do it. I'm gonna look for some tutorials and see if I can fix this, but if I can't then I'll have to ask Aneesa to come over once again so we can refilm these like 2 shots which is so annoying and a waste of time, but it is what it is :( 

its 1 am and im editing

 If I don't get an A for the dedication I have towards this project I swear- It's 1 in the morning and I'm here, editing, stressing, and wanting to scream. It's not going so smoothly anymore, I've run into a few problems:

-I didn't hold some shots on for long enough, one of them was too short and I wanted to do a slow zoom on it. I tried first to cut a quarter of a second shot of it and just paste it over and over so the shot is longer , but then I couldn't do the slow zoom, because that required me to do it on one single shot at a time and that would take me forever. So I ended up just doing the slow zoom on the shot I had but also slowing down the speed of it so it would last longer, but I'm still so scared that it looks too artificial or its too fast :( In the shot, I wanted it to be longer because it's a close up of Rhia's face as she gets very overwhelmed, and the slow zoom would work to give emphasis to her emotions, and I'm worried it won't be the same as I wanted it to :((

-On to problem number two, I don't have a tripod. Now you could be wondering, Julie why didn't you just ask your teacher for one? I did not think of that and I thought I wouldn't need one since all my other shots looked pretty good even handheld. I could've even just used something else to hold the phone but I unfortunately did not think of that 😔 and now I have extremely shaky shots. Now those are only the beginning shots, the still shots of the props. Technically I don't need those, but I really liked the idea of having them there and so did my teacher, they would be good for the credits of the film!!! Because they wouldn't fit anywhere else tbh, sooooo.... I resorted to doing what I did to the slow zoom shot, but... worse. Just look how many I had to put together 😭 and its still too fast!!! And I don't know what to do!!! I mean I could refilm, which would be the best choice, but I'd have to put the set back together which... wouldn't even take me that long I'm just lazy, but we'll see.

-And last but not least, problem number three... the length. I know, all this time I've been worried about the film being too short, and I got a bunch of extra shops in the hopes that it would be enough... but I fear its too much now. I've put everything together and guess what, without the beginning still shots it was already 2 minutes!!! And I don't know what to do because I remember my teacher saying we could go I think 10 seconds above or below the limit? But... gosh this is difficult, what do I do? Right now I'm putting everything together and seeing what I have. I only have 2 seconds of still shots done which is literally nothing so I'm stressed.

filming/editing day #1!!

 Okayyyyy so after we filmed most of the project on Saturday, I wanted to jump straight into Adobe Premiere Pro (which is the editing system I'm using) and get all the clips together so that I could tell which we needed to redo and what more we needed to add. I.. got a little carried away (I like editing :D) and did a little more than just putting the clips together.

So I got about a minute of footage done, the blank spaces in between some shots are the ones we needed to redo or add, which we filmed on the second day. I'm really liking how this is looking so far, and turns out Premiere isn't that hard to work with, it's quite similar to DaVinci, the software I previously used for projects. 

I reason I chose to switch to Premiere for this project is because:

1- The school provided us with a fREE Premiere subscription so we could use it for our projects, and since DaVinci is usually free, one can assume that Premiere is better.

2- I've seen YouTubers and film producers use Premiere for their projects and they all turn out pretty well so I assumed that was the better route for me.

Of course, I wasn't used to this software so I was worried about not really knowing what to do but the system comes with a free little trial to help you know the basics of the program and that got me on track.

"Offering a clean, easily customizable interface, native support for a huge range of file formats, as well as lightweight proxy workflows, Premiere Pro CC lets you move through projects faster and deliver your best work, even on the tightest deadlines."

Anyways enough of this software talk, back to the filming.

Filming this project has been so fun and honestly so easy. As I said I'm working with a friend from this class, Aneesa, and she's really good at this and very nice! Even her sister who had taken this class before came and helped us out, which was really nice of her. We got most of our shots done in one takes, and did two days of one hour of shooting, which could seem like we didn't do a great job but we did, we just work well together. 

The lights worked so well as well! The red ones might give me a bit of trouble, which I'll have to look up some tints or color editing on Premiere, but the purple one was just perfect. 

I'm really looking forward to continuing to work on this project over Spring Break and hopefully getting a result worthy of a good grade :D. I feel like this is my baby.

Here are some sneak peeks of the film 👀

Sources:

https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/products/creativecloud/pdfs/ibc/2018-top-reasons-for-premiere.pdf 

i really needed help

 Today in class we did group meetings!! If you don't know what those are, we were assigned groups in which we gave ideas and opinions on each other's work, and my god when I tell you I really needed that help. I really enjoyed seeing everyone's work and how for into the project everyone is. It made me feel better about still being filming since there are still people who haven't started filming or editing. Speaking of which, blog post soon about my editing process because oh boy do I have a lot to talk about that.

Here's a little picture of all of us! I really enjoyed this group I think we all really helped each other with constructive criticism and ideas to help each other's projects and I'm quite happy with what was said about mine :D

They liked it :D

I really enjoyed all of their projects as well, they were really good and it was nice to see... well, my competition.

Here are opinions and ideas they offered about my project so far:

• Voice overs: One thing I had thought about but not really written about in this blog is my worry about the dialogue. My piece is heavily dialogue-driven and the audio from the recordings isn't exactly professional-sounding, to say the least. It's not bad just not the best it could be. So, my group suggested I recorded voice-overs of all the dialogue and synch it with the footage. This is something I wanted to avoid because it's really hard to do (something I learned from the music marketing project) but since I don't have a microphone it might be my only option for a professional-looking film. I'll be considering this and talking to my actress about it but one pro about the voice-overs is that she can record them at home, so it doesn't require us to be in the same space or worry about each other's schedules (which is currently a problem we're facing).
• Shadows: This is something I had never considered before but I found quite intriguing. Some of my fellow students in this group pointed out that a way I could make it easier to distinguish between Rhia and the clones could be working with shadows. Since I'm heavily relying on lighting for this piece it could be a really good idea, and very doable, but I would have to give it some thought because I honestly don't see how shadows could add to this scene. This will require a lot of brainstorming. Time to give my brain a workout!
• Still shots: They agreed with me that adding still shots for my credits at the beginning of the film would be a good idea! And I agree, not only would it give me more time as I'm worried about not reaching 2 minutes, but it also fits the genre pretty well. A lot of coming-of-age movies have this kind of shot at the beginning of films to introduce their credits, usually with some music playing in the background as the character is sometimes in the same room, hinting at their actions. In my case, this would be before Rhia walked into the room, just with the muffled electronic music playing in the background. Something I would have to consider is the lighting for this though, would it be purple? Or would it be just dark since Rhia isn't in the room still? Would be visible if it's just dark?
• Credits: This one I actually suggested, and it is since most of us are doing the project by ourselves, to avoid the repetition of having our names for almost all of the credit roles, we could spice things up by putting different versions of our names in each one. For example, in the first one we write the full name, then the first name, then the last name, then nicknames, and so on. I think it's a fun idea that could be lighthearted but still professional.