FINAL FILM
This is my group, it consists of Tarak Parikh, Ronald Hing, and I. We also had help from friends including Danny and Flora Kim, Thomas Shu, Justin Cheung, and Camaro CK. We chose to create a horror/comedy movie but later transformed this movie into 4 episodes that are 3-5 minutes long.
We chose to do this category, mostly because we were all fans of the movie series Scary Movie. We thought by doing this, it'll give our audience a big laugh and a scare at the same time, sort of giving them the unexpected.
Ashley
Candy
My group:
Ronald
Tarak​
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
Overall Reflection:
What made these episodes and all the filming great were the people in it. I'm so glad to be working with the people I did, they made the filming fun and motivational, which really pushed me to make it really good, as an editor, actor, cinematographer, and director. We would get together and discuss twice a week to plan out our filming, writing the script, and divide our roles equally.
During the process and the end of our first episode, we knew we had to give this series a great plot. We came up with multiple ideas and drew storylines and graphs, and asked people what would they like best. At the beginning of our second, we learn that not only does the film need to have a great story, we needed to have a great everything. We were so caught up in the story, we didn't realize what would happen after that, like having good actors, good location, noisy commotion, good quality camera, smart cinematographer, great editing skills, and a director to lead.
By the end of our series, we were happy it was over and the due date is near, but we were also a little disappointed because we knew we could've done better and we were also missing parts of clips when they were exported. But overall, I'm so grateful to have this experience and to grow from it from where I was before in the beginning, I'm happy this happened, so thankful for Ms. Stanhope, Tarak, and Ronald for making this experience worth it.
Changes: Reasoning
We made a lot of changes in our film, especially with our storyline, changing characters, actors, and our movie category. Which can be seen is our raw videos and script.
Where did I grow?
Filming
I thought the filming was a huge success. I had three cameras available to shoot our film from, although We placed two of the camera around the room we were using, and the cinematographer holding the canon to film. But I'm glad I had so many cameras angles available, but I also had to be careful, because if I have added so many it would look distorted and messy, which wasn't my aim. I used three types of camera: Canon 700D, my iphone6, and my MacBook Air 13". The camera in my phone and laptop wasn't as clear as my canon, so I made it film farther than my canon. I also had to use the audio from my canon since it was the closest, even though I used Final Cut Pro to remove 100% of the background noise, I could still hear some commotion.
Editing
The editing was a bit challenging for me because I wasn't sure on how to make it interesting for my audience to watch and stay fascinated. Mostly, because I knew I cut and skipped to a few parts, which can be easily seen by my audience, and also irritates me. For this film, I signed up for a 30-day free trial for Final Cut Pro to step up my editing game and to experiment with it and see if it's better for me to use than iMovie. Which it has proven that it is. It has given me so many options and motivated me to edit it to the best of my ability. I have grown from when I started to edit with iMovie, to change my ways and switch to a different program, and to look for motivation and other interview videos to get samples. And to also go into extreme detail, shown in my video and reasoning.
Script/Storyline
We all contributed to the work of the script, I think this took us the longest time to do, more than the actual film series itself, mostly because we kept making changes and switches to complete our film. And we would mostly film and make words on the spot, and once that happens, we would add what the actor/actress on the script, and based it on that. We kept looking back at the clips from the Scary movie (preferably the first one). And use common movie statements like "I'll be back" and "I've got a bad feeling about this". Those statements really helped make this movie cheesy, funny, and scary at the same time. And I am proud of the final outcome.
Acting
I thought the acting was pretty decent in this fil. It was actually my favorite part, but it was uneasy and difficult at times, where we were reacting to events, and my acting wasn't the best. I had to act scared and frightened, which is hard for me because I sounded really fake, but my group members said it was good since it was for a cheesy movie. And when I was directing, I had to direct my members to look confused and scream when there was a jumpscare, but that didn't work out well as we thought it would ( shown in raw videos ). But it was mostly hard for me because I was embarrassed, but after being with my group members multiple times, I've gotten really close to them, and I started to become confident in my acting, which I've really grown to love it.
Characterisation
Choosing our characters was a bit easy since we were doing a cheesy horror/comedy film. Since there were three of us, we focus on each character for each episode, Our first character was the squeamish and helpless girl, we thought our movie really needed that. We also used our real names in the film, we were supposed to use common names like Billy, Cindy, or like Bobby. Our second main character was Tarak, who was the smart and brave boy. We've shown that by making him look for Ashley, and when they were compromised by the ghost, he stood in front of her. Our third main character was Ronald, who was lazy and clueless. But we especially made him last, because we thought he would be a great person to end the series with.