Reflection

  I can't believe everything is over. 

Seriously though, this was a months-long process that took lots of effort and dedication from all of us. Looking back, I feel very proud of how far we've come, and I feel that this is a good time to reflect on this entire journey.

I almost didn't join this class. The only reason why I chose it was because I had no other ideas for an 8th period! No other class I was interested was compatible with this time, so I just chose Media Studies and hoped for the best. Well, I'm not sure who's in charge of schedules, but I would like to thank whoever made choosing this class so easy, because I grew so much because of this course.

Honestly, when I first heard of the film opening project, I was completely out of ideas. I didn't really spend time brainstorming since I knew I would have group mates that might reject any ideas I brought up. Luckily, this worked out in my favor when I paired with my partners since Hannah and Daniel already had an idea they were so passionate about. I heard of the love triangle idea, and I definitely was okay with it, and Tori was too. So that part was pretty easy.

Then, we had to figure out how we would communicate from each of our bedrooms. The answer was FaceTime. Whenever one of us wanted a group meeting after school, we would have one. The generally lasted around an hour. During these after-school meetings, we brought up new ideas (like my prop ideas), scrapped some ideas (the character Inez), and decided how we would distribute our time (the split between Betty's scene and the James/August part). Not gonna lie, I had a few doubts about how all our ideas would fit into just two minutes. I suggested cutting August from the film opening and having the focus be all about Betty, since August could be introduced in other scenes besides just the opening scene. Luckily though, Inez was all we needed to cut to save us time. Cutting things down, as sad as it may be, turned out to work for the best.

After agreeing on a general idea of what our film opening was going to look like, we moved on to making moodboards. Looking at my group mates' moodboards, I was happy to see that we all had the same vision of how our opening scene should feel like. For example, look how similar Tori's moodboard looks like compared to mine!

After the moodboards, we moved on to making the storyboard. This part was pretty simple since it was just a timeline that we could always alter during the actual filming process. While the order of the shots stayed consistent to the storyboard, some of the actual shot types that were drawn ended up changing depending on the demands of filming day. Nevertheless, things turned out fine. The storyboard proved to be a good step-by-step guide for filming since this plan prevented any improvisation on filming day. 

Then, filming day happened. Unfortunately, I wasn't allowed to go at all because of my parents and the pandemic. Also, Amberina wasn't able to be Betty anymore because of similar reasons. Fortunately, Tori was allowed to play Betty to cover up for Amberina, and she filmed in her own bedroom. This changed our anticipated filming location for Betty's bedroom scene, but I could not be more proud of how that scene turned out. Sadly, I missed out on all the fun my groupmates said they had, but that's life, I guess.

Where I REALLY step in is editing. My groupmates helped with song choices and font choices, but I was the one who had to put it all together. Organizing all the shots in a logical order was moderately easy. None of the transitions were too hard to do since I had experience editing already. I'm glad this wasn't a superhero fight scene, because editing that would have been a nightmare! I had to relearn how to add Tori's audio file, but that was extremely quick and easy (at least for me). As a final touch, I increased the saturation to bring a warmer and more vibrant feeling to the opening scene. The skills I drilled in my brain from this editing process will certainly stick around, so I'm happy about that. 

This project definitely was a journey of growth. I learned lots about communication, compromise, film techniques, editing skills, and much more. Seeing a simple "let's do a love triangle" turn into a fully fledged two-minute opening scene seems like magic when I think about it. Of course, this wasn't actually magic. This process took hard work, but like many say, hard work pays off.

Mediamel out!