an update (editing, social media)

 Today Samuel, Zach, and I met up at Samuel's house to edit. We edited together the opening scene of the film, as well as void scenes, and the tarot card reading. For now we just have a line edit, but we are also keeping sound design in mind and writing down what we need for each scene. 

a brief lunch break 

a still from the tarot card reading scene

Then, after editing for a few hours, we switched our focus over to social media, where we worked on some posts to upload. We decided to do a behind the scenes of our day 3 of production, and a reel. For the reel, we decided to do a silly behind the scenes, to show our audience how we achieved one of our shots. 

This is what we came up with:

That's all for this blog! Stay tuned for more.

Group Meeting

 Hi Blog! Today in class we had our second group meeting regarding our portfolio project. In these meetings we are put into groups with members of other portfolio project groups to share our progress and ask for/give advice and suggestions. My group today consisted of Emi, Adriana, Victoria, Audrey, Samara, and I. Here are my notes from the meeting:

Aneesa Bajaj

• producer/ art director 

• More planning and pre-production

• On the second day of filming 

• Their set up consists of a black background set up 

• Headshots on social media 

• Intro to characters on social media (tarot cards)

• They have a handful of posts scheduled to come out every day this week

• They are filming today after school( montage scene“ dead wife”) 

• The film is called “Witch!”

• Dark color scheme ( pay homage to mean girls poster)

Emi Valdivia 

• Art director/ producer 

• They only need to shoot 3 more scenes (out of 7)

• They started filming last week Tuesday 

• They focused on Andrews scenes Saturday 

• Emi is the social media manager

• The film is called “The Scourge”

• Making two postcards ( one is inspired by the tarot card that is given to a character in the film) 

Adriana Vega

• They are finishing filming today

• They are behind on social media 

• They filmed in the everglades + took photos for the instagram

• Filmed called “ One Flip Away”

• Postcard in Progress (plan to finish today)

• Planning to start editing ASAP after filming is done

• Plan to film interviews with cast/crew for instagram reels

Victoria Duque 

•  Finalized filming yesterday 

• The short film is mostly shot in main characters rooms 

• Showed the difference between day time and night time 

• Not started the postcard yet (ASAP)

• Filmed three reels for social media 

• Did a photoshoot for the postcards 

• Filmed called “ Sprouting” 

Audrey Pangalangan

• Working on social media 

• Adjusted cast/crew 

• Auras represent different personalities for meet the cast & crew on social media 

• Taking character photos (ASAP) 

• Filmed in called “ Session One” 

• They decided to not write in a death since its difficult to portray that in the right way 

• Majority of the filming is happening at her house 

• They haven't filmed yet (will start this Wednesday)

Samara Hernandez 

• Is doing a documentary

• ^ about latin american culture in society (This episode is about dance & music)

• She filmed before spring break and during spring break 

- Initially 4 interviews but ended up with 3 due to conflicts

    -grandma, dad, dancer

- 5 posts up so far on social media, bright color scheme to represent the different latin american flags

Overall, the team meeting was very helpful and I'm glad I got to here everyone out and give advice and suggestions

that will hopefully help their project!

My cutie group!

That's all for this blog! Until next time... :)

That's a wrap! (Filming day 3)

 We are officially done filming! Nico and I started out by shooting the flashback montage scene. We wanted to give it that traditional "dead wife montage" feel so we shot everything with an old digital camera I inherited from my parents. (a 2008 canon powershot) 

For being made the year I was born and being almost 18 years old, the camera held up pretty well and gave us the vintage quality we wanted. We shot various scenes around a local plaza for about an hour before heading to Samuel's house for the rest of the shoot. After editing it together I'm proud of it, and I think it fit our vision.

The final "dead wife" montage 

Once getting to Samuel's house we hit a bit of a roadblock because it was about 5pm and still light outside, and the film we were shooting took place at night. So.. Nico and I bought some trash bags at the grocery store and brought them to Sam's. As a group, and even with the help of our actors, we blacked out the living room windows by taping trash bags to them and then closing the blinds. 

Then, for the tarot reading scene, we made the lighting more creative and dark to mark a shift in the story.

Samuel's dog 'bono' in our witchy lighting

A still from the tarot scene

Overall, this was a very long (3pm-10pm) but successful filming day, and we are wrapped! Yay!!!

That's all for this blog, stay tuned for more :)

Production Day 2

 Hi blog, we just wrapped up our second day of shooting!

Today we filmed all the scenes set in "the void" as well as the new opening scene, and the scene where Claire arrives to Andre's house. I'm sure you're confused, because the script has changed so much, but fear not,

here is the final script:

SCRIPT

It was finally completed on Saturday, and we are all happy with the result.

Personally, I think filming went very well, we did go a bit over the time we set to film, but we completed everything we scheduled, which made it worth it. 

We started off by setting up "the void," which was made possible by using a large black backdrop Samuel's dad already owned. (He's a photographer!) 

We did get a little bit behind schedule because we had to pick it up from Samuel's dad's friends house, but it was only a 15 minute drive so it wasn't anything too severe. 

Thankfully we already knew how to set up the backdrop and lighting because we have already used it for a film that required a similar "void" 

BTS pictures of a previous film Samuel, Nico, and I have worked on

Filming the void scenes went very well, Claire is an incredible actress and takes direction very very well. If we give her a note she immediately takes it and fixes what she was doing. Zach is a great director with a clear vision, and he works well with Samuel to get dynamic and interesting shots.

We also filmed a few shorter scenes, like the new opening scene which takes place in Claire's bedroom as she gets ready for school. We filmed in Samuel's sisters room and set up the desk to look more like a vanity. 

We decided to add this scene to the script because we didn't love our previous opening scene after we filmed it. As a group we thought it through the viewers into the story too fast. Our new opening has a bit more exposition and helps viewers understand Claire's character a bit more. 

We also filmed the short scene where Claire arrives to Andre's house, as the sun was setting, which gave good lighting and made it accurate to the script. 

Overall, filming day 2 was very productive, and when we finished I made a post for our social media to keep followers updated and give exclusive BTS content!

Watch W!TCH

 Helloooo blog

It's influencer time!

Or...

more like niche micro filmmaker influencer time 😝

SO!

Social media yayyyy

Step 1 was finding a good username. Our film title "W!TCH" made this a bit hard, since you can't add special characters to usernames on instagrams. After some brainstorming we decided to abbreviate our title to wtch, just for the username. 

We settled on the username watch.wtch because the alliteration is catchy and it gives a good slogan. 

For our first few posts we are doing crew intros and bios. Making a template for our posts took some time, we didn't know exactly what theme or imagery we wanted, we just knew we wanted to use deep jewel tones

social media color scheme

As Nico and I played around with ideas, we had the amazing idea to do tarot cards! Tarot cards are an important image in our film, and can be customized easily. 

We did the front of the tarot card with a picture of the person, and the back with a short bio of them. They will be posted together to give followers a brief intro of our crew. 

Here is an example of one of the posts:

The posts were made on Canva. We started by just using the line tool to form a rectangle (the outline of the card) Then we changed the background color to a deep purple to match our proposed color scheme. The I found some tarot card backgrounds on google, imported them in, and changed the color to a purple to match the background

Original tarot card backgrounds

Then I imported pictures of each member of the crew, removed the background, and put them into the tarot card. God bless Canva Premium! While I was working on the front, Nico was working on the back, which I think turned out great! He also found the fonts we used which I think match the witchy, tarot card aesthetic. 

We finished the posts by adding some final details like the stars in the background.

That's all for this post. Call me a graphic designer because for never doing anything like this, I'm very proud of myself 😸

Andre please lock in

 Hi Blog! I'm backkk

Spring break is sadly finished but that means its crunch time for our project. As the producer/head of preproduction and planning, I made a filming schedule for the rest of our project and shared it with the cast/crew. We plan to film on Sunday March 29th, Monday March 30th, and potentially Tuesday March 31st if we still aren't done. 

We are cutting it a bit close, since after we finish filming we only have a little over a week to finalize the short film. However, I think if we edit as we go, and have productive filming days it should be doable. 

Our only potential issue is that Andre, who plays our main antagonist, may be in Tampa to visit her future college. This would be very bad as this is really our last weekend to film to give us sufficient time to edit and complete all the other components of our portfolio. She said she would update us by Thursday, to see if she's going out of town or not, so lets pray she isn't. 

Here is the filming schedule I mentioned eariler in the blog:

Sunday  

2pm: Crew arrive to Samuel's house

2-4pm: Set up and review shot list/ what we’re filming 

4pm: Cast arrives 

4-8pm: Film 

Monday 

3pm- Crew arrive to quinn 

3-4pm- Set up/review what needs to be filmed 

4pm- Cast arrives 

4-6pm- Flm 

6pm- Cast leaves 

6pm-7:30pm: Crew edits 

Tuesday 

Same schedule only if filming isn’t done 

If filming is wrapped: Crew meets to edit 3-7:30pm 

Postcard: The Print Component

 The short film portfolio project contains a print component in the form of a postcard advertisement. The postcard is meant to be handed out to persuade potential viewers to watch the film at a film festival showing. After a lesson by my teacher, I felt a lot more confident about the postcard component because she explained exactly what should be on it and what Cambridge is looking for. 

The postcard should contain: the name of the film, the name of the director, director's contact information, and when/where the film is showing. The postcard can also be vertical or horizontal.

Here is a real world example of a postcard advertisement made by Samuel's sister (a film student!)

Front:

Back:

For our postcard I am thinking of doing a dark color scheme: think dark red, purple, green, etc.

However, I want it to be very traditionally " teen girl movie" font and layout wise. I was thinking of doing something like the mean girls poster, but with the witches. I think it could be cool to contradict the standard conventions but still hint to what the film takes inspiration from.