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. 

We summon the devil on a teacher planning day pt 2

Hellooooo Blog!

Our shoot went well! We're making a film! Yay!

I am so so happy. To be completely honest this project has been stressing me out so much and just knowing that we have part of it shot makes me feel so much better. 

Yesterday, Zach and Samuel met up to write the scene that we filmed. I will say, we are behind on writing...

Thankfully, spring break is next week which gives us plenty of time to finalize a script. Here is what we have so far:

Onto filming..

I would say the shoot went very well. Since it was a teacher planning day at school we were able to film in an empty classroom which gave us freedom to move around the desks to get cool shots. Our actresses did very good too, and I think we made great choices casting wise. For equipment we used Zach's tripod and hollyland microphones, and Samuel's camera, which is a Lumix S5. 

Here is a video from the shoot:

Deciding our cast

 Hi Blog!

Tomorrow is my teams first shoot and we have just finalized our main cast. Actors are crucial to the film, as they are the people bringing the story to life. When coming up with our story and writing our script I already had someone in mind for the "queen bee" character, and the main witch. This character needed to be portrayed by a strong actress, which is why I was thinking of my close friend Andre. 

Andre has been involved in our schools musical theatre program for 4 years, and has played roles like Malificient in Descendants, and Sharpay in High School Musical. 

Thankfully after a quick text and phone call she agreed to be in our project!

After casting our queen bee, the other two witches were easy to find. I asked one of my best friends, Ambar, who I know through my schools television production club. She is one of our main actresses whenever we make short films, and has acted in countless short films, so I knew we could trust her to do our character justice. 

For our third witch we asked Sarina, another member of the television production club, although she doesn't have AS much experience acting, she has been in a few projects, and we trust her to portray the character. 

Finally...

casting our protagonist.

I'm not going to lie blog, this wasn't an easy task.

We debated for days about who could play our lead, and asked multiple girls if they were willing to. However, since we plan to film during spring break it severely cut down our options, since many people had plans to travel. 

But then! Samuel had a lightbulb moment and came up with a perfect actress! Claire is a freshman in our tv club, so she has that innocent look, but she's also involved in our schools theatre program and she is truly an amazing actress. (She just played the lead in our schools spring musical.) Thankfully, after asking her she agreed to act in our film! Yippee!!!

I'm so glad we casted our leads! Stay tuned to hear about the shoot tomorrow :)

We summon the devil on a teacher planning day

 Hi Blog!

We are stressed. Like very stressed. 

After switching ideas for the third time we realized that we actually have a lot less time then we thought. In reality we have next week (spring break) and the week after that to finish our project. Because of this, we want to finish filming as soon as possible to have time to edit, and complete the other components of our project. During spring break, one of our group members (Zach) will be on vacation, so we have planned to begin filming this Thursday and Friday to get the big scenes done before he leaves. However, this means that we need to lock in and finish our script in the next few days.

Thankfully, Friday is a teacher planning day, so we have a full day to dedicate to filming. On Friday we plan to film every scene that takes place in school.  A big advantage we have is that Zach's mom is a teacher! And since we need a classroom to film in it works out perfectly. 

On Thursday we're planning to film the big seance scene, as it is a very important scene to our film and will take time. Thursday is also a half day at school, so we will have plenty of time after to film. 

A seance film from a previous film I produced

Yes the stress is definitely stressing, but thankfully this week gives us a good amount of time to film.

I'll update you next week blog....

The plot thickens (....switches again)

 Well blog... this is a little awkward

We switched our plot again. 

I know I know! It's already week 3...

But unfortunately our previous plot idea just wasn't working when we were writing, so we ended up switching gears... or more like going back to our old gears.

We ended up circling back to our previous idea but making it more detailed. We met up at Panera to plan, and got until the middle of the plot. 

Here's our plot outline (still in progress):

Main plot: Girl who's pure gets invited by popular Trio to stay on at popular Trio leader house and the sounds backfires and she gets possessed and after she gets possessed she can break the fourth wall and then stuff happens from there ethical stuff a real ethical stuff something that changes her as a person deep down inside 

Beginning:

• MC is introduced as pure cutsie girl type:

• She meets popular girl trio (band of classic prissy hot pink popular girls)

• she takes one of their seats in class and they sit around her

• They start talking to her, in a fake kindness tone

• They invite her to one of their popular girl hangs (mean girls esque)

Middle:

• Hard cut to her outside the door of the hangout

• She talks to the camera while waiting in excitedly, but gets cut off with the door opening

• Popular girl briefly questions who shes talking to, but MC waves it away quickly, but also notices a charm around her neck

• The do classic girly stuff, MC notices the other 2 wearing the same charm

• Popular girls suggest doing a witchy spell casually “it’ll be fun” its revealed that they are practicing witches, and have been doing magic for a while (they maintain their prior characterization though)

• They start the spell, MC notices her energy draining and stops the spell

Right now our main focus is figuring out our ending. We've had some conflicting ideas, so we're meeting up again sometime this week to figure it out.

Group Meeting 1!

One of the most useful parts of the portfolio project process last year was the group meetings. During the group meetings we meet with members of other portfolio project groups to give each other feedback and advice. 

Today we had our first A level portfolio project group meeting. My group consisted of Victoria, Fabiana, Adriana, Daniela, Emi, and I.

I took notes during the meeting, splitting them between general info, concerns, and suggestions. Here are my notes from the meeting:

Emi: Working with Joaquin and Andrew

• Dark comedy short film 

• Critique of power struggles

• Statement about joining religions for power

• Completes task for devil, loses humanity at the end 

• Script is finished

Concerns: 

• Location filming

Suggestions: 

• 1 death (instead of 3)

• Film at markham park 

• Make your own symbol (instead of the pentagram)
  
  

Adriana Vega: Working with David 

• Comedy short film 

• Guys teleports by flipping a penny

• Everytime he goes somewhere new he tries to do a kind act and it backfires

• Interested in using fast cuts

Concerns:

• Scheduling

Suggestions: 

• End with David completing a kind act but when he tries to teleport again he drops the penny down a drain/sewer (for comedic effect)

Aneesa Bajaj: Working with Quinn, Nico, and Zach

• Meta dark comedy 

•  Heavy on breaking the fourth wall

•  Camera starts on initial subject and falls in love with another subject, subject 1 tries to win back its attention

Concerns: 

• Developing storyline and it making sense

Suggestions: 

• spotlight turning off on main subject 

• mic turning off of main subject

• -give context to studio setting 

• -casting call (actor desperate to get role)

 

Victoria Duque: Working with Kenna and Renn

• Coming of age 

• Message: even through fears and stress, you keep growing

• Girls plants seed, life gets stressful, she forgets about it

• Friendship breakup (friend gave her the plant) 

Suggestions: 

• End with voice over

• Buy 3 different plants to show the growth of the plant

• Focus pulls 

• Use calendar to show days passing

• Weeks instead of days

• Camera is calendar- writing on camera 

Mariana Aldana: Working with Audrey

• Drama short film 

• Starts with a therapy session 

Suggestions: 

• Quick death 

• Ideally have an adult play therapist 

• Maybe car crash

• Younger 

• Not dd 

• Therapy a year later

• Put date on bottom

Fabiana Castillo: Working alone

• Psychological thriller short film 

• Guilt is getting to him after killing girl

• Protagonist goes crazy 

Suggestions: 

• Give context at the beginning - like crash and show year of crash and then year 

• Dead person is signified by item specific to them

• Time doesn’t pass

• Hes like bipolar so he writes the notes himself and just through the movie show the different personalities 

• Limited dialogue 

• Daniela Gonzalez: Working with Gaby

  • Music promo

  • Annie Lemasters 

  • Dramatic vibe (olivia rodrigo drivers license vibe)

  • Story based 

  • artist in nashville

  • Story will be fully acted out 

  • Build up to running on the beach at the end (sitting on beach, walking, then running.) 

  Suggestions:

  • Go to the beach during sunrise instead of sunset

  • Have everything completely planned out before, as there is very limited time to film.

  
  

Overall, this group meeting was very helpful to all of us and gave useful suggestions and advice for each

of our projects.