Done!; My Project

 Well, here it is. Not much else to say, this was a pretty fun experience and a lot of hard work.

no 'post titled after' today, but I made a Youtube playlist of all the songs I used for blog post titles.

Here it is to finish things off :)

GT-R / CCR

 Home stretch!!!

Here's my finished CCR, I'm quite happy with how this came out and I think I answered the questions well and edited it creatively (plus I used some of my friends' music in the background again, I'm such a great supporter teehee).

post titled after this song (last time I'm doing this </3)

In the Flesh

As a final reflection on this whole process, I'm really thinking about how many things I changed.

This started off as a partially narrative, if devoid of dialogue, opening to a story that I really hadn't fleshed out much at all. But as the process continued, I kind of started to form a full film in my head, which pushed me to make the opening itself looser and more atmospheric. Over the course of the project I allowed what I really wanted to do to take over and the result is the best product I could make to match those self-set expectations. I would have wanted it to look better, but I have no real complaints about the result since it was all my sole doing. 

I think my project came out well, and I'm proud of the work I put into it.

post titled after this song

Three Steps

I woke up super early today and guess what: finished! I'm done! No more! 

The car footage didn't end up working out, but I filled out the timeline with some random cool looking shots I got elsewhere. I rearranged some stuff to make everything flow better, finished up mixing, did the credits, and now I'm done. This was honestly a lot more straightforward than I thought, which can definitely be attributed to my plan to go for the montage route. I think I effectively accomplished what I set out to do and the result is pretty good. The part I'm happiest with is the footage I got for the credits sequence, though, and I made a little mini short with it scored by one of my favorite spoken word pieces. 

Here's the opening in my export queue (exciting!) and a frame from the
credits (I ended up going with Vinyl for the font).

Now that I'm done editing and everything I just need to finish up the script for my CCR and get to filming. I feel pretty accomplished and satisfied with the entire project at this point.

Here's an embed of the short I made with scrap footage as an extra treat:

post titled after this song

You

I shot some really pretty footage of the palm trees in front of my house today with a 135mm lens. I love how they came out and I just finished editing them together to make up the 'credits' portion of my short. I also went through the entire timeline and added some jump cuts and crossfades to connect shots together, and I'm happy with how those transitions came out. In addition, I mixed the audio for all the footage I have too, and I think the volume levels of the background noise and music are balanced well. All I need to do is get the car footage for the beginning and I'll be done besides credits, which is what I'll mainly be discussing in this post.

Here's me working on a crossfade.

Anyways, it's time to think of a good font for my credits. The footage I'm placing them over looks like the screencap below for the most part, so I want to go for something with a strong contrast to break through the patterns made by the leaves.

For placement I already know I want to fill up the negative space between the leaves, so all I really need to figure out is fonts. The first thing I want to do is look at my main inspirations and see what types of fonts were used there. I didn't even realize this until looking back at some of my favorite films' opening credits but a lot of them feature landscape or nature shots with text over them; I guess that was a subconscious inspirational move on my part, but it also helps in deciding on text options now. The examples I looked at use sans-serif fonts, almost always white, sometimes with a shadow to distinguish further from the background, so I think I'm going with something like that. 

(That fourth example is probably what my credits are gonna look like LOL)

It's worth noting that one of my favorite uses of text in an opening is the one for Gummo (third example): I love the contrast between the more contemporary slim bold sans-serif and the red blackletter in lowercase. Maybe I'll incorporate a second, more elaborate font as a dedication.

With all this brainstorming, I think I'm going to use a white sans-serif font in all lowercase to fit the contemporary teenage relatability I want to create in my opening. I'll add a shadow to contrast the sky blue background and put the text in the negative space between the leaves in my shots. The main fonts I'm considering on Adobe Fonts are the Trade Gothic Next family and Vinyl OT Regular. I'll try out both on top of my footage and see which one works best.

post titled after this song

XS

During the latter half of Spring Break (cutting it kind of close), I'm going to finalize my project. I have most of the footage I need, I'm just missing the car shots and the road-to-sky credits take which I'll try to get this weekend. The credits one should be really easy to get in the morning, but I might have to work around the car parts depending on whether my parents can take me out: this wouldn't be the end of the world, honestly ... I've kind of come to not like the idea of those shots as much.

With the footage I have, I've been making the full timeline flow more cohesively. I added the background noise from one of my longer takes underneath the entire mix, making it pretty quiet but loud enough to fill in some ambience and make it "natural"-sounding. The entirety of track 'A2' is this noise, and as you can see in the mixer in the second screenshot I've been adjusting the sound levels in comparison to the background noise in my outdoor take as well as the music track. 

As you can also see I've been experimenting with cropping some of my shots, which really helps to finalize the look I want to achieve. 

After I finish up the footage tomorrow and over the weekend all I really need to do is research a font for the credits and put those in (shouldn't take long seeing as I did literally everything besides the music, whoops) plus mixing the sound more which has been super easy. This honestly feels like a breeze and I can feel the end coming, sweet relief. I've also been working on my CCR, so I should be able to finish that up soon too.

post titled after this song (robbed at the Grammy awards, how sad)

Waterfall

Super glad I switched to resolve. The color and light editing look insanely complicated at first but once I got used to them it was so cool to mess around and get all my shots looking how I wanted them to!

Here are some before and after examples. I'm going for a more pinkish look than the tan-brown I had in mind at first, solely because of how most of my takes turned out lighting-wise without shifting things around. I like the kind of stuffy warmth that the lighting gives off in most of my shots, and I have to keep editing the top example to make it look more like my others (I might just retake it, honestly). 

I'm going to start looking at fonts and my credits in general, which should be the easiest part of the entire project considering how I did everything myself. The footage I have right now along with ~5 second placeholders for my missing takes puts me at about 1:35, and the song I'm using is 1:46, meaning I'll probably have to trim down some stuff to get everything I need within the needed time.

post titled after this song