Throughout my production process, I have changed several components of my project, have had to cut some things down, and have gone through a lot of trial and error. This post is going to talk about all of them.
One of the first changes that started from the beginning was scheduling. As shown in a much earlier post, I created a schedule for how I am going to approach my project. Since then, the schedule has shifted several times for numerous reasons. One of the main reasons was evaluating the time it took to do everything. In my schedule, I anticipated for certain tasks to take a shorter amount of time than required. An example of this was developing my mise-en-scene elements. In my original schedule, I anticipated that it would take me a day to develop all of the elements required in my film's opening and blog about it. In reality, it took me about three days to design the bedroom, the costume, the makeup, and the main prop as well as talk about my decisions in my blog post. Another instance where I thought a task would take a shorter amount of time than it did was editing. Editing took me much longer than anticipated due to technical issues and another reason that affected other scheduling aspects of my project, which was my busy schedule. For two weeks, around the time I was going to edit, I was in my school's production of Legally Blonde and, I had family coming from Italy and Arizona. Both of these took time away from me to work on my project thus, It took me longer to start work on certain aspects of the project than others.
Most of the changes in my production occurred while editing. When I started editing, I put all of my clips on the timeline, uncut, and I realized I had over fourteen minutes of footage. This blew my mind. I failed to realize just how much I had filmed, even though most of the footage was the shot being set up or me leaving the shot. I changed my approach, only putting one clip on the editing timeline at a time. As I was doing that, I realized that some of my shots were too long and drawn out and they would've caused the opening to become longer than two minutes. To resolve this, I cut parts that seemed unnecessary or made the sequence too long but kept certain parts that still showed what was happening. An example of this is when Delilah unpacks her bag and beings taking notes. Unedited, that footage was just under a minute and a half. I quickly realized that wasn't going to work so, I cut spaces in between. I cut Delilah grabbing her pencils, instead, she goes from zipping the pencil case open to zipping it closed with the supplies already in her hand. I do this several times throughout the sequence so the cuts look uniform, rather than out of place. I also trimmed down the shots of Delilah getting on her bed and of Delilah throwing her book on the bed, because it made those sequences feel too long and unnecessary.
While editing, some of the effects I wanted to achieve in my film opening changed as well. These effects changed due to the way they appeared in the project. I initially wanted a light to come out of the book and engulf the screen, then fade out to reveal that Delilah is no longer there. This effect did not look the way I envisioned it. When I created the effect, I thought it looked cheesy and out of place. I also wanted the book to glow, but because of the way my shots were highlighted, that effect also didn't work the way I wanted it to. Because the comforter was the brightest thing in the frame, that's what would have glowed, and that isn't the effect I wanted to portray. To combat all of this, I did a fade to white, with a blur and a teleportation sound effect. This workaround still gives the illusion that Delilah was transported into her book, even though it wasn't initially in the way I planned.
A final major change that was made to my film's opening was showing the location where Delilah was transported to. A friend of mine suggested I do this, and I always kept that suggestion in the back of my mind. I decided as I was editing, that it was essential to the film's opening and made the plot more clear. I mentioned most of what occurred during my filming process in a previous post, but I'll summarize it in this post as well. I went to a park near my house that had a forest nature trail and I figured that would be the perfect place to film. I took my equipment and drove with my dad to the park. After looking and filming at several locations throughout the forest and overcoming many distractions such as planes, people, motorcycles, and even a wedding, I finally got the shot I wanted. Adding this footage to my film's opening gave my film's opening a more realistic touch, making it seem believable that Delilah was actually transported into this magical world.
I'm really pleased with all of the changes I made throughout the production process and I feel they have really elevated my film opening as a whole.
No comments:
Post a Comment