Jake Landis's Blog

 Ethan finally brought the flash drive to school so I am able to join in on the editing, today my main goals are going to be looking for sound effects for our movie, specifically a water splash for when we throw the body over the bridge because we want to emphasize where we are throwing it so the audience can understand that it is going to disappear into a river. And I also want to find background music for the scenes of us driving up to the bridge and the scenes where we are getting rid of the body and walking back to the car because the ackward silence inside the scene does not match us very well so I am going to do some digging most likely on Pixabay or Audionautix to find good background music for that.  So first I have added that water splash audio and below is a picture of when the splash starts, I think it is a perfect time because the bag is completely out of view and we do not know how far below the river is because obviously we did not throw it into a river when film...

 As I near the end of the editing involving in the movie opening, I am looking into the CCR that are part of the AICE media studies grade, I have been urged about their importance by my teacher the whole year but now is about the time to start working on them. In class we are watching a past students CCR's and it is helping me get ideas of what to do for my own CCR's. He did a podcast where he interviewed himself and basically just explained the entire movie. This is pretty interesting because he was able to do this all by himself and he just altered his voice a little, so it did not sound like the same person. This gives me a little bit of an idea where I can do a podcast because all I would need to do is audio and it would not require me to make a video, I would be able to cover which ever question I wanted to but by just looking at them I would probably choose to do the question about how my production skills developed throughout the project because I could have someone inte...

 As we get closer to finishing up our opening we still need to edit the audio of the movie and to prepare for editing the audio I think it is going to be a good idea to watch a quick little video and do a little research. It is also my first day back from spring break and I had quite a nice time away from school. I spent a day at Disney with some of my friends and spent some time with my family and my brother who was down from college, but I did have to work quite a bit but it was fine cause I made pretty good money, but enough about me below I am going to put some research on audio in Adobe premiere pro.  Enhance Speech: it is a feature that allows for noise to be removed in order to improve dialogue adding a more professional sound to our film.  Auto-Ducking: feature that automatically lowers the volume of music when dialogue is present, can be useful for us to turn down God's Plan when we begin talking in the start of the film.  Audio Mixer: creates an easier way ...

 Today it was just some more editing because we need this film to look amazing and sound amazing so through editing is how we are going to achieve this. Today the first thing that we worked on was cutting our time to below 2:10 because we were around 2:13 so we needed to cut a few seconds. We have a scene where we throw a body over the bridge and then me and Lucas get back in the car and then it goes to a scene of Scotty watching us get in the car, so instead of playing us getting in the car twice, Ethan had the idea of cutting out the first one so after we throw the body over the bridge it cuts to Scotty watching us and not keeping the same clip of us getting in the car twice, this brought us to about 2:08 which is very good but we may end up needing to cut more later on. Here is a video of the new and improved cut that we made.  We also moved the intro music so after opening credits when the visual parts of the movie began to play there is a beat drop so it kind of matches u...

 Now that the production company and the movie title are complete it is time to work on the names and introducing the characters and who they play in the movie, just looking at this, I can tell it is going to be challenging but we can definitely get it done. It is going to go by each of our faces because our scene covers the introduction of each actor and what they look like so through this editing idea it also includes the names of what the actors are and their names inside the movie, which is helpful so the viewer can understand the dialogue better.  We have it done, starting by introducing who filmed the movie which was Ethan and for all of these names we used very simple fonts because if just fits better with an older styled movie and a simple font reflects the background of our movie being a pizzeria. We also made his names with size 130 because there is not really anything going on in the movie at that time so it can be focused on the name a little more. For all the name...

 So today we are going to be working on opening credits today and just focus on implementing our production companies name and the names of all the actors and who filmed the movie which is going to all go into the first like 15 seconds or so.  We also had our teacher watch our first rough cut and he gave some very good suggestions on what to adjust and edit for our movie such as showing us a couple scenes that we could possibly cut down and also showing us the dialogue auto audio button that cuts down noises inside of the scenes which I think we are going to use for the scenes where we are talking inside the restaurant and inside the car.  I discussed the fonts I researched with Ethan and Lucas, and we decided to try the AM Sirte because we all thought it looked pretty cool, but we do still have to see how it looks in our film.  And this is what it looks like, so you do not have to go back to my old posts. But we are only going to use it for the part for our producti...

 So, we brought our footage to school, we got it off the camera and onto a google drive and now me and Ethan are sifting through the scenes to find the good cuts because we redid some scenes upwards of ten times which just goes to show that we are not very good actors. 3/5 So after a few days of attempting downloading the files off the google drive we have finally transported it onto adobe premiere pro and we are going to watch the entire movie in order for the first time and I am very excited but just by looking at it I can see that it is over 3 minutes long and will definitely need some cutting to be done to it.  Before watching it we did make some initial cuts because we did have some very long scenes that held to much footage that we did not delete previously but we are going through and trimming before we do watch it and give our initial thoughts on what to get rid of. Already these initial cuts brought us down 20 seconds which is very good, but another problem has been e...

 The one downside to using a nice camera is the fact that lighting is a big problem, because it was dark outside and the restaurant had dim lighting the video is very dark and will need to be color graded, so in advance to color grading I am going to research how to do it so it does not take more than a couple days.  So, color grading is primarily achieved in adobe premiere pro using the Lumetri Color panel which is located inside of the Color workspace when the app is opened. Withing it you can use a few basic corrections such as exposure and white balance. There are also so more in depth changes you can make such as color wheels, HSL, and curves, but I think we will just be messing with the exposure and white balance to make our video brighter because there are definitely points where it is hard to see and forces you to squint.  color grading using adobe - Google Search I watched this video by the Premiere Gal, which simplified the color grading feature inside of Adobe ...

 Below are picture Me, Ethan, and Lucas took of the filming experience.  This is the bag that was left with us by out friend Cyrus, it holds the camera and other equipment needed and you can see the camera at the bottom and the gimbal on the left.  This is Ethan holding the camera by the gimbal, getting used to how it moved.  This was at the beginning of filming and Ethan was explaining to us what we needed to do for that scene and this is why it took so long because people like Lucas were on there phones.  This was the background photos from the restaurant, and I felt that it really fit our vibe for our movie, the vintage looking photos and the green wall.  This was just for fun, post filming because they thought they looked cool with the fake guns More of the background of the restaurant, vintage style photos and very centered around pizza and it was very good. All of us in position ready to shoot the first scene, waiting for Ethan to stop taking photos o...

 Later today we meet up at 5 P.M. At Solorzano's pizza to film. I am going to take some pictures of the process and post them in a couple of days post filming 3/2 Filming went great, we got permission to film at the pizza place, and it was absolutely perfect. We got out shots done at both locations, weather permitted and there was no rain, and there wasn't to many problems. The main problem we ran into was the fact that we kept laughing when we were trying to film, at the pizza place we were there for over two hours. It was so hard to keep our composure at the start, I guess we were just having too much fun when filming, which is a good thing. For some scenes when for example I was not in the shot I would have to get up and leave because one of our actors Joey could not stop laughing when looking at me. But we ended up getting it done and I think once editing is over and all of that good stuff it will turn out very good, I also think the step up with our camera is going to play...