Reflecting on The Project

    Well, the day has come: my group and I are almost done with our film opening. This day actually came by so fast and to be honest I was a little nervous about how exactly we were gonna pull this off but you know what, we did it. There has been lots and lots of challenges that we've had to face along the way, but I believe that it's all been worth it to come to the point where we are now. 

    Although since the very beginning, we have been in this COVID-19 pandemic situation, several different things, some results of the pandemic, have changed and affected how our film opening came out. For example, for one thing, the "actress" who was originally supposed to play Betty, our friend Amber, couldn't offer her room nor her acting skills anymore because her parents no longer allowed her to take part in our project, so we had to make a change in the cast and eventually re-cast Tori as Betty.

    When we did make this change, we also had to deal with Tori's similar issue of not being able to let anyone in her room or house. But, after discussing it for a little while, ultimately we decided it would be best for Tori to just film herself in her own bedroom. And Tori did just that, with her family helping her a bit, to film a few shots that she couldn't do by herself.

 

    However, we also had to change part of the plot of our little opening. Initially, in conjuring up this idea, Daniel, who mainly brainstormed it, had wanted to include another character named Inez. Inez was going to be a gossip-monger who would've been the reason that Betty found out about August and James' summer fling. But, because we could tell that it would be difficult to include her, along with the rest of the opening in under two minutes, we had to cut her out. Also, in terms of filming, the day we finished, we discovered a problem in shooting the very last scene that was the sky tilt. Basically, the plan was to film Betty and James arguing from the outside of the car, I would back up with the camera (kind of creating an illusion of a dolly out shot), and then tilt the camera to the sky. Due to visibility issues, we actually had to open the car's sunroof and film this scene from inside of the car.

    Fortunately, I worked with others on this project and not only did it make the process of creating a film opening easier, but a more creative process because we were able to bounce all of our ideas on each other and come to a consensus at every step. For example, once, we were all kind of debating whether we should have a conversation scene between Betty and James at all, since we were all a little scared of running over the two-minute mark. But, we talked about it and thought about it and figured we would just write a short piece of dialogue and film it and see how it went. And it turned out to be just fine! 

    Now, on what I would do differently in doing this whole film opening. I would've loved to be able to film the tilt to the sky with an actual dolly or maybe even a drone so it could show the sky very clearly and look less like an amateur attempt but what can I say, we are all amateurs at this anyway! I would also probably make the conversation between James and August longer so we could see how James truly felt about August, because we more or less already know Betty and James' backstory from her voiceover and their own conversation.

    As my classmates, and groupmates of course, are going to be on spring break for the next week or so, we will be using this time to finalize our film opening. We are definitely done filming, shown by the fact that we are in the editing stage, so most of our work is going to be related to adding the proper credits and creating the title sequence that I mentioned yesterday. Also, Tori will record her voiceover for Betty's dramatic monologue and we will also add that in. Hopefully (fingers-crossed), after that we'll be pretty much done so we would just review it and try to catch any little mistakes we might have made.