Music Choices

 A huge struggle during my project was music.

A big part of the story itself is music, and how it can help someone with their problems... the problem is I can't find music. I've been searching up down, sideways, and upside down for music that is non-copywritten. I found lots of non-copyright music but it all sucked, most were background music, with no lyrics, or if it did have lyrics the artist wasn't someone I could easily reference in the film. So after searching for a while and only coming up with songs like this I took a break to work on the shot list.

After I finished everything and even shooting I desperately needed an artist to use for the opening. Then I remembered my friend Ava has a friend that makes music. Which I thought It would be perfect because she even talks about mental health in her music. Her name is Mckensy and her music name is Tired in Pink. She is not a huge artist but she makes great music, she has 16 monthly listeners and has 16 songs on Spotify. After I listened to a couple songs and heard how good it would go in my film opening and decided to DM asking her for permission, obviously it wasn't a super professional text but here it is.

As you can see she said YESSSS. So as soon as she texted me back I  listened to all her songs and I picked 4 that I really liked. Those were Best friend, Skyler's pov, Nathalie, and FAKE.

The reason I chose those specific songs is because they had similar vibes, chill, and soothing music that could help Olivia thought her hard times. I specifically chose Best friends as the last song she would listen to as she is having her panic attack to foreshadow that the girl she meets will become her best friend.

Audio problems and solutions

 Since there weren't many people to help me during the actual filming process I needed people to do a voiceover for certain clips.

I needed to do a voice-over of Olivia reading her diary, this was pretty easy since I did it by myself. I checked out a phone lav from my TV production class, and I recorded it on voice memos on my phone inside my closet so I could get the best quality audio that had no background noise. I just read the script I had previously written.

After doing my part things got a little harder because I had to rely on other people. I needed a man and a woman to play Olivia's parents and I also needed someone to play the teacher. So for the parents, I texted my classmate Gabi because I know her parents, so I gave them a set of lines to do. And they said YES!!

When they sent it back it was perfect and just what I needed. So I added it to the timeline. Since I wanted to make it sound like it was coming from the room next to Olivia I added the same effect I added to the music.

When adding these audio clips I made sure to make the sound quiet when she put her headphones back on. 

After doing the parents scene I had to do the teacher scene. I had first asked my friend Zain to ask her mom to do it. She had said yes and Zain said she would send it.

After waiting a day... she didn't send it to me. I then asked my friend who also helped me film Mateo. I asked him to do a deeper voice to sound older.

Although it's not exactly who I wanted to do it I think he did a good job of sounding older and like a teacher. For his audio when I added it to the timeline I did not make it sound like it was coming from a different room since you could see Olivia and the teacher's shoulder.

I think the hardest part of the project was relying on other people. The technicals is not hard because its something I enjoy doing, but when it comes to getting other people's help something always goes wrong, i think everything is a learning experience and makes me want to do another project like this.

shooting

 So I shot Anxious Melodies, and it did not go horribly.

So since I told you guys I did play the main character, SO when shooting it was me and my friend Mateo because no one else was able to help. This was a big struggle since it was just the two of us and honestly really annoying because I am always able to help everyone when they need but when I need help no one is available to help me. That's why I love Mateo so much because he is always able to help me and I appreciate him very much. I am grateful that Mateo was able to help me and I think it turned out great. I would have liked it better if I wasn't in it and instead behind the camera but I have to do what I got to do to get this project done. 

Ok so to the actual shooting part, I wanted to shoot in 3 different locations. The first location is at school, Here we shot in a classroom, the hallway, and the bathroom. Then we shot in my house where we shot in my room and dining room. And lastly, we shot in my street, on the road, on the sidewalk. 

We did not shoot in chronological order because since we were already at school, we shot first in the classroom. Here we shot the scene where Olivia gets confronted by the teacher, since this was after school there was no one there to play the actual teacher so we positioned the shot behind a chair to make it over the shoulder, so it looks like there is a person there and I am speaking to them; here is one of the shots that require a voice-over which I'm going to ask one of my friend's dads, or mom to do it for me. The next shot we shot was Olivia walking out the door of the classroom after talking to the teacher, here we see her start to have a panic attack and drop her notebook. After she walked out of the classroom, We got a shot of her dropping her notebook and walking fast to the bathroom, so for most of the shots we decided to go handheld and the reason is because it adds to the stress she is having, it makes the viewer feel the panic attack and feel how Olivia feel, we did this for the majority of shots except ones where we wanted to show some stability. In this shot, we made sure to get the front and back of the same action of her walking so we see both the notebook fall and her facial expressions. After this, we started to shoot the scene which I think is the most important scene which is the one of Olivia having a panic attack. We first got a shot of Olivia walking and I thought we could be creative I took some inspiration from a shot we saw in an excerpt in class the other day from the show killing eve where the camera is positioned through a mirror where we see the main character, so in my shot, we positioned the camera where it points to the mirrors and we see Olivia walking into the bathroom, we also got a shot of Olivia back walking into the bathroom stall, and we see her slam the door.   

The second location we shot at was at my house we first started in my room, where we shot the shot of Oliva writing in her diary, this is one of the shots I wanted to add to the opening because I thought it would look cool. The shot is a bit shaky in a bad way cause it required Mateo to walk around the bed but I think it turned out good. Afterward, we went to my living room where we shot Olivia doing her homework as her parents fought, we got multiple angles just in case; for these shots, we used a tripod because we thought it would be too shaky otherwise. 

Lastly, we filmed the beginning of the film which is outside on the street. We had a lot of fun with these shots because we got to use my bike and run around my neighborhood. Here we just got every shot we could imagine, I rode the bike up and down the hills, we went on the sidewalk, the street, the grass. I made sure to tell Mateo to get a variety of shots, like one of my feet, and one on ground level. We spent the most time here to get the shots perfect because it is the first scene of the film so I wanted it to look good.

After this the next day I did have to make up one shot that I was missing, which was the shot of Olivia writing the name of the artist she loves on her notebook, this was a quick shot that took about 5 minutes to do, it was handheld and it had people talking in the back for the classroom effect.

Overall the shooting process was very stressful but I think I got everything I needed to edit a great film opening. I know I'm going to struggle to edit and look for clips, so I made sure to mark the clips I liked after filming to make things easier when I started to edit

problems...

 Hi... it's been a while things have been hectic but that's a different story. So I've come to a few problems with my script. 

The first problem is that I don't have anyone to play the characters, I knew this would be a problem because with 5 characters and 3 being adults casting was definitely rough. So I cut out the scene where the parents argue and instead of showing them arguing and well just being able to hear them, It will fully focus on Olivia's reactions and what she is doing while listening to them argue rather than the parents while they argue. I think this also works well with the piece because at the end of the day we want to see how her parents arguing affects her.

My other problem is the casting itself, unfortunately, I am going to play the main character which I desperately did not want to do, but I needed someone to do it. So this means I need someone to record, which I got my friend Mateo to do. Since I am in the film and not behind the camera things aren't gonna end up exactly how I want them, but that's just what happens sometimes.

So because of these issues, I changed lots of things. I figured out a way for only one person to be in the entire thing. For the shots with the parents I am going to VO the fight and make it seem like it's in a different room. I am going to get rid of the shots with the entire classroom filled with students, and instead, I'm going to give the context to Olivia's bad grades by showing them in the scene where she hears her parents argue and then cut to black and the school bell rings and we see Olivia talking to her teacher. In this scene, we will only be able to see the teacher's shoulder, which I can easily fake with a chair, and I will also VO the teacher talking to Olivia. The only concern is that the VO won't sound real, but I'll make sure to record room tone when I film the scenes and then add them on top of the VO to make it sound like it's actually happening in that moment in that room.

dates

 So I am behind on the blog post because I've had a very stressful week, cried a couple times today but it's all OK. I want to set out the whole schedule, there are basically 4 weeks before the project is due and I need to film and edit. So let's break it down week by week.

3/4 - 3/10

So this week I need to finish my storyboard ASAP

research small bands and artists I can use in my opening

I want to research some short films that are psychological fiction.

Cast character + figure shoot days out

I need to do some scene changes because of character issues

3/11 - 3/17

Work on character wardrobe + coordinate with actors

Work on mise-en-scene elements of the project like her notebook with her band drawings and such.

Create a shot list 

Research credits and title cards and find right fonts

3/18 -3/24

Check out equipment from BECON (Beacon is a Broward County station where they run news, radios, and shows, and they offer free equipment to South Florida students.)

Shoot days 19, 20, 21(for reshoots)

19- shoot all the school scenes

20- all the house scenes and outdoor shots

3/25- 3/31

EDITING (my least favorite part)

Dive deep into colors when editing

Create credits and title card

Final edits and changes

tea time in tstok

 So today in class we had a group meeting to discuss our projects and get some feedback and ideas... unfortunately Cypress Bay decided it was a perfect time to do a fire drill. So for the first 30 minutes of class, we walked in the blazing hot sun but eventually, we got into our groups.  My group consisted of my classmates Martina, Juan, Max, Kat, and Isabelle. Most of our ideas were very different from one another, but it was so cool to hear what other people's ideas were. My favorite idea was Isabelle's who is doing a dystopian film that I thought was so out there for a teenager to make, she and her partner have developed the full idea and even beyond the film opening. The opening consists of a group of kids getting socially experimented on and she was struggling to figure out a way to show that, we all gave her some advice like making them follow rules, or injecting them with something and seeing how they react or just something obvious that the audience would understand. Her idea kind of reminded me of this movie I watched that I actually really liked its called The Giver, it was a mix of that and Hunger Games into 1.

After 2 people in our group talked we only had 20 mins so the rest of us had to kind of speedrun our explanations. Juan went after Isabelle and he had a similar type of dystopian film involving kids but it was still so different from the other one. It's about the CEO who runs a boarding school for kids to learn how to be businessmen, it's a really interesting idea and I've never seen anything like it.

When it was my turn to speak there were 5 minutes left of class so I quickly told everyone my idea. Everyone seemed to really like the idea and loved the musical aspect of it. One person mentioned that I should have the music playing in her headphones and that was exactly what I was going to do. 

After talking with all my classmates it made me super excited to see all their final projects because they all seem really into their project and I am sure they are gonna make them amazing.

So before I start looking for locations to film I need to do a deep dive into non-copywritten music that I can incorporate throughout the opening so I'll talk to you when I start that soon.

Script writing is so harddd

 The next step of my film opening journey is the script and this is the part I've been dreading the most. I've never written a proper script and I also never write things down like scene by scene but this is a challenge I have to overcome so let's do this. Since I want to do this properly and not on a Google document I've decided to look into scrip writing websites, after looking for a while I found one called Celtx with some good reviews. And it already looks better than anything I could make on Google Docs.

So far I have written 2 pages and it isn't as bad as I thought It would be. Writing this gives me such creative freedom and I can write whatever I want. One of my favorite things about this website is a counter that counts how long I've been writing and thinking, It motivates me to write even more.

 

So I finished writing my script and I am so excited. I loved the website and how it worked and I think I made just what I imagined.  Here it is...