CCR

 Here is the link to my CCR!

Hello, my name is Erin Watson and I had many roles in my group's film opening. I helped direct, create, edit, and an act in the suspense mystery short film “run”. My group chose the genre murder/mystery because it was something that really spoke to all of us. We could not have agreed faster on a genre and once we did we jumped right into storyboarding. My group members and I are a very creative group of students so coming up with a plot was quite easy and more entertaining than a challenge. It was not until after we had finished our film that we came up with a title. The plot is Josh trying to escape from a murderer, and since Josh is running in the opening scene, and since he is trying to “run” away from the killer, the name fit the occasion. During our whole film, it is very obvious to the viewer that they are watching a suspense/horror movie. This is because of the elements my group and I used to create a suspenseful feeling. Some of these objects were physical, and some were not. The props which definitely let the viewer know that this was a horror/suspense film was the baseball bat and the empty car. These two props both seemed very dangerous and had a big part in the story. Some other elements which weren't exactly physical are the suspenseful music that gradually builds up throughout the film and the characters emotions. My emotion (the killer) throughout the film was very dark. I never showed my face, I was always wearing a hood and sunglasses, and I was also wearing all black which gave a sense of danger. Another element which also let the viewer know that this was a suspenseful/murder film opening was the editing techniques. Maddie added a blue tone and darkened our film so the setting had a more “cold” feel.

As I stated before, I was the killer in this film opening. By myself (a girl) being a killer, my group and I are challenging the male stereotype for always being the “villain”. In nearly every murder/mystery movie, the bad “guy” or the killer is always a man, more than likely to show a sense of masculinity. My group wanted to put those stereotypes aside and make the killer a woman. Our video not only challenger gender stereotypes but represents a cultural struggle. The main character getting chased in out the film, Josh, is an African American male. The fact that our main character Josh is struggling and is fighting for his life subconsciously represents the racial injustice in today's society.

Our film opening definitely engages with the audience by making the viewer empathize with the character. Since our film is not just murder but is also suspenseful, our viewer feels as if they are in the place of the main character which overall makes them more engaged in the film. Our film is also very open-ended. There are many things that may be confusing to the viewer, such as if the main character made it out alive, why the car is empty, or why is the suspenseful music playing, but it is all to grab the viewer attention and hook them in.

Our product engages with the audience by hooking them in on something they are interested in- suspense, but then reveals the underlying message that racism is still alive today. We want our viewers to be entertained, and be on the edge of their seats, but we also want them to learn a lesson. My group successfully did this by having a very suspenseful film opening, but by making the killer a white female, and the victim a black male.

Throughout this project, I was able to teach my group a lot about the production which also taught myself a great number of things. Last year, I took Television and Video production and was introduced to Adobe Premiere Pro and became very comfortable with the program. When it was time to edit out the video, Madison, our main editor, did not know how to use this program. From what I remembered from the previous year, I was able to teach Madison which ended up refreshing my memory, and as Madison and I were editing together, we learned new things from You-Tube tutorials and from the help of our teacher, Mrs. Henderson.

My group integrated technologies into this project by using Adobe Premiere Pro to edit our film opening. For the filming aspect of our project, my group used Lily’s iPhone X which has tremendous camera quality. Madison and I also used You-Tube to look up new editing techniques to use on PremierePro when editing our film opening.

Click here to see my final cut film opening

After reading the many peer reviews from my classmates, my group and I came to the conclusion that nothing needed to be adjusted in our film opening. For every negative comment we had, we had a positive one contradicting it. Many people said they were confused by the plot, and others said they understood it completely. Our plot is supposed to be somewhat confusing and creepy and not have a very clear and obvious plan. Some people also said they did not like the panning at the beginning of the video, but more people said they really enjoyed the panning scene. Since every one of our reviews had a negative and a positive, we chose to not change anything.

Film Opening Link

Click here to watch my film opening!

Film Opening Editing (week 2)

This week, my group worked on editing again. We focused on clipping our film to perfection and adding credits. First, I started off by putting the credits in the middle top portion of the screen but ended up not liking it. Since the shot is panning and moves, the background where I placed the credits was moving, therefore the color was changing. This made the words very hard to see, especially when the background was very light, almost as white as the credits. Because of this, I moved the credits down to the bottom left corner where there was a patch of grass so the words would be very easy to see to the human eye. We also adjusted the color of each shot, making sure our darker scenes weren't too dark.

Film Progress (w3) (editing 1)

This is my group and I editing our film opening. First, we started off by uploading the pictures to Adobe Premiere Pro. The first step we took in the editing process was cutting our film. All of our films was originally much longer than expected because of bloopers and pauses. By cutting those unnecessary clips out, we made our film shorter in order to fit in the two-minute time frame. A big issue that we had to combat was that lowering the exposure, which we used to make the film seem more creepy, but when we lowered the exposure, it significantly increased the noise. The font we will be using for our titles is Ariel. We are sticking to one font only to stay very uniform. We are also planning on having digetic music added to out film to sound like the music playing from josh headphones

Film Progress Week 2

 This picture shows lilys car, one which follows Josh when he is running. We are trying our best to keep the shot moving fast enough but steady enough by using a tripod. We will use a panning shot to follow lilys car, and possibly even shoot from a head-on view as well.

This is the road we will be filming on. We chose a road that looked kind of abandoned but was not too creepy looking because we did not want to make it obvious that something bad was going to happen. This is our establishing shot which is the beginning of our film opening. 

This is the point of view shot from Lily's perspective. This represents the murderers, also known as lily, and me which will be shown soon, following josh and the intentions that we have. This point of view shot is interesting for the audience because it is a different point of view and shows the movie through the murders eyes. 

Filming Week 1

This week for filming, my group practiced how we were going to film and what shots we were going t use. Because all of my group members and I are very busy, we could not film at the actual location we had in mind, so we compromised and did practice shots at school.

This vide of Josh running is at the beginning of our film opening when Josh is casually on his morning run before he realizes anything was wrong. I used a panning shot to film Josh running because I feel as if it added suspense that was present but was not obvious to Josh at the time. One thing that was hard was timing how fast Josh ran. Because I had to follow Josh while he was running, I wanted to make sure I moved the camera fast enough to capture his whole body, but not fast enough to where the camera became blurry or hard to watch. In order to get the perfect run, Josh and I had to film this scene a few times before we got it just right.

This picture is an example of what the closing scene of our film opening looks like. After Josh has been hit on the head by a softball bat, he ends up unconscious in a basement. Josh is a very good actor so there was not a problem to try and get him to act dead. One problem I did realize was that I will need to be far out in order to film josh's' body horizontally laying down. Vertically, it was not a problem, but for our actual video, everything will be shot horizontally.