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Creative Critical Reflection

Oh its a reflection alright!

LINK:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZqY4V7CUGxkIo9M124LOlQMXvJVY1xYx/view?usp=sharing  
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Thinking about what could and what has been

To reflect on this entire process, it has been quite complicated in all aspects. I am aware that I am quite an indecisive person, so any project development of mine is bound to experience some changes,  however, this portfolio project has gone through more change than I was originally comfortable with.

 At first, our project explored themes of kindness and generosity as we were going to tell the story of a child taking a toy to give as a gift to their friend. We were going to have some sibling dynamic in there as well, as the scene in which they interact was the way we were going to show the impoverished living conditions of our main character. However, this dynamic obviously developed into much more as we got along with the project.

 COVID-19 brought us a lot of obstacles; not being able to get camera equipment, no access to our original actors and actresses, as well as the discouragement that it gave Joey and I was a lot to overcome, but thankfully we were able to do it. Although we are still slightly disappointed that we weren't able to go with our original plans, I think we are just as proud of our current result as we would have been our last.

 All in all, this project has enabled me to challenge myself and try ways of filmmaking I would have never thought or chose to do otherwise.  With the amount of restrictions we had, I feel we were sort of forced to be creative problem solvers, which lead Joey and me to do the rotoscoping and change our story so the stylistic choices made sense (aka visually representing a person in the past through the animation). I guess it takes an entire pandemic to learn that I don't need everything at my disposal to tell a good story.

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THE COMPONENTS!



Here are our final products!!!!


















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Assorted Updates

Animation will always be one of my true loves. The ability to combine 2D drawing as well as filmmaking is absolutely beautiful and I adore it. And since I love it, I gotta be honest with it. Making it is: THE WORST.



At first I thought, tracing? This should be easy... until my artist’s urges kick in and I force myself to draw every crease and line that my eye detects. It's as if someone asked for a stick figure and my brain decides to recreate the Mona Lisa. There is no reason for me to fully render a drawing that will show up for 0.03 seconds, but here I am, struggling not to do that.
my wrists hurt

Here are some of my favorite animations I have created thus far!









    


I've also been making progress little by little on the website and the postcard! Here are some in detail thoughts of those.

♡ OVERALL DESIGN CHOICES ♡


Joey had created this color palette for the branding of our film!
I think overall this color combination looks relaxed and sincere :-)

The Color Psychology/Meaning of the colors:

BROWN - MATURITY (represents Charlie, what Marco strives for) // warmth, comfort, security as well as loneliness and sadness (the sort of duality the feeling of alcohol gives Charlie when he drinks it in the film)

DARK BLUE / LIGHT BLUE - DEPENDABILITY (Relationship between the siblings) // CALMING (Relaxed tone of the film)

ORANGE/YELLOW COLOR - IMMATURITY, INNOCENCE (represents Marco)

TEAL - encourages a calm, reflective mood (Relaxed Tone of the Film) 

I am also obsessed with handwritten type fonts because I think it makes branding seem more down to earth, genuine, and human so I've been working on developing a font that I can write in.








♡ POSTCARD UPDATES ♡

For the postcard, I have decided to go with the illustrative style rather than photoshop! I attempted to create something like a photorealistic collage, but I did not enjoy how it was looking while I was making it, so I changed it last minute as I do with most things.

I had already decided to include some frames from the rotoscope animations in the front art because I felt that the animation aspect is something that makes this film unique and would encourage people to see the film; therefore a visual of that is essential to the postcard!

I was also inspired by this album cover I'm obsessed with, Revolver by the Beatles.



I love how there is a combination of drawings with different scales and perspectives to create such an intriguing design. It almost has a sort of horror vacui aspect to it.

And, as the postcard is a way to market the film, there has to be information on it that helps it do that. The visual draws them in, and the information on it seals the deal.




♥LIST OF INFORMATION TO INCLUDE♥

WEBSITE
(POSSIBLY THROUGH A QR CODE)

WHERE TO WATCH THE VIDEO

SOCIAL MEDIA HANDLES
(INSTAGRAM, FACEBOOK, AND TWITTER WOULD BE THE BEST FOR OUR TARGET AUDIENCE OF AGES AROUND 16-24)

FILM FESTIVAL SELECTION / AWARDS

I know I said in a blog post eons ago that I wanted to make it so that it could be interactive in a sense, but I no longer think that that idea works well with our current film, especially because we don't really have that dog plush aspect anymore.





And, in a way, I think that making an appealing front while also putting a lot of ways to market the film on the postcard is just as effective as the ideas we had before. The reason I wanted to make the postcard interactive was to give it more value, make this simple piece of paper less disposable and get people's attention with it so they may feel a desire to watch our film. What is more effective than creating a beautifully illustrated image to make someone wanna keep it with them?


♡ WEBSITE UPDATES ♡

I decided to go with just the film marketing website template from Wix (one of my options from a former blog post).

I will be illustrating most of the visual components of the website and creating lots of gifs for it to represent the animation/rotoscoping aspect of the film.



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Dawn of The Final Day

Majora's Mask': The Weight of a Game Over | Legend of zelda memes ...
A Legend of Zelda Majora's mask reference :-)


Today we filmed the last couple of shots for the film (the very beginning of the sequence and the end / both set in the present along with other misc shots). If I were to describe our entire day in detail it would actually be just me repeating the following events

1. GO TO FILM SPECIFIC SHOT
2. HAVE PHONE GLITCH AND DO SOMETHING ANNOYING

GO BACK TO STEP ONE AND REPEAT!

So, here are just the highlights of what happened late at night of the first filming day, and then what happened this morning.


⬨ TRYING TO GET A REFLECTION ⬨

In one of the shots for our film, I wanted to get a reflection of Charlie's face in the alcohol of the cup. 

Originally, no matter how much we tried to film his reflection in the cup, we couldn't get it! This had us thinking... how does the science of a reflection work?

With my very limited physics knowledge I have from getting an A in Physics Honors, I thought of using a flashlight of sorts to put directly on Joey's face so that the image will bounce off of the surface of the liquid in the cup.

Now, we did not have a flashlight with a concentrated light beam (just Joey's phone flashlight), so we had to project it through a paper towel roll to have more control of where the light would point.


Joey in the spotlight
So, we ended up with the following shot! Pretty happy with what we were able to do!




⬨ ILLUSIONS OF ALCOHOL ⬨

We had to show Charlie drinking the alcohol in the film (which we chose some kind of scotch whiskey we found in the house), but obviously, that would be super-duper illegal.

Therefore, Joey and I had to create a similar-looking liquid so that we could show Joey drinking it legally and still give the impression he is drinking the whiskey.


Using ice tea from Joey's fridge and some water, we were able to water down the ice tea enough to resemble the whiskey. We were quite proud of this idea until it came to the shot where Joey had to drink it. He told me it is quite gross; sorry Joey.



(A video I sent my mom updating her on the situation)


⬨ BREAKING GLASS ⬨

To create the illusion of the glass falling and breaking, I climbed on Joey's counter and prayed that Joey would be good at catching at the bottom (he is not good at catching but he did ok this time).



It had come to the time to break the cup. 

We did not want to throw it or do anything violent to break it because that is well... dangerous. So we had gone outside and Joey had put on my second pair of glasses to protect his eyes, and I watched as he hit it with a hammer.

We first tried to do it by hitting a nail into it with the hammer to have more control (sort of chisel it in a sense?), however, that seemed to be pretty unsuccessful. Smashing it seemed to be a more effective solution.

Then, we had to glue the mug back together.

On second thought we should have put on gloves or something but, we didn't get hurt so it's fine! If this instance ever comes up again, I will be sure to.





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Second Day + Sophie's Videos

We got all of Sophie's videos last night! Her little brother is adorable! I gave her some little feedback and requested some specific ones from her just in case but overall, of course, she did a phenomenal job!!! Sophie if you are reading this, I love and appreciate everything you did to help with our project!

What an ABSOLUTE cutie!!!

Sophie's brother plays Animal Crossing on the switch so I will be paying him a visit in the game with many gifts for him next time I get a chance.

Today is our second day of filming technically, as our first day was an absolute failure. But, everything went alright today for the most part!

 Here are some highlights:

 TECHNOLOGY HATES US!!!

 We did face a problem this morning after Joey received his wonderful, shiny, red iPhone 8!

We were set to film and went to set up the audio when we realized we completely disregarded the fact that the new iPhones do not have a HEADPHONE JACK!!!

I was so mad! I was ready to stuff the headphone jack into the charger hole in pure agony. Ah but alas Joey's friend had a neighbor who had one of those dongle things (I hate the word dongle so much). He was able to bike over and deliver it to us. Thank you Joey's friend for saving the day!

Besides that, the only issue that my phone had given me was how it always seemed to be out of storage no matter what I deleted! I had gotten rid of all of my apps except for Filmic Pro, deleted every image from my phone, but I still received the notification: Out of Storage.

I remember facing the exact issue last year with my AS level project too. Some things never change.

 DISAPPOINTINGLY UNTALENTED

 There's something Joey has always said about me that has always held true:

 I am good at doing very difficult things and bad at doing very simple things.

 One of these simple things is... blowing balloons. I had discovered how terrible I was at it today as we had to create them for the birthday scene.


BEING A COUPLE OF TRICKSTERS

 We had to create a couple of visual illusions in the film to make sure we can get certain shots that we wanted! I thought it would be cool to document them here to show you how we did certain shots.

 The first illusion we had to do was to show Marco (the younger sibling) holding the cup. Now we couldn't actually do this, because he was to be animated in and its a little difficult to animate a real cup with his character.

 So we made this little set up to trick the camera.

Using this, we were able to get this shot! His hands will be animated around what appears in this video as a floating cup and his lap will be drawn under it.

I then had to do a shot from under the table, holding the cup slightly above the frame. Joey's house has a lot of dog hair everywhere because 



A little shaky but, we have to what we have to do!

------------


We still have a little bit more to film; just took a small break to write this blogpost down! I will get back to bossing Joey around <3


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First Time is NEVER The Charm

Why should I have ever thought that a day one of filming for me would EVER GO WELL!!!

 I woke up this morning, scrambling to gather all my things and head to Joey's house to start filming. Joey was in costume (a single birthday hat) and I was just about to press record when...


Thankfully, Joey had lapel mics ready to go! But Joey's phone was dead. And I don't mean the battery kind of dead, I mean it was completely broken and ceased working. We needed my phone to record video and a separate one to record audio.
This was only our first discrepancy. 

We were going late into shooting because a lot of the scenes set in the past are set at night. We planned on shooting the present scenes the first thing in the morning, so I needed to bring the boxes for the mise-en-scene.

Well, guess who 


Me!!!! This big clown of a person!!!

The shooting stopped before it even began because of how I rushed out of the house ://

Anyways, it was our goal to at least finish until the end of this week so we can't be too hard on ourselves.

Second day should be better... I hope.



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Going a Different Direction and The Storyboard

I feel like I should address how Joey and I completely backtracked from the path we were going on towards an experimental film.

 The main reason is, that we were simply uninspired by anything person to create something that completely depended on our own personal vision. I would really love to make an experimental film, but after choosing a direction for our project that was still loosely based on our original story, it didn't make much sense to completely change our idea to accommodate an experimental film style. We definitely still learned a lot of techniques and were encouraged by our research of Maya Deren that we can still make films without much money or tools, and rather with creativity.

 We just didn't have the heart for it I guess. I'm sure we can make one in the future, just not for this project.









Goodbye to our experimental film passions! May we see you again for another project!





Anyways, the storyboard is DONE! I really enjoyed making it as it is my favorite part of any filmmaking process!

 Here are the boards! Some of them are just discreet images of what only I can recognize (my hand got lazier the more boards I drew).

The shots outlined in pink with the light pink colored person are the ones for Sophie to film parts for. The light pink person represents her brother in the film. 

I will send these off to Sophie to create and Joey and I will get started on the rest of the film!

Also, here are some questionably drawn boards that made Joey and I laugh:

spiderman

floating head

an even more abstract spiderman

CAW!!!!

Want a higher quality pdf of the boards? Click here!


And I updated the song of the week! This week it is Mr. Blue by Catherine Feeny.
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GROWING PAINS.

We have finished the script! And we came up with a title for the film:

The story surrounds Charlie, the older sibling, reflecting on growing up with their younger sibling, Marco. Marco always wanted to be just like Charlie and looked up to him (reflecting Joey's relationship with his own brother and my brother's relationship with me). Through an incident surrounding the Spiderman mug that Marco receives for his birthday, Marco learns about individuality and the value of innocence. 

 There is also a major age difference between Marco and Charlie, Like Joey and his siblings.

 We will be showing the transition between the times through mise-en-scene elements like changes in costume and subtle changes in the scenery. And, we will be doing these transitions mainly through graphic matches and/or sound bridges.

 The older voice of Marco will be done by my brother and the older sibling will never be fully shown in the film, and the younger voice will be done by Sophie's brother.

As Joey and I make the transition into adulthood (Joey turns 18 this Sunday ;-)), it was refreshing to be able to put our own fears about growing up but also our yearning for adulthood in this piece.

With the disappointing lack of progress we made this week, I'm glad we at least got to finish this so I could get to storyboarding the film and then filming and animating! The production process is going to be tight but I believe in us.

ALSO, I know I did not update the song last post, my bad. Anyways, for this week it is Ricky Baker's Birthday Song from Hunt for the Wilderpeople. I plan on making Joey his own version of the song since his name has the same amount of syllables as Ricky Baker. 
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Falling Behind

In short, Joey and I were basically brain dead all week trying to find out a cohesive story until now. We've been facetiming for a majority of the week trying to brainstorm together, but until about a couple hours ago, we had nothing.


So to generate ideas about the story we had to reflect on our own relationship with our siblings.

JOEY'S SIBLINGS


Joey is the youngest sibling in his family, and they have quite an age gap between each sibling (a whole 8 years, nearly a decade)! So when Joey was born, his oldest sister was already 16 and his older brother is 8. Because of this tremendous age gap between them, Joey never felt like he was very close to either of them. They also lead different lives, as Jaime grew up entirely with their father, Tyler experienced the divorce when he was a teenager, and Joey when he was a kid, living most of his life with his mom. He told me he found it difficult to relate to them because of the differences in all of their upbringings.

Joey mainly looked up to his older brother, Tyler, and told me he always wanted to be like him and do everything that he did.


ME AND MY SIBLING

Unlike Joey, I have quite a small age gap between me and my brother. I found that the most major difference in my relationship with my little brother and Joey's relationship with his older siblings is that Joey's relationship with his siblings grew better over time and I got more distant with my brother as he got older. I remember that my brother used to hang out with me when we were both younger, but not as much now. I don't even like going in his room now because he is going through puberty so it smells weird.

 I'm also the eldest sibling, so our experiences also differ in that sense. 
OTHER MISCELLANEOUS INSPIRATION: THE CUP

We also decided to have the story be surrounded by an interaction with an object/objects which I had mentioned before. We had decided on a mug, but what kind of mug? A Spiderman mug.

This would restrict most of the interactions between our characters to one setting of the kitchen so we wouldn't have to film in different locations.


Without further ado, here is the outline for our story.


OUTLINE:

Sibling starts packing 
You see college box somewhere in frame 
Pick up kids cracked mug 
Turn around to see scene 
Mug given as gift to kid for birthday (yay we get to use a lot of the props we bought :D)
Sibling drink liquor out of mug 
Kid finds them 
Sibling says like don’t tell mum or something like that
Late that night sibling hears banging downstairs
Siblings walks downstairs to see kid trying to get mug
Kid trying to get mug to also drink liquor 
sibling sees them 
They drop mug 
They glue mug together 
High angle of siblings putting mug in goodwill box 
Hear sibling as an adult saying the closing statement 

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Whats to Come: Progress, Hopefully

Joey and I need to get on this HUSTLE and start these rusted gears back up and running! To keep our progress on track, we created this schedule for the next week so we complete as much as we can!


Not sure what could possibly go wrong, but I'm sure something will. For when it does, I will let you know what happens! Either way, I'm excited :-)
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