Month: April 2019

Alternative Viewing Location:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1H1FVundqSRNHM-TZb-N88bMj1UKOlHU_

Alternative Viewing Location:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=19ntfNNz9VfqGavgOWzMCGLCt2n5XFW8A

The journey is finally coming to an end. The light at the end of the tunnel is here.

The CCR I struggled with for multiple days has finally been rendered properly and will be uploaded later.

Now that everything is finally coming to an end, I’d like to briefly look back on the experiences I’ve gained and the people that have helped it come to pass.

I’d initially like to thank my group, for their persistence and dedication to this project, through the lows of the first rough cut and the highs that came with the second one.

I’d like to thank Bianca, our production designer. She has a great personality that kept the group positive and a great eye for design. We worked together to get the design of the opening just right. She spent a lot of time picking out the perfect costuming and props to go with our first and second plots and worked overtime to get these props and items for our filming dates. She spent a lot of time and money getting exactly what we needed for out title sequence. Bianca is a hard-working group member that brought a lot to the group and helped us to make the opening that much better.

I’d like to thank Katelyn, our cinematographer. Her vibrant spirit and energy always uplifted the group, which was a large contribution to the group in itself. But in addition to this, we worked perfectly together to bring the shots to life. Katelyn worked hard crafting the storyboard of our opening, even pulling an all-nighter to do so. She has an amazing drive and was willing to help any way she could, even agreeing to act in the film when we decided to do so on such short notice. Katelyn was a stellar group member that no doubt increased the quality of our opening.

Last, but not least, I’d like to thank Ben, our editor. His work ethic was evident in his dedication to the editing of the opening. He quickly pieced together our rough cut in one night when we filmed in the motel. He worked constantly on our second rough cut over Spring Break with little consultation and even took it upon himself to add musical stings that we had yet to discuss, going above and beyond. We worked together perfectly, adding both of our ideas into the post production and communicating fluidly. Ben’s phenomenal editing skills, work ethic and drive were just what we needed to top off our group.

There are also a few other people who were great aids in helping the title sequence become what it was.

I’d like to thank Robert, our actor. My brother, who did not have to help us on our project and did so expecting nothing in return. He drove me and Katelyn to our first rough cut and remained the entire time, even driving the whole group back to their subsequent homes after we were done. Robert spent as much time as necessary at our second shoot as possible, coming to both days we chose to film. I’d like to thank him for putting up with all the direction and nitpicking I put him through when having him act through the opening. He gave a great performance that helped out title sequence become what it was.

I’d like to thank Mr. Engle, our AICE Media Studies teacher. He gave great feedback for our title sequence that has helped us to change and later it for the better. Not to mention, he called the school land gained permission for us to film in the Health and Science room on the campus. He additionally stayed long hours with us after school to chaperone our after-school filming, a task that he didn’t have to take on. Without him, we might not have been able to even film our opening in that setting at all.

And last, but definitely not least, I’d like to thank my parents. If it weren’t for my dad, we wouldn’t have been able to book the motel in the first place. He’s the one who allowed me to use his credit card and initially payed for the motel in the beginning. Not to mention, my parents were the ones who allowed me to go to the motel in the first place, which was far away in Tampa that we were away at for hours. Their trust in me was vital in this. My dad was also a great aid to my work throughout the project as well, giving great tips in areas such as production, sound design, props and much more. He also supplied many items to use such as the broken and functional computer that played a large part in our opening. Without them, the opening wouldn’t have turned out as it did.

These people were instrumental in making the project what it was. It wouldn’t have come together had they not done what they did. I’m very grateful to their hard work and aid in our project.

This is the end of the road. The final “diary” post. It’s a very bittersweet moment, honestly. I’m greatly relieved and it feels that a great burden has been taken off my shoulders. Nonetheless, this has been a great experience and I have learned a lot from this and have grown as a director and, more importantly, as a person in this process. I’ve grown closer to my group members and have learned a lot of things, media and non-media related, during this process. I’m happy and sad to be finally done.

The next posts will be my CCR and final cut.

It’s been a great ride!

This can be marked as the beginning of the end. The end of the “Trials and Tribulations” series that I created on a whim and had a lot more installments than I had previously expected.

It makes me realize how many challenges I faced on the way here and kind of grateful that the challenges are almost over.

So, I thought: why not end my Trials and Tribulations with perhaps the largest challenge I faced during this process; why not discuss the technology that I’ve had to struggle with my entire project? My blog, WordPress!     

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This blog has been anything but simple to get the hang of, even after a few months of using it.

I remember when I first began to use the WordPress platform, I immediately wished I had chosen a Blogger account. The interface and navigation through the administration of the blog could be described as anything but user friendly. It took almost 2 days to simply learn how to properly customize my blog and change the style.

After getting into typing the blogs, however, I began to appreciate the platform more. The process of writing a new post was much easier to understand than the overall layout.

After a little experimentation, the addition of new paragraphs, images and many more became simple tasks. They even had specific block formats for embedding Gifs and YouTube videos. This certainly made my life a lot easier.

I began to appreciate the platform much more. At least until I delved further into its functions. That was when the frustrating began to set in again.

After accustomed to the simple and fascinating features of the blocks within the blog posts, I found that there was the ability to upload video. I knew that this would be beneficial to my project and looked forward to when I could upload videos to give examples of what we had done on our filming days. But what did it say when I tried to upload a video file?

“[T]his file type is not permitted for security reasons”

I was utterly confused at what this meant, trying to fathom what “security reasons” could be preventing me from uploading a video. Wouldn’t an image I downloaded from the Internet have a higher possibility of holding a virus or something to compromise WordPress’s security than a video I’m personally uploading? Maybe, maybe not. I didn’t know for sure so, although frustrated, I went along with this. It would mean that I’d have to find another method to upload videos, however.

I decided to use my old friend, YouTube, as a shortcut. There were blocks that accepted YouTube videos, so I had to upload any video clip that I wanted to place in a blog post to my YouTube channel. I kept them unlisted – meaning that they can’t be accessed without a link – so my page would not be inundated with 8 second clips, though.

This worked well. Although requiring an extra step and being much less easy to work with when formatting blocks, I made do.

This was the way I uploaded videos to my blog.

The next big hurdle came when I attempted to upload audio. I knew that videos weren’t able to be posted directly onto the blog, but I thought that audio would a different story, right? WRONG!

I wasn’t able to directly upload audio, either and believe me, I tried. Thinking that it might have been thanks to the m4a audio type, I tried converting it to many different files: m4a, mp3, wav, even flac, ogg and mp2 (which I didn’t even know existed). Nothing worked.

I then took to Google for an answer as to what “security reasons” were preventing my audio upload and if there was any way to bypass it.

Google turned out to be no help at all, providing both outdated and useless information. I either received articles made back in 2014 with WordPress’s old interface or articles simply telling me to “drag an audio file” or “select one from the media library” – or more simply, things I already knew.

But I decided to visit the WordPress media library to see if I could solve my problem by directly uploading audio to this library and then placing it in my blog posts. What I found was disheartening.

“To upload audio files on your site, upgrade your plan.” Below this message sat a link to upgrade my blog to a Premium Plan.

The same message was present for the ‘videos’ tab, only switching the words “audio” for “video.”

From this, I began to suspect that the reason I couldn’t upload audio or videos was less “for security reasons” and more “because I didn’t give them money.” I would have to find a loophole.

What I decided upon was a pretty lengthy process. It was obvious that I would need to rely on the YouTube videos yet again, but the videos could not be made solely with audio. It needed a video of some sort.

This meant that I had to place the audio in my video editor, place a black image over it, produce the brief clip and upload it to YouTube. This process was a very roundabout way to upload audio, but it worked and my posts about my experience with sound now have examples.

These roundabout methods added extra hours to working with this blog that required a lot more time and patience.

Nonetheless, I still prefer this platform, especially for a free account. After I got the hang of it, it allowed me to make a quality product that I can be proud of.

Thanks WordPress, for the good and the bad things that came with you, which helped me to learn, overcome and experience new things. It’s been a ride.

I didn’t think I’d run into even more problems with the CCR at this point. I was nearly done with it by the last post and I thought my troubles were nearly finished, but no. There’s more.

Exporting the entire Creative Critical Reflection proved to present multiples issues as well.

The initial production of the CCR is still a mystery. I don’t know what happened other than it rendered astonishingly quickly – around 5 minutes time. I was initially surprised by this but thought that I had just had a large stroke of luck and could upload the video even quicker than expected. But my suspicions were correct when I opened the file only to find a 1-minute video inside.

I was disappointed, but not surprised.

I decided to do a bit of clean up before trying to render the 18-minute video again. The process slowed my entire computer down considerably.

I had placed all of the images that I had downloaded and used in my Creative Critical Reflection on my desktop. The number of images I used neared 40 and they took up about half of the space on my screen. I felt that now was as good a time as any to get rid of them all. That was a mistake.

When going to produce the video into a file again, errors popped up, revealing that the program “can’t find file…” before listing the file that could not be found. I began to ignore these one by one, before noticing that the number of files that could not be found were staggering. Having become accustomed to the glitchy nature of the editor, I believed that this was just another instance of this. I just decided to ignore all of these errors.

I rendered the file and waited. All one and half hours.

When I finally opened the file to see if the file had rendered completely, I was appalled to discover that the warnings weren’t just glitches. Pieces of the CCR, where images should have shown, were completely blank.

You can see this CCR here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1xGaNx9wxB5cjpZFhY_3UssatPrkiHsgc

Of course, you don’t have to watch the whole thing. The extended instances of black screens can be seen around the 1-minute mark.

Although my soul was crushed, and I took a 30-minute break as not to cry, I pushed onward, trying to discover how to resolve this.

After opening the AVS Video Editor once again, I noticed for the first time that some media in the media library had the test “FILE NOT FOUND” over it. I realized immediately that this was because of the deletion of all of my images. I also found out that these could not be automatically restored by redownloading them. This meant that I would have to reinput all of them into my editor, one-by-one.

Another painstakingly slow process begun, where I had to download all of the images again, put them into my media library, move the audio beneath the corresponding mage, place the image into the editor timeline, time the image as it was previously, and replace the audio. This was the process for every. Single. Clip. It took around two and a half hours.

It’ll take another one and half hours of rendering to get the CCR into a file and perhaps another couple of hours to get the video uploaded into YouTube. WordPress doesn’t support any files uploaded directly from the computer.

I’ll be talking about this struggle in a separate post. For now, I need to let this video render and to sleep. It’s been a long day.