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

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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.

So, the expected has come to pass. The CCR is upon us and I am having issues

I have spent the past few days working on my CCR, initially forming a script, which I will post along with the Creative Critical Reflection, and then recording the audio I needed to send to the computer to download.

I recorded that audio I would input into my CCR on the iPhone app, Voice Memos. This was a convenient and effective method of recording audio as I was able to take it into my room or any other quiet space and record the necessary audio. The app also provides the possibility of recording over audio. This meant that if I was recording fairly long audio clips and I happened to mess up, I could simply stop the recording, scroll backwards in the audio and record over my mistake and continue the recording.

This revelation came a bit late, seeing as I had deleted around 90 audio clips where I had made a mistake before realizing that this was a possibility. Overall, I took 53 audio clips to put into my CCR.

Nonetheless, this was an easily overcome, although tedious, hurdle. But more problems awaited with the video editing software that I was relatively new to, AVS Video Editor. I had edited with this software previously for preceding projects, but the CCR is so far the longest video that I have edited.

It had an interface that was pretty simple to navigate. Everything was well laid out and easy to access, Problems only began to sprout when I started to input images and audio.

I quickly found that placing audio underneath video did not result in any issues, but if you placed video or images over audio, then the audio would be split apart. The same thing occurred whenever I shortened or lengthened a video or image over audio.

This became especially problematic in the middle of the CCR, when timing began to become important. I placed images to correspond with what I was saying in the audio and had to time them accordingly. Without being able to adjust the timing of the images with the audio under it, I would need to move the audio aside before adjusting the image and then put the audio back in place. This was much more time consuming of a method.

This required a lot more patience and time than if I was able to adjust the image over the audio.

Another problem that I encountered while working with the AVS Video Editor was the glitchy nature of the editor. There were multiple times when vital parts of the editor refused to work, like the all-important undo button. Another issue that would arise with the editor was that it would jump back to the beginning of the timeline whenever I would place a new image or video into the program. These frustrating occurrences would require me to close out the program and reopen it, taking up more time.

These setbacks made a lengthy project even lengthier.

Nonetheless, I’ve been able to get everything input, which has become easier overtime as I have become used to the process of moving the audio, adjusting the video and replacing the audio. I’ve got a bit to go, but EVERYTHING has almost come to an end.

Everything’s coming to a close!

The light at the end of the tunnel (you know, the metaphor that I’ve used a few too many times now) has finally come into arm’s reach. It wasn’t easy; it actually required a lot of work. But we’re almost done.

As previously stated, I sent all of the sound clips off to Ben, so all that he needs to do now is input them all into the opening. After that and any minor tweaks to the sound that may need to be made, we’ll have our final cut! Our group project will finally be complete!

But that’s not the “final stretch” I’m talking about. My final stretch towards completing the group part of the project was finishing the sound. As of now, I am officially done with our group video project

Now, I move onto the Creative Critical Reflection, better known as the CCR. This is the last part of our project, meant to help us “reflect upon [our] work, using digital formats such as director commentaries, slideshows with voiceover, podcasts, Prezis or screencasts” according to my teacher. This is the last big part of our project, holding nearly as much importance as our title sequence.

In this CCR, we need to answer 4 questions:

1. How do your products use or challenge conventions and how do they represent social groups or issues?
2. How do your products engage with the audience and how would they be distributed as real media products?
3. How did your production skills develop throughout this project?
4. How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware and online – in this project?

To answer these questions, I’m planning to do a sort of “director’s commentary” which will require me to mess with some video editing software that I have only scarcely dealt with previously. This will require a bit more research and a lot more ranting in my blog posts.

Anyway, this process will start shortly, so expect some troubles ahead.

Today’s experience with recording and editing sounds was less difficult than the previous time, fortunately for me. I’ve been getting the hang of recording the sounds and have been picking more accurate items to make the sounds I hope to record.

Bed Rustling

• When recording these sounds, I occasionally showed my dad the audio I had captured, just like with the water drip. When revealing the “bed rustling” sounds I had captured, he believed that these sounds sounded too harsh, like the first water drip I had recorded, and suggested I rerecord a softer sound. To do so, he grabbed a bed sheet from storage and we stood out in the living room, moving and shuffling the sheet to give the right sound. Using this method, I captured a much more desirable sound and recorded three different variations.

Air Conditioner

• This one was by far the easiest to capture. It only took one take to get right. I simply held the bottom end of my phone (the microphone end) upward towards the vent that my air conditioning was running through. With it, I recorded a 15-second-long clip of just the air conditioner running, which wasn’t difficult to record. It should also be long enough of a sound clip seeing as this background ambient sound probably won’t be loud enough to notice a loop in the sound.

Pickup and Set Down of Picture Frame

• Capturing this sound required a bit of ingenuity. Picking up and setting down an actual picture frame did not give the desired sound as I had hoped. The part of the picture frame on the back that keeps the picture frame stable did not give a strong sound. Besides, it was hard to set the picture frame down in time with the opening and have it make a strong sound. The sound of the picture frame below was not in time with the title sequence.

• I instead went ahead and used a portable speaker that we had lying around the house. This had a more sold base and allowed for a much better sound when it came to picking up and setting down the speaker.

Now, this seems like a lot less that I recorded, but in reality, these were the ones that I deemed necessary out of a large amount of rejects. There were a lot of takes that I simply deleted on the spot because they were out of time or didn’t sound right. And some sounds I even went as far as to edit, but then ended up scrapping. These will be detailed in a later post.

I also spent the majority of this time, approximately 4 hours, editing the sounds I took yesterday and the sounds I took today. Recording sounds only took up about 1/3 of the time spent on audio. Besides, editing took less time than yesterday thanks to the beautiful art of “getting the hang of it.” I better understood the software and could better edit the sounds.

So I’m finally done and will send the sounds off to our editor – Ben – soon, meaning that we are finally coming to the end of our project.

Sound is a pain. Especially when you don’t know how to work the software (AVS Audio Editor) to edit those sounds.

That’s what I’ve learned over these past 5 hours.

Add this together with having to accomplish this by yourself in as short a period of time as possible and we have:

Stress! And Exhaustion!

Well, that’s enough complaining, I guess. I just had to vent for a bit on the frustrating experience that is – recording and editing sounds in your house while also editing them on software you have scarcely used. My sound is far from silent and making it silent enough to record diegetic sounds was pretty difficult. But it had to be done and done it was.

I won’t relay the events of 5 HOURS of recording and editing chronologically as this would result in long, confusing post as my work flow is anything but linear. I jump from task to task in no given sequence and that would probably be very difficult to follow in text. Besides, structuring this like the “Re-shooting (Everything) – Day 1 and Day 2” posts will help with clarity and section the important details into separate posts that come later. So, I’ll be talking solely about how I recorded each sound for each day and discuss the struggle of editing in a later post.

Anyway, transitioning into talking about recording the sounds, I used the rough cut to time many of my sounds. To make sure that some sounds matched up with the timing of the actual clips, I would watch the blocking and then make the sounds according to the movements of Lionel.

Water “Bloop”

• This took a lot of recording to figure out. I had initially decided to let the water drip onto the bottom of the sink and capture that sound, since that’s what would “technically” be happening in the film.

• However, when I showed this to my dad, he found the sound to be too harsh. He advised me to make it sound more like the expected “water drip” – the deep “bloop” that occurs after the water droplet hits a body of water. To accomplish this, I had the droplet fall into a cup full of water. The sound I attained was much more desirable.

Footsteps

• This one baffled me. It was simple, but not simple at the same time. I quickly discovered that footsteps on carpet don’t make nearly enough sound to capture, so I moved to tile. However, bare feet coming directly off of tile does not sound appealing. In reality, it actually sounds pretty gross

• So, I made the decision to put socks on and walk on the tile. The sound became instantly better. Unsure of how the sounds would far when added to the opening’s soundtrack, I recorded three variations. Although the differences are minute, since we were not directly communicating on the audio, I felt that these would give the editor choice and allow him to see for himself which worked better.

Bed Rustling

• This one was probably the weirdest to record. This sound was supposed to be for when Lionel is moving in the bed and ultimately leaves the bed. Unsure of how to best capture this sound, especially without a second person, I resigned myself to – are you ready for it? – shifting and swiveling around on my own bed. It was actually pretty sad. I probably spent the most time recording this sound, as Lionel spends a decent amount of time shifting around on the be in the opening and it’s difficult to get the audio to sound right when recording it by yourself. Not to mention, my bed creaks a lot and I had to be careful not to get this in my recording.

• Nonetheless, I still sent myself four different variations of the bed rustling that I planned to edit.

Hands on Bed

• This one was taken along with the bed rustling sounds. This sound was meant for the part in the second half of the opening where Robert puts his hands on the bed to lean over and glance at the fluorescent light on the other side of the bed. This one was much simpler to capture. I felt that the creaking of the bed would work well for this one.

This doesn’t seem like much as it not only doesn’t include the time spent trying to edit these sounds but also the time spent deleting the sound clips that I messed up. I deleted at least 15 takes for each variation of diegetic sound I kept.

And the worst thing is, I’m not even done yet.

So, bad news.

It seems that we’re going to have to almost completely redo all of the sounds due to our ignorance of how to incorporate sounds into our film.

In the rough cut, our editor, Ben, went ahead and included the majority of the sounds into our opening by finding sounds from the Internet. He effectively placed these with the according sounds and added them as diegetic sounds – sounds that occur within the film.

Our group saw no problem with this initially, seeing it as one less task that we would have to accomplish by ourselves. Besides, there was no rule that we weren’t allowed to take such sounds for the Internet, right?

Apparently, there was, and we just didn’t know about it.

My group was showing our rough cut to our teacher, Mr. Engle, when he asked us about how we recorded our sounds for our film. After Ben responded, relaying that we took most of the sounds from the Internet, our teacher gave a disappointed look. He then revealed the Cambridge rule, that all diegetic sounds need to be recorded by the group themselves.

Needless to say, all of our hearts dropped immediately, letting his words sink in. The end of the project had just moved that much farther from our grasp.

The light at the end of the tunnel seemed that much more unreachable.

That’s a little dramatic, but you get my point. At this point in the project, I didn’t think that we would experience any large setbacks, seeing that we have everything filmed and in the editing software, but here’s another hurdle we must face. And by ‘we’ I mean ‘me,’ seeing as I volunteered to oversee the production of sound in the film. Ben just decided to do me a favor and input it while he was editing for our convenience.

Unfortunately, that means we’re almost back to square 1 with sound, and I’ll have to create all of our diegetic sounds from scratch and edit them all myself to send to Ben.

I have to record a new dripping sound, rustling sheets, footsteps, AC ambient sound, the sounds of the bed being pressed down and the sound of the picture frame being picked up and put down.

Oh, well.

At least there are a few semi-silver linings to this situation

1. Ben did record the sound of the clock ticking in the beginning of the opening and the curtains moving himself, so I don’t have to rerecord that. I guess that a plus.
2. The same group that I am currently working with previously did a project, a “music video,” together. Before the music started in the clip, my group included a part that did not have music and therefore had diegetic sounds that we recorded input. This experience has given me a bit of insight into how to go about recording these sounds.

Hopefully, this experience will make the process go a bit quicker and be a bit less complicated than expected. However, I have a feeling that there will still be struggles