Editing During a Pandemic

A new disease has taken over the world as well as the media. This disease is known as Covid-19 or more popularly Coronavirus. This disease is very infectious as well as deadly. Due to this, all schools closed for around a month. They did this as a preventative action to make sure it does not spread even more. The US is even thinking about a full-on quarantine. While this is somewhat helpful giving kids a break, unfortunately, it also hurts us. I say this because this is going to put us behind in many of our classes including our AICE classes. AICE testing is not being moved at the moment so it is going to be hard to catch up on all the missed days. Right now people are very unsure of what is going to happen making it quite stressful for not only the students but the teachers as well. With the fact that we are not at school, editing has halted. We edited using school computers with the school's editing software. This means the only way we can access our edits is if we are at school. Our editing process has not been going smoothly even before the pandemic. This has put us further back in our editing process than we already were. My group and I talked through with each other to try and find the best solution. None of us have a mac or an apple computer so we could edit with our computers using Imovie. We tried it out using our phones but it was very choppy and did not work well. We finally decided to all chip in a little to buy Pinnacle Studios for ourselves because our teachers were not giving us any other options. We chose to do this because we will probably have school off longer than expected so we will need to own the editing software ourselves if we want to get anything done. I hope that this pandemic will be over soon and things will return to normal. 

Editing Our Footage

Last Friday we continued to edit our film. Unfortunately, we ran into more problems again. Just our luck huh! If you have seen my past blogs, you would understand that we have been having problems for a while now. Although, this time was different from the last. For some reason, the laptop we usually use was missing. We looked in the laptop cart as well as went around the class asking if someone has it. After looking throughout the whole class we could not find it. We need to use the same laptop throughout the whole editing process because that is how the program works. My reasoning behind this is that the editing that is done is saved to the laptop and not the account. This means that you have to make sure you use the same laptop. It was a huge disadvantage that we did not find our laptop. I say this because we are already behind on editing and this just set us further back. After all of this, we had to come up with some sort of solution. To avoid any other hiccups we decided to get 3 more laptops just in case pinnacle studios doesn't work on one or two of them. My computer booted up first and opened pinnacle studios so we decided to use mine. Pinnacle studios took a long time to start up as usual. Fortunately, we already had the music and font size decided before the fact so it went pretty smoothly after. After pinnacle studios finally loaded we had to import all the footage onto this computer as well because it was a new computer. We did not get much done because most of the class we were sorting out the problems. We put the laptops away and hoped that next time our computer will be available. All in all, it was not very successful and I do not know how we are going to get the rest of the editing done.

Re-Shooting

On Tuesday we completed re-shooting for our film. Once again we ran into a few problems. I forgot the tripod at my house. I did this because I was rushing to leave because I did not want to be late for filming. Thankfully I do not live far from Kathy so I called my mom and she brought it. This was only a small hiccup and took up maybe 20 minutes at most. After this, it went pretty smoothly nobody else forgot any equipment at their house. The camera was fully charged so there was no need for an extension cord. We started right up after we got all the equipment. Firstly we set up the tripod by pulling out the legs and placing it in the desired position. Then, we unplugged the camera from the wall and put the SD card in it. At this point, we were ready to start filming so we got started immediately. We re-shot 6 different scenes because they were either too blurry or choppy. Firstly, we filmed the ankle scene where Amy takes the restraints off of her ankles. Then, we filmed the gag scene were Amy spits out her gag so she could speak. Then the window scene where the knocks on the window and screams for help. Afterward, we filmed the door scene in this one Amy tries to open the doors around her to escape but they are locked. After that, we filmed the hallway scene where Amy is walking down a mysterious hallway trying to find her way out. Lastly, we filmed the kitchen scene were Amy turns on the light in the kitchen to see her surroundings. All in all, it was a productive day of filming and I'm glad we got it all done.

Finally Done Filming

Hooray, we finally finished filming. We have fully completed filming all the scenes shown in the storyboard. But this does not mean we are finished. I say this because we have to complete re-shoots as well. For the first time so far in this project, we ran into zero complications. Katherine made sure the camera was charged by charging it overnight. The parts for the tripod were all there and none of them were broken. Also, everybody remembered to bring their items such as a camera, tripod, and SD card. With everything working out so smoothly yesterday, we got a lot done. Once we got to Amy's house we unpacked all the equipment from the bags. We set up the tripod and put the SD card in the camera. Finally, we started to film the last few scenes needed. We started by filming the flashback scenes that our main character gets. These scenes are flashbacks that explain how she got set up to be kidnapped. Her friend makes her go on a walk and hires someone to kidnap her. In the scene that her friend forces her to go on a walk, we had an action match with a closing drawer. This adds a better transition between the story and the flashback. We then filmed the scenes with the phone call between the friend and kidnapper. We did it in a dark room to create an ominous tone that embellishes the fact that the conversation is with a criminal. We finished up the last few scenes and packed up the equipment and we were done filming. It was very productive and I can't wait to see it finished.

Peer Editing

This past Monday we peer-reviewed another group's movie. We do this so that we give other groups and ourselves ways to improve. After reviewing we go back to re-shoot and re-edit to fix the faults in the movie. The group that we peer-reviewed was a group of 1 person. The movie was about two twin assassins who get sent to kill each other. However, from the film, I did not get that they were twins and needer further explanation to find this out. Other than that the film was very well made. The quality of production was amazing with clear graphics. We learned from this because it shows how an iPhone camera's quality is better than the camera the school provides us with. The sound was also very good because we could hear what the actors say without any background noise. This is important because if u have something like wind, you wouldn't be able to hear anything. Another thing that was done well was the editing. They had difficult editing styles such as split-screen. I would know that this is hard to edit because I had one for my group's music video. Now that I have gone over the good things lets talk about the bad things. The main problem is that the storyline shown does not match up with the actual storyline. What I mean by this is that it shows in no way that the two main characters are siblings. They need to include something like a baby photo of the two of them to make it more obvious that they are related. The last thing that needs to be done is to add titles, so far there are no titles in the movie. Other than those two things the movie was quite enjoyable. All in all, it was a successful and productive day.

Editing Gone Wrong

Last Friday we begun editing our footage. We did not get very far because of technical difficulties with the editing software. However, on Tuesday we attempted to edit our footage again. For some unknown reason our editing software, pinnacle studios, would not open. We tried it on multiple computers and multiple accounts but had no luck. We went through that class waiting for it to startup but it never did. This led to us being very unproductive throughout the class period. Also, today we went into class to edit our footage and the same problem arose. None of the computers we tried would startup. After being in the class for an hour and trying almost everything the problem solved itself. The computer finally loaded up pinnacle studios. Unfortunately, it took so long for it to load we only had about 1/3 of the class left to edit. We started off right away in an attempt to get the most work done possible. To start off the editing process I opened up pinnacle studios. I then preceded to put the SD card reader into the computer. I did this so that the footage we filmed can get dumped onto the computer. I read all the usual popups and dismissed the ones necessary. After Amy completed her part of the editing process I got back to mine. The class was about to end so all that I did was delete all the unnecessary footage such as failed takes. Unfortunately, all of our days of editing were extremely unproductive and we are going to need to put in a lot of extra time to make up for this.

Filming Again

Today we started our second day of filming. We ran into a few problems filming again. Firstly, we were supposed to film over the weekend but one of our groupmates forgot the tripod on her bus. We were going to film anyways without the tripod but decided against it because we didn't want our shots to be shaky. We chose to wait until we had the tripod because we want the movie to be a good quality. The second problem we ran into was that the camera was not charged again because my other groupmate forgot to charge it. We used the same solution as last which was getting an extension cord. This has happened the past three times we have filmed. To stop this from happening, from now on I will look after the filming equipment to make sure that everything is working correctly. The third and last problem was that the screw that holds in the tripod handle was missing. To fix this we manually moved the camera on the tripod. Once we finally started filming it went relatively smoothly. I believe that today we were more focused and efficient. We knew exactly what scenes to do as well as how to do them. All of this helped us complete today's filming process quicker. We completed a number of scenes in today's filming. Firstly, we finished the scenes where Amy wakes up in a mysterious room. Then, we filmed the scenes where she is walking around the house and discovering her surroundings. Lastly, we filmed the flashback scenes where I am kidnapping Amy. These scenes were filmed outside and the extension cord did not reach. Due to this, we were on a bit of a time constraint because the camera only had 20 minutes of battery at this point. We swiftly filmed these last few scenes and finally completed our set of scenes needed for today. All in all, it was extremely successful and I cannot wait for our next day of filming.