Abdullah's Film Blog

This is my Creative Critical Reflection (Length 11:44): NOTE: THERE IS AN ERROR AT 2:03 - I say "DIEGETIC SOUND" when I mean to say "NON-DIEGETIC SOUND". Summary: Overall, it was a great experience working on this project. The film overall is a horror / adventure film about someone who "loses" some of his friends while driving without any explanation or reason. This causes him to have a mental breakdown, serving as the intro to our movie "Search", which will presumably be about the driver searching for his friends. Analyzation: 1st scene: Color is utilized to symbolize future and foreshadowing; Non-diegetic Sound is not used to keep tone neutral 2nd scene: Could potentially be improved; we did not give anyone dialogue to use Transition from 2nd to 3rd scene: Could potentially be improved; There is a problem in that some viewers may think a significant amount of time is passing between the two scenes. 3rd scene: Moment of shock for driver; area in...

     Now that the project is pretty much done, there's a lot I can say about how it's gone. It really was a great experience, even though it had its ups and downs, it's amazing to see how far we've come. At the beginning of the year when I first heard about the end-of-year project for this class, I was a little worried and had no idea how I'd go about with the project, considering it nearly impossible. However, as the days have passed, it has turned out to be far easier than I ever could've imagined.     There's no doubt this has all been far more enjoyable with the help of  Alejandro and Arturo, two people who while I didn't know at the beginning of the year, now consider good friends. They made the project far easier than it ever would've been alone and working with them gave me the motivation to do my best on the film.     I also gotta say that's true about this class in general, although difficult at times, has turned out to be far more inter...

    We wrapped up our editing and exported our film today, and as our project is coming to a close, I'll look over some of the last few changes and improvements our video oversaw before we finished the job. You can see the back driver-side window blurred out in the top-right, while the layout of the video editor shows the true intricacy of this part of the intro     First of all building straight off the last editing post, I did find a good solution to the abrupt blur issue we had. I made the effect fade in and out, and it worked wonders, now it looks much more smooth, and even less noticeable than it had been prior to this. However, I had to use some creativity for this. The way I did it was I removed the effect from being directly on top of the third scene's video segment and added another exact frame of the same exact video on top of it that I conducted the effect on and faded in and out. This process was repeated many times for different windows, but with this, I...

-PICTURE OF US THREE-     The way a group functions is very salient in how a project will go. Luckily our group had no issues really, in fact, it was a great experience working with Alejandro and Arturo. We evenly divided the work from the beginning, with all of us having a say while we were in coming up with the actual idea for our project, and all of us had ideas to add into the mix.      After this, we continued to work together but narrowed our focuses a little bit. Arturo specialized in the technical details, costuming, dialogue, and props, Alejandro did some great camerawork and videography, while I focused on the editing. We all helped each other and oversaw each other's parts, as I know firsthand. All the while as I edited Arturo and Alejandro both were incredibly important with their help, and they always had something useful to say about any of the changes I made to the video     I have nothing but good things to say about our team and the wa...

     A few weeks back, I made a post  regarding our original storyboard, which was the first time when we had laid out our plan for our final project. Now that we actually have the final product in front of us, what would a revised storyboard based on the real thing look like, and how does it compare with what we had a few months ago?     There were many things that did not go fully to plan in our film, either due to logistical issues or because we changed our mind. Some of these turned out to be negative and a few others turned out to be positive. It all depends on perspective as to how well you think certain aspects of the intro are.     This is what our initial storyboard looked like, for reference:     This is what the revised storyboard (when taking into account what actually happened) looks like: -TBD-     Here are some of the more notable differences, in short form: The addition of a fifth scene just before the fina...

    Representation, no matter what form, is often a facet that is taken into account by film creators. On an individual level pertaining to the actors, we did not follow this, and it was a very minor thought while filming. We just got whatever actors were available and happy to help out, and things worked great. We'd rather our viewers focus on the content of our film rather than individual representation, as horror, fear, and isolation are universal themes anyone can understand.     On the other hand, as for genre representation, our horror trope I don't feel is very cliché and it is a unique idea. Even though jump-scares are usually utilized in most horror flicks, we made use of the opposite effect. Getting scared by the absence of something (the passengers). I think this somewhat breaks the mold of your average horror film. Overall, we don't think this intro to a film is very stereotypical.