AICE Media Studies

      Hello Cambridge! We will be showing someone our finished movie soon, and I am very nervous. Since the whole movie is not completed, I think they could be very confused by this snippet of the full movie. While I personally am not confused, I think this could be because I know the full story, and an outside observer might be disoriented. I think this is why it's good to get a peer review, so that someone who hasn't been working on your project can tell you what a general audience will think.     I also am concerned as to if we will have to make changes. We have struggled to be able to make a date and time to record normally, and a shorter notice will make this even worse. At least if we have to just edit, we won't have to dress Amelie up again in her crazy person clothes. But still, we would all need to be their to make decisions, so it is important that we don't have any scheduling conflicts. I am fine to do almost whenever, but Lilly and Amelie can't do S...

      Hello Cambridge! We have now finished editing our final task. We added some shots to the video of the bookshelves speeding by. We felt that this helps add to the eeriness of the video and to make the cuts less jarring for the viewer. It also makes it seem like something is potentially following her, or that she is being chased. This chaser may be her own psyche or her past actions that are haunting her and causing her to go crazy. This could be a very interesting thing to explore in the rest of the film if we were to continue past the opening sequence. The sudden motion also builds tension and interest for the viewer to hook them in and keep them watching. This is similar to the shaky cam in horror movies and actions scenes where the lack of orientation builds a sense of unease and fear.      We also put the titles animated onto the screen instead of having them just on paper. We weren't able to just have the names on paper, especially since it could...

      Hello Cambridge! We have been working on getting the music that we want for the film. We want to get Everything in its Right Place by Radiohead, specifically for the beginning noises that builds fear and unease. We messaged everyone we could find related to Radiohead. We emailed the account that their Twitter page linked to for copyright issues. We also directly messaged every member on Instagram and Twitter asking for help getting the rights to the song. We weren't really expecting to get a response, but surprisingly, Colin Greenwood messaged us saying that he would try his best to help us. We were very optimistic that we would be able to get the song that we wanted! However, Colin Greenwood started asking for more information about our project. We obliged, but one night we took a while to respond to his message, and he messaged us the next day saying "hello little baby!" This is obviously very concerning and made us think he was a pedophile. We stopped responding ...

    Hello Cambridge! Today we started our editing journey. First, we had to airdrop all of our files onto a computer. This took a very long time because the wi-fi was not working. I also had to send all of my videos to other people in the group, because my phone does not have the airdrop feature. Finally, the wi-fi turned back on and we were able to start the real editing process. Our first step was to put everything in order, unedited, into I-Movie. We had some debate over how to put things together to make them flow the best. One problem was that we needed a shot-reverse-shot, which we had technically recorded but we didn't particularly like it. We had videos of her looking down and then back up, but we weren't sure what to put in-between these shots. We finally decided to put one of the shots of paper there, which we felt flowed the best. This scene was made even better because the scene we decided to put next was of her ripping that paper off of the page, which helped...

      Hello Cambridge! Today we managed to finish the recording process, or at least until we rerecord. For today, we managed to get some of the shots that we were not entirely happy about from the previous days. The main one was the shot of Amelie walking across the floor of the bookstore shot from far away. We had wanted to get more takes but people had gotten in the way last time. I also wanted this to be a panning shot instead of just a wide shot because I felt that the still camera made it difficult to discern what the focus of the shot was. I recorded this shot to the best of my ability, and I think it turned out pretty good! I don't know for sure if it will be in the final take, though. Not everyone seemed entirely thrilled with the end result. Still, I am glad we at least have options for editing to make the process easier. I would prefer to shoot more than we end up using then to realize that we don't like something in editing.     We then rec...

      Hello Cambridge! Today, we went back to the bookstore to finish the recording process. To keep up consistency, Amelie was wearing the exact same things that she had sworn the other day when we had first recorded. The main things that we had to record were the titles and credits. We were planning on having them on pieces of paper as the "homework" that Amelie would be doing, and we would have the handwriting on them get worse and worse as the titles progressed. To make it easier to keep track of what we needed to record, I wrote down the order that the titles had to be in and checked them off as we went along. We quickly decided that just having all of the titles on paper would get old and boring quickly. We had a couple of other ideas on how to put the titles on screen, namely having one of the names on a pencil and another on a book. We decided to record those a different time to see if we were good enough at editing to figure it out. After a few relatively normal ...

    Hello Cambridge people! Today we started filming our movie introduction. We went to our local Barnes and Noble after school and set up in a small corner in the second floor. We had our star actor, Amelie, do her makeup while the rest of us wrote down the shots we would need for the film. First, we had Amelie walk slowly through the shelves. The first take was way too slow, and the camera was moving around too much. However, we discovered the wonders of cinematic mode on Samantha's camera, which allowed us to remove the motion on the camera and make the shot feel like it was on a dolly. The second take was much better, especially since Amelie was getting into character as a crazy person. The next shot was from across the floor of her once again walking which was shot by Samantha. We had a few takes, but quickly ran into the problem of other people in the shot, since we were not alone in the store. We were not entirely happy with the takes, but since the floor was starting ...

     Hello Cambridge! Today, we were going to start on filming our final project. The plan was to go to a Barnes and Noble, probably record there all day, and hope that we would be able to have the movie close to finished. However, there were a few problems that arose with this plan. The first was that I had been a bit behind on homework the night before and had to stay up late to get work done. This meant that I was very tired and I was not going to be very helpful during the filming process. This problem was amplified by the second, more pressing issue, which is that we hadn't done a storyboard and therefore did not have a clear picture of what we were going to do that day. This meant that our entire project would be improvised, and we felt that the quality of the project would suffer too much if we didn't know what we were doing. I was also nervous about being able to get to the Barnes and Nobles. I live far away from anyone else in the group, so we decided to record a...