CCR - production
How did your production skills develop throughout this project?
I have noticed improvements in many areas of my film making and organizational skills over the past few months while working on this project. I have had some previous experience planning projects, filming and editing. This passion of films and storytelling started very early, I have always wanted to be an actress and this grew over time into a love of films and later into the determination to make them. I have watched hundreds of movies, always with a critical mind, trying to find their faults and think of improvements. I also wrote stories, some inspired by films that fascinated me, and last year I decided to turn one of those stories into a script for a film. I began shooting some scenes from this film, called “Treacherous Thinking”, with some friends over the summer but we haven’t got around to finishing it yet, it is a huge project that requires a lot of time and attention. However, the work I did on that has introduced me to the practical aspects of what it takes to make a film, the planning, filming and editing.
Even so, I was only an amatoure when working on that film, the only significant improvement I noticed in all my skills, even if they were somewhat present before, was while working on “Demure”.
On a more practical and personal level, I learned how to plan all the steps and necessary materials I might need. So the very detailed lists and plans I posted on my blog made the actual filming a lot easier and more efficient. Writing the script made me clarify my ideas in a way that could be understood by everyone, making the storyboard helped our creative process, and creating a target audience questionnaire also brought some new ideas about what might be appealing and intriguing to audiences. By having all this plans before shooting, I had time to focus on working with my friends and colleagues so that we get along perfectly and we all understand our tasks. And this was highly important, we worked perfectly as a team, we all got along and I learned how to listen more carefully to other’s ideas. We even got to shoot a few extra angles and shots that weren’t planned, which we later realized were very useful. Doing more work and being free with your creativity always helps, especially when with the right group of smart, quick-thinking and creative people.
There are also many technical skills that I acquired and developed while editing. First I had to document myself on what are the best film editing programs, and which to pick. I look at online lists of different programs to see different opinions about which is the best, I had only worked in iMovie and CyberLink PowerDirector before. Then the actual work was time consuming but certainly worth it. More precisely, I learned how to work with color correction, which I had never used before, it took some practice and a few trials and errors but I managed to give “Demure” a cinematic look. I used an effect called “levels” in color correction, which used the three basic colors, red, green and blue. With this I could adjust the white, black and general intensity of each section. The music editing was also new to me, the first issue was syncing the actor’s voice with the image. Playing with different songs and finding segments that might fit what we needed wasn’t that difficult, mainly because we had some artist in mind that we thought would suit our vision. Then fitting the sound to the image was again more challenging, there were many nuances that I had to focus on and try to give as many details to the soundtrack to keep the audience engaged. Some examples could be the noises that mark the cuts or important moments in his actions. I had never done this before, my previous experience consisted of adding simple sound tracks of a song over the image, I had never done something as complex as choosing different songs and cutting segments from them to fit them to the images. Here I practiced being creative in my choices as well as focusing on details and fitting each sound accurately. Similarly, I had to sync the character’s voice to the way he moved his mouth in the beginning, recording his voice separately from the film was also something i had never done before.
To conclude, I would also like to mention the last very important lesson I learned from working on this project. Getting feedback from the right people can be the most important thing. I noticed a few benefits of showing a wide variety of people our work. Firstly, there are our peers, teenagers our age, whom can either understand and admire our work, or come up with relevant criticism, making us improve our film so that it is even more appealing. Also, praise from people we admire, such as teachers, parents and older students can be very important in motivating us, especially if we are at a low point.
