Portfolio Project 20 Settling On Sets

 #20 Settling On Sets

    We had ONE day to film in my old house, uno, no mistakes, no reshoots, we just had to get it done. We drove to the house and immediately faced our first challenge, they changed the lock. Now we weren't breaking and entering here, I wouldn't admit to that on a blog like a FOOL, my dad had the locks switched early, and this gave us a major issue in our filming process, so we entered the house through the garage, and remember we had to film in the front door, a lot of shots would need us to keep the front door open and to go inside and out for production reasons. Filming the shot-reverse-shot was HELL especially when one of use had to walk inside. The camera woman, Nina, had to stand still and who ever wasn't in shot had to run around the house through the garage, hold the dog to make sure he doesn't run away and run around, ruining our timing, and unlock the door which would AUTO LOCK because it was electronic, then they had to keep relocking it and unlocking to refresh the auto lock's timer, it was a major pain but we got it done. The house also had no water so we went the entire shoot dying of thirst, that includes the poor dog who got a major break after shoot, plus we had to be careful with everything since if anything breaks I would be screwed. Here is a photo of the house from Zillow:

    Filming at my house was a bit easier, my dad was off in Miami and my dog slept outside so we didn't have a lot of problems. It sucked having to take down all of my posters off the wall but it's FINE they can come back. Not a lot of interesting stuff happened relating to the setting but at least we didn't face a lot of issues that couldn't be fixed from not being legally allowed to go into the house.

Portfolio Project 19 Consumer Goods

 #19 Consumer Goods

    We needed a lot of props for this and had like 3 before hand. These props included: A couple of mirrors, a radio, a clock, broken glass, a picture frame, fast food bags and cups, and a dog, of those we had a single mirror, a clock, and a dog. Alejandro picked us up and drove us over to the dollar store, they didn't really have a lot that we wanted, we got these two tiny circle mirrors and they work fine, there's a metal bit sticking out of them and we're probably gonna have to rip them off plus they are very small but with good stage directing that won't be a problem. Alejandro also had the GENIUS idea of using those hard plastic bowls for the broken glass, chiseling them to give them that sandy glass look. Overall we walked out of the dollar store with 2 mirrors, one plastic bowl, and two things of beef jerky because we were hungry, boy I wonder how we're gonna handle that issue!!!

    We were actually gonna just get a bunch of bags from Macdonalds but we realized we should get things like those burger wrappers and fries holders and such, plus we were hungry sooo.... I paid for everything. The bags didn't show up a lot in the video but im still glad we got it.

    Last we needed a radio/clock, we merged the two by buying an alarm clock radio. We went to Goodwill and found the perfect one immediately, it was greasy, very greasy, Alejandro had to wash his hands to get whatever was in it. We originally wanted to get a radio and analog clock but there weren't any good ones and we wanted to cut bluff for time and I'd say it worked out in the end.

Portfolio Project 18 Editing Start

#18 Editing Start 

    Last time,  during the music marketing project, I did most of the editing, my team mate Nina doing some changes and additions. This time the opposite will be true as she is going to be the main editor of the project with me and probably Alejandro doing secondary things. So far what she mostly has done is put the clips together in the timeline which is a lot when you actually sit down and do it. While filming we wound up reshooting everything near the start since we figured out a way to make the shots look better, and properly white balanced to get the pre-editing yellow look.

    

I don't mean to give us too much credit, but I kind of love this shot

Portfolio Project 17 Editing Plan

 #17 Editing Plan

    The most common thing I ever say while filming a project and my team mates don't think it's looking good is:" don't worry, it'll come together in editing". Storyboards, scripts, and shot plans are very very helpful but I am a very amateur film maker, and I over shoot how much I can actually do while filming all the time. Sometimes some shots just don't work out, my last blog was about working with my dog and I didn't mention how we had to scrap a wide shot of the dog barking at the door since we couldn't figure out a way to make him face it, wound up having to replace it. We faced a similar issue trying to get those low angels of the dog, however those will be salvaged in editing, we will use cut aways to the dog as if he were intruding Ollie's mind while he lays on his bed. An obvious example of this being in Empire season 1 episode 1, we just recently had to watch and excerpt for this in media studies and me an my team used this scene of the hospital as our example.

 

Portfolio Project 16 The Wrangler

 #16 The Wrangler

    There is a saying when it comes to the art of film making, never work with children or animals, by WC Fields. For a part of the opening we were going to need my dog Mani to be barking, and we had to film him from a low angle. Now my dog is easy to excite and get shouting, a big problem that me and my family have whenever we have to do a countdown from 3, my dog always starts barking at 1 (which is cool, I like knowing that my dog knows how to count) he barks whenever we grab his leash, whenever someone knocks obviously, and whenever someone uses a blowtorch or spray, not sure why. For the shooting we used all of these tactics, minus the blowtorch because I couldn't find it, and they all worked through some success. Getting my dog to bark wasn't the issue, it was finding a way to record below him while he barked, or at least at any level that made him look imposing that was hard, we knocked really loudly on the door to make him SCREAM but he kept running around the room. 

     Now at first I assigned myself as the animal wrangler, but eventually that title would go on to Nina, who wasn't using the camera as much and didn't have to appear on the film. Nina eventually came up with the idea of using my dog's leash to lead him after she saw him playing with it, a sign that he wanted to go on a walk. What she would do is hold the leash above the camera as I filmed on the floor, which would make Mani look up and give me opportunity to film him. We also used this leash technique later on to make the dog follow us, I'd have the leash in my pocket and he would just walk along side me. The only down side of this technique was that I had to take a 5 minute walk that would halt production with the dog to make sure he didn't go to the bathroom in a house that neither me, anyone in the production, and, at the time of filming, my own father owned. My dog was really tired by the end and he got a well deserved nap on the ride back home, after 11 years on this earth he finally had to work like we humans do.