"Goodbye everybody, I've got to go" -- Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen
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It's over. It's actually over, good lord, these blogs have taken me so, sooo long to do. I never expected this day to actually be here. I suppose I'll leave with a parting gift, paired with a final goodbye to Mrs. Ortiz, my classmates reading this, and to you, Cambridge. As much as I loved filming and I loved seeing how me and my friends grew together doing this project, I can't wait to close this chapter with a beautiful blue blow and call it a year. So much happened that I wish I could forget, but it was part of what highlighted this school year for me, so I don't think it'll leave me anytime soon. With this class, I learned so much I wish I hadn't, because I never believed her when she said this, but I find myself analyzing TikTok videos when I doomscroll. I know my project wasn't the best, but hey, I did my best. As our last goodbye, I guess I'll make it pretty.
Okay, this is one is harder to do in terms of what I'm going to do to get my creativity points. Hey... I said I made stories but I never said they were the best... But this one is easier to know what to write, this one is more research based. I'm thinking of just voicing over a compilation of clips because I don't want to show my face, even though it may already appear in either my or my friends' blogs, and I don't think there are much creative ideas that don't require my face.
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My Script.. For now(?):
This is my CCR for my Cambridge AS Level Media Studies project "The Survey." My name is Ailish Reynoso and I'll be dissecting my thriller. The goal of "The Survey" was to take a simple task like doing homework and getting the mail and transform it into a thriller.
In terms of genre conventions, The Survey is a thriller. We used the prescription bottle and the letter as enigma codes to signal to the audience that there is a mystery involving Brittney's health and an external threat, which would be the person putting the mail in the mailbox, but mainly just the letter asking Brittney what the worst way to die is. By keeping the threat as text, the thriller is both from the person stalking Brittney and psychological, which can be seen by the pills she drinks. We also changed Chloe into the toxic friend who doesn't care much for her friend's feelings, as shown by how she tells Brittney to "suck it up" when she mentions how much school work is affecting her. In the mailbox scenes when the mail is taken in and taken out, the same close up of the mailbox is used to emphasize these two scenes' correlation. The long shot in the living room was also to emphasize how Brittney can feel trapped, as is also by shown by said scene's closed framing. Brittney represents the "Struggling Student" social group by including how she talks about her issues with class and how much it's affecting her, accompanied by her mom yelling at her even though--regarding how close the mother sounds--she's relatively near Brittney. This addresses the real-world issue of the mental health crisises among teenagers. She also defies the damsel in distress archetype because she goes outside, at night, by herself, to get the mail right after stating she saw something odd outside.
I engaged this audience through relatability and suspense. The first hook is the relatable stress of a late-night study session, being on call with a friend and complaining about school, not wanting to do work, and having your parents ask you for favors--like getting the mail--while you're busy. The second hook is the survey itself. "What's the worst way to die?" is what the paper asks, it's a great hook for the film opening because it leaves the audience wondering what Brittney is going to answer. They'll ask: What did she answer? How long will it take for her to die? Will the letter affect others like Chloe? Realistically, The Survey would be distributed by a studio like Blumhouse Productions. Their business model relies on high-concept and low-budget movies. For marketing, I'd put make a trailer and post it on either TikTok or Instagram. Also, I'd make an edit of our movie and then post it, then, people would say "Wow this looks so cool, movie name?" And then people would want to watch the movie.
In conclusion, The Survey builds a tense atmosphere through contrasting the warm lighting inside and the dark lighting outside. By balancing the thriller elements--like the teasing of showing the letter in the mailbox scene and leaving a cliffhanger as soon as Brittney opens it for the camera to see--and real societal issues--like balancing teenage life with school work and mental issues as showcased by the pills--we made a thriller that was both personal and relatable with the audience and suspenseful.
This concludes my Creative Critical Reflection. Thank you.
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Was that tough? This took me a lot longer than I want to admit. I really don't know how I'm going to make this into a video, I'll read this out loud first and time myself to see how long it'd be. I'm thinking of playing this one game on Roblox called "The Kidnapper," since it sounds like it relates to our genre. That, or I'll play a mystery game or something thriller/horror based and then put the clip of me answering the questions over the video. That way whoever's watching my CCR doesn't get bored while watching.
However, games like these are long, and I seriously doubt it'll take less than five minutes. So as a backup, I’ll play a stalker mini-horror-game. I think I’ll do that one instead. Y’know what… yeah.
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Time-Skip: Same day by the way, I played this game, it was a lot better and it fit PERFECTLY with my audio recording. Editing was so easy, I just lined up the audio and the gameplay and added the questions to the top. It's interesting, you don't get bored watching me ramble.
I decided to do the third and fourth question because they're more opinion based questions, they were easier in my opinion. I decided to do a podcast, since unfortunately, I'm short on time. I did the background myself by gathering pictures from Pinterest, I wanted to make the background similar to my Blogger background. I was planning to do a high pitched voice to be the person recording me, but it sounded sooo bad.
I made the whole script by myself. I used a text to speech for the reporter's voice though, the SCRIPT WAS STILL MADE BY ME THOUGH!!!!! EVEN CHRISTINE'S LINES!!!!!!!!1
This is me making the video, which was originally like 18 minutes long, I had to speed it up by 8x though because no one wants to watch 18 minutes of some random girl making a background, I also had to take off its sound because I was working with music, and since the video is sped up 8x, it hurts to listen to. So I muted it for everyone's sake. I also want the little frutiger characters to bounce when each person talks, the teal one is going to be Christine and the blue one will be me. Get it? Christine Catherine's Reviews? Short for CCR...?
For editing the video, I didn't have to do much, just add the credits, and it wasn't much. First, when recording, I already knew the perfect place to put one of them: on the couch in the longshot.
I kept forgetting to record before starting the editing process so they didn't show the whole process; I'll try to cover what I did while recording that wasn't covered in the video. The process itself was incredibly lengthy since I went through various TikTok tutorials on how to make an object move in front of a text. I had to duplicate the same clip and put it as an overlay, then use the remove background to manually remove parts of the overlay so that in the overlay it would be only Leanette with a clear background. Since it was a duplicated overlay of the original clip, there was so way to tell that a background was removed, since it was the overlay I edited, not the original clip (The overlay is the clip on the bottom, the original is the one on the top). After that, I put text onto the original clip and used the layering tool to make the text under the overlay so that Leanette could walk in front of the words. The clip of me editing looks really bad because I put it through CapCut to speed it up, and CapCut diminishes the quality. In the video, I'm checking that the text doesn't like show through Leanette's legs because, for some reason beyond me, I guess the Leanette overlay was too thin so I marked over it again to make it thicker and you wouldn't be able to see the text through her legs.
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For the cast, I just put the text I needed onto where I wanted them to be and for each duration of each piece of text I added a keyframe to the beginning and the end; the beginning keyframe of each frame would position the text where they appeared on the screen and the last keyframe would position them up and out of the frame so that they're not visible anymore. I did this for each piece of text, I just made them appear and leave one after the other. It wasn't that hard. For the movement, they just move themselves once you add the keyframes; however, between the keyframes, I added a graph to make them slide out of the frame smoother. The "Cast" has that paper-ish look--that I finished out of the recording because I had to pay for that specific font since it was CapCut Pro--because that's what I see in most teenage movies from the 2000s, so I didn't want the thriller part to appear just yet. I also noticed that I got Leanette's mom's name wrong, so I fixed that outside of the screen recording.
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For the mailbox scene, this was really awkward. The clip made the video 1 second over the limit. Are you serious? So I had to make it like 2.1x speed but you can notice it's sped up so it looks funky. As for the credits themselves, I had to do the same thing I did for the couch editing scene: I duplicated the clip and made it an overlay, used the removal background so that I could put text on the original text and put that under the overlay. As for how the text moves out, I did what I did in the Cast creditsL I added two keyframes, the first was in the mailbox and the second keyframe was outside the mailbox. The rest of the "Produced by" credits came after. I just put them in the bottom right of the screen and made them appear after the other, but not like the "Cast" credits.
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Finally, the title. This was arguably the most easy part of the whole video, since there were multiple tutorials on how to make text inverted. This is just me putting the title into the video and checking that the inverted text and the original video are lined up correctly and going back and forth because I thought they weren't lined up, What I did was get the clip I was going to put the title over and put it into a whole separate project, then I went to Ibis Paint X and colored the canvas green, then I put "The Survey" onto the middle and chose a font I liked. I downloaded that picture and put it over the whole clip, covering it all. I then downloaded that and put it into yet another different project. What I did was get the clip I was going to put the title over and I made that whole clip inverted in color, I then used the green screen text I made and put it as overlay, again, covering the whole video. I did Remove BG --> Chroma Key and selected the white text, NOT the neon green background. That way the inverted scene could show through the green and replace the letters. I downloaded that and THEN put it into the actual film. I put that as an overlay for the clip I was going to put it over, used the chroma key to select the green base to remove it, and then made sure the inverted scene lined up with the original scene.
This whole process was very, very long. I had fun learning, though.
