#6 30-40 Second Soundscape — Preliminary

 

    In our stound story, the typing is to be a guy trying to hack government files, he's got a radio to spy and tune in to what the people who are looking for him. The person trying to hack stops to turn the radio up when he hears them talking about him and starts typing faster. I suppose he makes a mistake and his access to the government files is denied, causing an alarm to go off and start a tracker in his laptop. He doesn't know there is a tracker in his laptop and quickly puts it away and runs. As he runs, footsteps chase him. The story ends there. We made the sound effects in school in the stairwell, but some were too low and so I replaced them with downloaded sounds from SoundCloud and YouTube: the typing, radio, error buzzer, and alarm. I also used CapCut to put all the sounds together and formulate the soundscape. The most challenging was filming the running, we ran up and down the stairs & down the halls, I was very tired after finishing. I also felt like finding all thos replacement audios was very time consuming. Making a story with just sound and no dialogue is very difficult and I would definitely not do it again if I had the choice.

#5 Promoting My 30-Second Story — Preliminary

 

    I made my poster so that it fades black at the top and bottom, giving it that horrific, scary, dark feeling. Those dots on the side, I really only added them so that it would look nice, but it also represents a sort of glitch-- as in when the call sounds grainy and barely understandable. If you'd look closely, there are eyes all over the poster, representing the stalking part of my 30-second video. Me and my teammates used this specific screenshot in the video since it was the best one to accurately represent the story's plotline

    I used this specific font because--I'm not going to lie--I searched up "horror fonts on Canva" and this one was the best one in my opinion; Victoria is the one who came up with the title "Marked Absent". The tagline says "only you and you alone" because this is one of the lyrics in the song that plays throughout the video. It also makes perfect sense; a stalker would 100% say something like that to the person they're obsessing over. The cursive also, in my opinion, really contrasts the blocky text on the top.

    The mise-en-scène in my video is echoed in the poster through the dark fading at the top and bottom, giving a horrific touch. The video is also echoed in my poster because the picture in it is quite literally a screenshot of my video. This practice will help with my Cambridge project because it will act as more practice with things like tracking shots and recording parts that you cannot get in a still picture but can in a moving one.

#4 30 Second Video Reflection — Preliminary

    Basically, in this video, Leanette–the girl in the purple shirt–is walking around school and she gets a call from some random person. She doesn’t know she’s being stalked until the stalker–Victoria–runs up behind her, attacks her, and kills her. 

    The quality was amazing… before I uploaded it on Google Classroom to my teacher! I have zero clue why it did that. The song we chose was Only You (And You Alone) by The Platters, since the mood of the song is supposed to be romantic, but the lyrics without context sound kind of obsessive–like a stalker. The music is loud up until it cuts to where it shows the stalker towards the left side of the shot, from there, the music gets quieter because the music is supposed to be what Leanette is hearing. The second shot where it shows Leanette answering a call from an unknown caller is supposed to be an over-the-shoulder shot, one of the easiest ones to execute, in my opinion. The third clip could also be an over-the-shoulder shot, since you see part of Victoria’s–or in other words, the stalker’s–back. The fourth clip is a point-of-view shot, as you can tell by how the camera gets closer to Leanette looking around and because the stalker is no longer in the shot. The fifth shot is a dolly shot, I held the camera and ran after the two, giving the viewer a feeling of suspense and anxiety as the stalker speeds to attack Leanette. Finally, in the last shot, the stalker is dragging what is supposed to be Leanette’s dead body away, I’m not quite sure if it could be considered a two shot or a wide shot. The music fades out at the end because, you know, she’s dead, so obviously she’s not going to hear the music anymore.

    These short videos help with our bigger course project because with every video, our knowledge and ability to make these videos and edit them and piece clips together to form a story gets better. Experimenting with shots and composition allows us to better familiarize ourselves with being able to piece different shots together to make better videos. If we went over it, I forgot, because I don’t know what the Cambridge portfolio is, but I didn’t really research anything, unless you would consider me squeezing every drop of my brain juice to try and come up with an idea for a 30 second video research. Planning was just putting ideas onto a note on the phone, and production was pretty easy. Sure it took us like three hours to come out with 30 seconds, but we kept retaking scenes while trying to stay within the 30 second limit. I love using certain mise-en-scene factors to help add onto mood or central idea, like music and how it can either compliment or contrast scenes to give off certain scenes. For example, our song of choice contrasts the scenes, providing a sense of uneasiness.

    Anyways, this is a blog not an essay, so I’ll try to keep this last one short. I learned it’s really hard to try and stay within such a small limit when you know you have a really good idea and have a really good plan to help make the video top tier media. I also learned that CapCut is so frustrating to use and that that company is just a bunch of money-hungry people, because what do you mean you’ll only let me export 9 more videos and then I’ll have to pay? That’s how you lose business. The easiest part of this class is the blogs, I might regret writing that later on though. These video assignments really help because it gives you experience so that when the final big project comes by, it’s going to be a piece of cake. I’ll be fine, hopefully.

#3 Camera Shots Story — Preliminary

     In this first picture, Leanette is walking through the school. A regular girl going on about her ordinary day, walking while texting her friends on her phone. We did a long shot so that you–the viewer–can see how calm she is in her own little world. Not a care in the world. However, we chose the hallways where there were no paintings since the lack of color around her would create an eerie feeling. In the whole of the upper floor of the main building, the hallways are covered with artwork from left to right, only leaving a few walls bare, which are in the very back–places that almost no one walks through unless for testing or if they’re ESOL. The bareness of the walls allow the viewer to think: “Why there? In such a barren hallway, when there are many more hallways that are covered in lively, colorful art pieces?”

    This second picture is an over the shoulder shot, done so in 0.5x zoom so that the hallway would appear to stretch further and seem longer than it would normally. In this scene, you can see Victoria–the girl with the hoodie–holding a book with a knife on top. The over the shoulder shot was chosen for this scene because, in my opinion, it helps create more suspense and show how Leanette does not notice the danger following her through the barren hallway.

    Till now, I’m not quite sure whether this third shot would be considered a close up shot or a two shot since the camera is close, but you can see both characters in the picture. In the left of the image, you can see a small portion of Victoria’s face and the murderous glint in her left eye. Victoria, here, hits Leanette in the head with the thick book with the intention to knock her out. In other words, moments before disaster.

    In this fourth picture, it’s a two shot. You can see where the pictures cut off and start to stop to white. The blur of Victoria’s hand shows how this picture is taken just as she’s about to stab Leanette after attempting to knock her out, instead only being able to slam her against the wall. She has her hand over her mouth–originally to not let how Leanette kept laughing show in the pictures–but the person viewing this could interpret it as trying to get her to shut up and not give her away in her evil scheme to kill her. In my opinion, this was the shot that took us the most tries, as Leanette kept laughing every time Victoria pretended to stab her with our very obviously paper knife. 

    In this final picture, obviously, Victoria manages to stab Leanette and kill her with the paper knife. It was supposed to be an arial shot, but it’s not facing straight down enough to be considered one. I had to angle it slightly: one, we were in a hurry since we did this the day after we did the first four, and two, you could see my reflection on the ground taking the picture when I positioned the camera straight above them. Again, the both of them kept laughing trying to take this picture.

In my opinion, this project was super easy. Sure, we had to take the last picture a day after we took the other fourth. That was only a small setback though, a tiny hurdle to jump over. Overall, a piece of cake. We took a bunch of pictures, but that was just to have a wide selection of which ones were best to use for our project. We took a total of 35 pictures, I took a screenshot of my gallery and all the pictures we took, however, I cut it off at the top because I had other pictures in my gallery that I felt were unnecessary to keep in the screenshot. This project is about the five pictures and the process in taking them, not what’s in my gallery.

#2 Media Studies Skills Audit — Preliminary

 

                In my opinion, learning all these new and fancy ways and names to take a picture is like telling a Victorian child butter now has multiple flavors. There’s more? Not to mention, I want to get a taste of all of them. Some of the skills I already know how to do: planning and organizing production work, storyboards, shot lists, scripts, using a camera, basic operation, focus, framing. I know how to do at least these things since I took theatre in eight grade and wrote a lot of scenes and went through hundreds of scripts. However, I have some things I’d like to be better at: applying media theories, genre, audience, representation, institutions, understanding mise-en-scene (costume, setting, lighting, props). Obviously, I worked with a lot of props and settings during theatre, but it just wasn’t enough hands-on work. Of course, I know some of this since I worked with this a lot, but I don’t know enough for it to be one of my strongest suits, and what I know so far is definitely what a Cambridge class would consider enough or up to par knowledge.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BAnenrVHQBu7CdIU10pQcTUQrGulQTRoz9g8B7HTpro/edit?usp=sharing