#41 Our ACTUAL Film Opening — Production

 

#40 Editing 2.0 — Production

 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.

#39 Everything Changes — Production

We decided that the old production was a fail, there were too many issues no matter how many times we tried to convince ourselves that our video was a success… To many things I couldn’t edit out. So…

We made a new one.

We made a unanimous decision to scrap the entirety of the old film opening to make a new one, one following somewhat of the old plot line while still being new. Improved. Better.

The Thought

Looking over the new video, we realized it was really a waste of our time… the deadline was creeping closer, CCRs were going to take up most of our time, so we decided that the very next day, we were going to film a whole new production still following the old idea. Letter “K” walked so that The Survey could run.

Well, maybe that’s too much glaze. I already explained this in the last blog….

Filming

For the first clip, we didn’t want to do much, not much dialogue so that there wasn’t much to edit in, just a simple phone call between a depressed girl—Brittney—and her toxic friend—Chloe. The characters and their personalities changed too. Chloe (in the old video) was the friend who was going to be the main character as the movie progressed, in the new one, she’s the friend who cares little for her friend’s mental state. As for Brittney, she was just an ordinary, dumb teenage girl in the old video; in the new video, Chloe has mental issues as a result to the work from school and her parents. This way there would be more representation in her character and adding a touch of realism that reflects the struggles of teenagers. 

Before we filmed that part though, we wanted to get a scene of Victoria running to the mailbox to put the mail in, but as we recorded, it got darker outside, so it didn’t make sense using a clip with daytime, when our clips from inside you could tell it was dark out. Especially since the clips are assuming to be at the same time.

The Daytime Clip:

The One We Ended Up Using:

We filmed the first daytime mail clip before the daytime call scenes, each that we didn't use because it was getting progressively darker outside. Again, the phone call was the most time consuming part of the film, even though we had a script, there were some parts in which I messed up such as I didn't turn on the speaker on the phone, or that Victoria took too long to call.

Call Took Too Long:

No Speaker:

In the end, we managed to get it right and film everything we needed without issues. Leanette's mom (Anay Morell) also got her parts perfect too, considering since she didn't want to yell since she's not used to it. If it wasn't her, it had to be me, and if I was going to record, yell, and answer the call, then the clip would be very confusing. 

The Clip We Used:

After we did this clip, we had to do the scene of her getting the mail. It was easy doing this part of the video, with three tries max and done. In one, we were just practicing how it would go, the other was a combination of both the call and getting the mail, the final one was the one we used.

Practice:

Call AND Getting the Mail:

Clip we Ended up Using:

After getting the mail, Brittney has to go inside and do some things before she can answer the mail. She first has to drink her pills, an enigma code to show that something is going on with her. It's up to the audience to interpret what she has, seeing as this is simply the film opening. We decided to do a close-up of Brittney swallowing her pill to emphasize how big of a clue that simple action is on Brittney's character, but they didn't like it and said it looked odd, so we didn't use it.

The clip we did end up using was a long shot of Brittney coming in, turning on the light, and drinking her pill. Which then I ended with a cliff-hanger of the survey or mail and what it says.

The reveal of the letter was too long, so I cut it so that it only showed the first two or three seconds.

#38 CCR Introduction — CCR

  Recording the film opening was a challenging experience for me, and honestly, it wasn’t a good one. While I initially thought my CCR would focus on all the valuable skills and insights I got from the filming process, I now think they’ll focus on what I learned were the mistakes to avoid. The process highlighted how important preparation, communication, and flexibility are in any creative project. I realized that filming is not just about capturing footage but also managing unexpected problems and being able to adapt quickly. These lessons–although very frustrating to learn–have given me a clearer understanding of what it takes to create a good, if not at least adequate, production. I’m hoping to put these things into my CCR by reflecting on both the challenges and the growth that came with them.

Looking ahead, I plan to create a series of blogs to break down my reflections more thoroughly. My idea is to make maybe 4 separate CCR videos, each one focusing on a different question. This way I can explore each topic in depth and, realistically, rack up points so that I don’t fail. If I don’t have enough content or creativity to put into one video, I’ll just have to settle for two separate videos–each answering two questions. 

A lot happened during the production of our video and even more stuff changed along the way. These shifts gave me plenty to think and write about to discuss in my blogs and in my CCRs that I am going to make. I’m still figuring out how exactly I want to structure my CCRs; hopefully, I’ll find a way to make sense of everything that happened and present it in a way my audience will understand. 

#37 Final Video — Production

 

#36 Bathtub Scene — Production

 We couldn’t settle on the pool, so we had to redo the scene. Instead, we went to Leanette’s house to do that part. This time, we had to get it perfect. Her dad helped us record and gave us a set of equipment to reach out further to properly record the drowning scene. We only had one take for this too because we were running out of time and we couldn’t afford to wet Leanette’s hair and then do another take where it’ll be obvious the scene had to be taken more than once. So we practiced without actually dipping her head in the water.

  

Blogger isn’t letting me put videos and photos from my camera roll nor is it letting me put in YouTube videos into my blogs, so I can only copy and paste pictures and not videos. In the video, we had a speaker where we played the phone call and said that Victoria would go drown Leanette once she said “Isn’t that, like, next Saturday?” in the call. Also, since we didn’t have the old phone that we did at the pool scene, we had to use a calculator and hide half of it behind the curtain. Since she came back up instead of lingering in the water, we can to do a walk out where she’s just limp and the bad guy’s walking away, then I’d just do a camera glitching transition to connect both scenes together.

#35 Bathtub Scene Phone Call — Production

 The phone call was done at school, since we were going to use a bathtub this time and not an outdoor pool. Since we’ve done the phone call before, it wasn’t as free-styled as last time since we had a skeleton for how the call would go, but the wording was different. We did the call outside the classroom during class, with permission though, of course.

There’s not much to say about this phone call, it went a lot smoother than the other one. We had to do retakes though, I just don’t have the, since it was shot on Victoria’s phone, not mine. It is a little lengthy; however, the final product is only 1 second under the max limit for our film opening.

#34 Discarded Pool Phone Call — Production

 This is the phone call in the drowning scene for the pool. We couldn’t make it long and towards the end of the call, Leanette had to be silent because that was where she had to die. The phone call was too long several times so we had to keep redoing it. The phone call is where the film introduces the actual main character of the rest of the movie that the film opening is connected to, Chloe.

First, as said in the video, they lacked urgency. They talked slow and without emotion. Also, they didn’t even have a script that was set in stone yet, practically free-styling it. Also, it was 58 seconds. Almost a whole minute. You can also hear Victoria in the background, so there’s an echo. Victoria was calling Leanette through Leanette’s phone and Leanette was picking up through my phone because of my ringtone (which we thought kinda sounded like an old phone, since in the pool scene, the phone is old), I was recording with Victoria’s phone. We also had to keep doing retakes because Leanette kept forgetting to put the phone on speaker. 

This one was long, 58 seconds, but some of it had to be cut out because it wasn’t Torsten of what I was going to use for editing. I still scrapped it though because even though it had to be cut, it was still too long and didn’t match with the pool scene itself. To get rid of Victoria’s echo in the back, she went back inside and went to the second floor for some reason. The phone call was free styled again, but we knew there had to be a portion where only Chloe would be talking where Britney would be drowning; it had to feel like an actual conversation after all.

#33 Discarded Pool Scene — Production

The Pool:

 

It was really cold, this scene we had to do quick because it was at night and like 40 degrees Fahrenheit outside, not to mention Leanette was in bikini and in the water. I discarded this scene though because the drowning was too short and I couldn’t match it up to its phone call that we recorded separately. We had one take for this, because we were filming at Victoria’s aunt’s house (we changed location from Leanette’s grandma’s house to Victoria’s aunt’s house) and her aunt was and her mom were ushering us to hurry up, so we couldn’t do another take. I also was whispering because, anyways, there was going to be a phone call overlapping the video.

I was laying on the ground trying to get a good shot of Leanette so that it wasn’t a high angle shot, but Victoria’s aunt and her mom were standing around me like I was going to harm her if I didn’t finish in like 10 seconds. I didn’t get a chance to listen to the phone call and remember the cues to when Victoria was supposed to drown Leanette. Additionally, I discarded this clip because after Britney put the phone down, you could see the side of Leanette’s face, which doesn’t match with the audio overlay because she’s talking on the phone (that’s from the 2000s-ish) and you can see her mouth isn’t moving. Finally, when she’s actually drowning, she’s under the water for like 3 seconds. That’s not enough, and as soon as she was done with those 3 seconds, she came immediately back up instead of lingering a bit under water or just floating facing down so that it seemed like she actually drowned. It’s a shame we couldn’t use this, the pool was really pretty.