Daniel's Photography & Film Blogpost!

  This blogpost is my creative critical reflection for finishing my project.

  The link below leads to the posted version of our film project. https://youtu.be/KPzYSLePdjw

  This post will be a brief explanation of what our title sequence means, and how it's used.          Above is the name of our film, and we decided on this name for a few reasons. First off, the title is a fair description of the protagonist, given that he has been followed since the beginning but wasn't aware the entire time. The title gives off a general idea of what action to expect just off of the word "Oblivious". Another reason is because the secondary character was pursuing the oblivious protagonist to surprise them with a celebration without realizing it was too late, making both characters oblivious in their own ways. Lastly, the film was designed to make viewers think, "The main character of this film is terribly oblivious" since the scenery exposes the stalker, creating dramatic irony.     We decided on this design for the title opening because it occurs right after a punchline, abruptly changing the scene to create a sense of humo...

     In this blog post, I will describe what my overall impression of our finished project.      I am actually pretty impressed with our project despite it being our first time making a film. The film is no masterpiece, and is far from being remarkable in any way, but I think it is pretty well done for some students doing it for their first time. We had many factors that limited greater quality of our film. For example,  Our video recording equipment was nothing more special than one of our phones.  Only one of us had any real knowledge on video editing.  We had limited time and a time limit to our film We struggled finding time to get together to film or complete other work We are doing this for the first time      I feel like the group did a good job, but there were times that communication was either slow or not present due to unviability, which made it hard to express ideas and address time scheduling with the group. This w...

  In this blogpost, I will give a brief explanation of the process behind composing some sounds and music for our film project.      I was tasked with composing some sounds and a soundtrack for our film to work around copyright issues. I used FL studios, which is shown above. I essentially started off by trying to make some Foley or using stock sound effects to enhance auditory aspects of our film. Using sound effects like light switching were easy, but a little more difficult would be heartbeats and heavy breathing. Luckily, we managed to use the sound effects to enhance the horror feel of the film.           Along with this, I wanted to make a short clip of some background music that would fit the tone and fill in scenes that didn't have that much background noise. We decided to use a low pitch Cello, and I used FL Studios to make a demo of what the soundtrack could sound like. My other partners liked the demo and decided to use i...

  In this blogpost, I will give a brief explanation to what gave us inspiration for our film project and what lead up to the final product.     My two partners and I watched movies fairly often, and were no strangers to genre. We wanted to work with a genre we would find entertaining to film and that was fairly easy to do, since something like fantasy or sci-fi would be a lot more complex and higher budget. Luckily for us, we all swiftly came to the agreement that horror would be easy to perform and come up with. Daniel Yanes came up with the idea of the surprise comic-relief skit at the end of the title sequence, which we all thought would be pretty comical and make our project unique from others.     In terms of direct inspiration from other works, I didn't really have any myself, but Daniel Yanes took inspiration from some  films like "Scary Movie", which was essentially a horror/comedy, much like our own film.

  In this blog, I will describe our experience acting for our film, and our approach to what we wanted our characters to look like.      None of us has ever taken a theater class and this was the first time we've filmed a project, so this was all very new to us. We wanted our characters to almost be opposites. The protagonist is supposed to appear as boring and apathetic using body language, while the stalker looks mysterious and sporadic in his movements.      I acted as the stalker and in order to fulfill this role I often looked for dark areas to blend into and I tried to be very sneaky. This was pretty fun doing since I would try to stay in character in between shots so that the character doesn't seem different. Daniel playing as the protagonist did a very good job of looking tired when coming back from work, like how he enters his car very slowly and moves sways a little in his movements. Along with this, his facial expressions make him look fatig...

 In this blog post, I will describe how we managed our time for the film project and how we scheduled our work flow.      Coming up with our time management and scheduling meetups to work on the project was a little difficult since we all had homework to do and jobs to work. We had to find days that all of us were free to meet up since all of us are necessary in the filming process. We eventually picked out a few days and we did our best to get there on time.      Luckily for us, all we needed to meet up for was filming our project. Everything else like editing, planning, and paper work would be handled either in class or online over a video call. This way we can reduce the struggle of finding time to meet up in person. I do wish we could've fit more time into filming because we wouldn't have to rush to find good material, we would be better prepared, and we could have multiple takes on shots we wished to redo.

 In this blogpost, I will show pictures and detailing changes made to our storyboard that our film fitted a lot better.      Now for obvious reasons, storyboards are supposed to be the prerequisite to films, but we had to make our storyboard off of imagination without having concrete knowledge of the environments we would be filming in. Despite this, our film did follow the actions of the storyboard very well, so it's not like we made a different film than what was portrayed in our original storyboard.     I will make a brief list of changes we made to our storyboard. For our first scene, it's a change in environment to mimic the actual place that we actually recorded at. We also changed the hard cut to a fade-to-black and we went in for a wide-shot instead of an extreme wide-shot.     Second scene highlights the cars, in which it started off by following the character and changed the position of the cars leaving. This was used because the parking...

In this blogpost, I will explain our total budget for our film, and what we spent it on.       So, we didn't have a big budget because we are students that preferred to use what we already had. We did a great job of saving money by shooting the film on a phone, editing the film on a free software (iMovie), and adding sound design through a previously owned software (FL Studios). We also saved money on costumes, as our costumes were just clothes that we already owned. A penny saved is a penny earned. Our only true expense was this one prop that is depicted in the picture above, a cake! This cake costed us $7 and was bought by Daniel Yanes to be enjoyed by all after filming was complete.     If we were to be given a bigger budget, we could have utilized it on getting a better camera for crisper footage, or maybe better software for clean and in-depth editing, or even better costumes to fit the genre better. Unfortunately, the only ones willing to invest in our pro...

  In this blog, I will be explaining how we used the lighting in our environment to fit into the genre of the film.      Since we're focusing on the horror genre, we need to utilize our lighting to give off elements of unease and mystery. In order to evoke this effect, we utilized the poor lighting of our environment to make natural low-key lighting.      There are some instances where we had brighter lightening, which can be seen towards the end of the film, since we want the facial emotions of the characters to be clear and seen. We also used decent lighting because this scene is supposed to feel more welcoming than ominous. We also didn't have a big budget to buy professional external lights, so we had to utilize the lights available in our surroundings.

In this blog, I will be detailing the specific use of colors in our film and how it affects the mood.      Everything in our film is fairly monochromatic, and especially favors dark or black colors. This is because we wanted to make the protagonist's life feel very boring and monotone, as well as have our suspicious character covering in the shadows to prevent limiting their identity. Another color tool we used was black & white representing evil and good respectively. This can be seen with the white clothes of the protagonist (good) and the dark clothes of stalker (bad), which also happens to correspond with their cars too.       The only time there are vivid colors is when the main character is watching TV in his house. This is subtle imagery that the TV is one of the only things that provide the protagonist with entertainment and isn't boring. Color scheme is very important for setting the mood of a scene, as colors carry emotions that can refle...

    In this blogpost, I will be highlighting the efforts and roles of my group members and myself towards the contribution of the project.     We all played a very important roll while developing this film project. To make things simple, I will generalize the roles of each of us. Daniel Yanes played a very executive directing role, giving us an idea of what needs to be done and verifies it happens, then approves of final products. Sofia Kawalek was like our equipment personnel, she did the majority of the filming, photo-documented our progress, and did the final editing on video editing software. My role was a lot more artistic direction and creative concept work, I drew the entire storyboard and made sure the shots of the film were almost exactly how it was imaged in the storyboard. I also helped with audio design and made music for the film so we wouldn't run into any copyright issues.      Daniel and I were also the actors in the film, while Sofia w...

  This blogpost will describe the representation shown in our film and what we did to show inclusion.      To be honest, representation was never brought up in our discussions of the film project. We never really considered tackling this social issue as the purpose of our film had nothing to do with any social issues. Consequentially, we do so happen to feature two Hispanic Americans as these are the only two actors in the film. Our film has nothing to do with race, stereotypes, religion, or anything of the sort. This could be a potential issue because now-a-days people tend to read too deeply between the lines and end up exacerbate some sort of social issue that wasn't even present to begin with. For example, people could think the scenario of a white person stalking a more Hispanic looking person is some reflection of modern society and all sorts of unintended jazz.      For full disclosure, this film project was made with no intent to...

  Like a previous post that analyzed the main character, this blog post will focus on the secondary, supporting character.      This character, played by me, is the ominous stalker that follows the main character back home. As seen, this character wears full black to blend in with darkness and limits identity. Some props that this character utilizes are a knife, car, and cake as comedic effect.     Our stalker character suspiciously follows the main character around while hiding in the shadows and trying to be sneaky, which can be seen with both actions and body movement. The motivations of this character are well hidden until the climax towards the end of the title sequence, in which the stalker wields a knife as to backstab the main character, but ends up surprising him instead with a cake. The knife itself was a cake cutter, which goes to show that this character just being friendly and trying to surprise the main character for some sort of cel...

In this blog post, I will be detailing the equipment used to film our project.      We weren't professionals or had a big budget, so we had to rely on what we had already. One of our partners, Sofia, had a GoPro but we ended up using her iPhone. We didn't use the GoPro because we didn't have the proper setup to have it function well and it didn't have a lot of battery. We tried using Daniel's phone, and then my phone, but we liked Sofia's phone because it had the best video and audio quality.      For our editing software, we had a little trouble deciding what we should use but we decided to go with what was convenient. Daniel Yanes did some research on what software's to use, but quickly discovered how costly it could become, with initial fees for downloading, or monthly subscriptions, we didn't have the money for just one project so we ended up with Sofia's iMovie software that already came on her laptop. It proved to be just as useful and it worke...

     In this blogpost, I will be detailing what our soundscape will be like, along with what we used to achieve it.      Since our film is in the genre of horror, we want to make sure the audience isn't distracted from key elements and actions in each scene. One way we will achieve this is by emphasizing sound effects and ambiance. So far, many of the sound effects in the recordings are ideal, but we may still use Foley to enhance certain actions for the audience to hear, like leaves ruffling, or light switches toggling.      In terms of soundtrack, there will be very little music since we want the audience to focus on the action. Despite this, we might add low cello bowing to the background to make certain scenes seem ominous in nature. I could make this soundtrack on FL studios, and share it to Sofia to edit it into the film. This is especially useful since a big issue for music in films are copyright laws, but they don't apply if you make ...

       In this blogpost, I will discuss our second day of filming, which actually went pretty smoothly.     This are our costumes for the filming. It's the same as our last shoot and this time I actually got to perform and act on video. As you can see, Daniel Yanes is still the protagonist coming back from work, and I am now playing as the stalker, following Daniel to his house. Filming this time wasn't that difficult, but we spent a lot of time brainstorming how we wanted to film our scene, since this location provided us with a lot of opportunities.      This is the location of filming. This location is the garage of my house, and it served pretty well for the scene we were trying to film. The only issue we came across was the fact that there were other people home, meaning there were other cars parked outside the house that would break the immersion of the film. There's really only supposed to be two characters in the video, so it wouldn't...

     This blog post is an extension of the last one, involving extra details of how much time was spent on it, who worked on it, and what will we need to make sure these scenes are complete.      Luckily for us, editing didn't actually take to long, but it was challenging. The editing process is not a long one if you know what you're looking for. The longest part of editing is the brainstorming aspect. In this case, it was trying to figure out how to put the clips together in a way that made sense and clipping some parts out to make time appropriate for the two minute mark of the film. This is especially important because we must fit every important scene and save space for future clips to stay below the required two minutes mark.       Everybody had a role in the editing of the film that helped make the process a lot quicker than it would be working by ourselves. Starting off with Sofia, she was the foundation of this process by using a...

     In this post, I will detail our editing process of our film project! We ran into a few challenges here, and I discovered that editing our film in post takes as much imagination and creativity as shooting the film itself.      So far, we've compiled all of the clips we've taken so far and put them in story order. It was a little challenging to merge these clips to fit time and have it look decent. We're still trying to figure out which transitions and editing tools to use to make the clips merge together in a way that makes sense.      Since it's a horror film, we do not plan on adding much or any music. Instead, we plan on using sound effects and even some Foley to enhance our imagery. In terms of visual effects, we may use dark borders to make a focused effect and maybe some blur to help viewers focus on important aspects. Besides those two, we won't be using any filters to keep it grounded to reality.      We're try...

     In this blog post, I will detail our first day of filming our movie project! Despite only being the first part of the film, a lot of work and factors went into the production.      We decided to meet up in an empty parking lot of some office building. Meeting up around 6:30 gave us enough daylight to explore the environment and find out what we could work with. The location was perfect for the setting, as the film would start off with the protagonist leaving an office building after work. We filmed when it became night time to match the mood and setting of the film. Luckily for us, the parking lot was very vacant and was perfect so that there were no distractions when it came to filming. The only obstacle was that there were still people around the entrance of the building, preventing us from getting a good angle of the building itself. Luckily for us, they eventually walked out of frame and we filmed from an angle that cuts them out of focus.  ...