CCR Question 1: Research

 During the creation process, I looked to challenge the very traditional stereotype of a high-school bully by explaining his motives and background, displaying them to the audience. The audience is aware of this right away. The somber mood mixed with the bully hiding his bruises signals the issues to the audience early, before they see his outward appearance. 

Character's like this such as Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter franchise, and even Gru from the Despicable Me franchise, were helpful guides as characters with tough exteriors who are revealed to have troubled backgrounds, and are hiding softer sides. 

Draco Malfoy (2010) being controlled by his father.

Throughout the project, I looked to show how a person's environment and surroundings can shape how they act and feel. This is a key piece of our film, as at school our bully is confident, but at home he is sad and frightened of his parents abuse. By creating this contrast, it shows how our character himself is reacting to the abuse, and showing how he doesn't fully understand the pain. The film heavily suggests the viewers consider what someone could be going through, as it could be a lot more than you realize.

Editing: Time to Focus on Color

 In our project, one of the main focuses on how to present our film, and fully show the audience our plans, relies heavily on color and how we interpret it in our film. Because of this, we need to be very careful with our decisions.

One of the scenes we knew we would need to utilize Adobe Premiere to edit our project was during the car scene. We knew during filming that the scene needed to be darker than it was being shot at. 

We looked around at Adobes integrated filters, as well as all around the options they had, but no luck. Not until we discovered the Lumetri Color tab, which had a slider, which could be adjusted to produce numerous options for colors. Sliding towards the blue just a bit, gave us exactly what we needed! This was a very easy and efficient step of the process. 

Editing: The Audio Stage

 So this past week we have been assigned to start editing our project, specifically regarding audio.

Beginning with the opening clock scene, we wanted the sounds to increase as the camera got closer to the alarm. Tsis thought came to us during the filming process, and we felt it would compliment the scene nicely. So using Adobe Premiere, we first tried an option called Constant gain, which I thought was working decently, but after my partner Brady and I watched a Youtube Tutorial from Adobe Masters we had a ,uch easier time creating the product we needed

Another key audio we needed to add was the parents yells in the background once the bully arrives at home. We wanted to make sure it was muffled, focusing on the character hearing it while also having thoughts racing through his head. I found a copyright free sound off of a Youtube channel named Free Sound Effects, and Brady agreed it fit perfectly. 

We must continue the editing process soon as it can often take longer than expected.

[Adobe Masters]. (2013, December 26). KeyFraming Basics in Adobe After Effects CC Tutorial [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGNbFgaVT80

Filming Day 4

 So, we messed up on our previous shoot days. 

We both realized that we had made a mistake when we went over the film. Brady pointed out that a few of the shots were a little shaky. It wasn't a huge deal, but we decided to go back and re shoot some of the shots.

The main issue arose at the beginning of the production, with the zooming clock shot and the matching shot onto the main character waking up. So, we re shot it to make sure it was still, and the following shot as well, making sure they aligned perfectly from the clock to the face.

We are very satisfied with how this came out, and we are glad we took the time to do it.

Day 3 of Production

 Welcome back, today is day 3 of our filming process! We had another pretty easy day today, only needing to film a few shots, which all took place in the car. 

The firs is a POV shot which looked like a challenge but was actually not too bad. Once again Brady's mom was a huge help, capturing an excellent shot from the back seat while Brady was driving.

We will use this shot, as a way to display the opening title of the movie. We will have to make some changes to the color and tone of this shot during the editing process, in order to fully capture the somber mood dawned on the character while he is on his way. 

We then filmed 2 close up shots of the main character while driving that captured his emotions in a very descriptive way. 

And that is it for our third day of production! A pretty easy day, but we still have more to film at school which we hope to complete on Tuesday of this upcoming week. Things are going well so far and we hope it continues to do so.

Production Day 2

 And we're back! We have much shorter of a filming session planned for today with just the ending home scenes on our schedule. 

We were back in the main characters room, once again with the dark ominous lighting, reflecting the fear of the main character from his parents impending arrival. However, it was lit slightly upon arrival with some of his school personality remaining lit up.

We displayed the character closing the door nervously, which we did not have any difficulties with, and we fully captured the mood of the anxious protagonist. 

Some of our best shots were the over the shoulder shot, as well as the rotating mid shot of the character on the bed.

Our only challenge of the day appeared on our final shots. As we filmed the parents getting closer, the goal was to have the shadows appear under the door to make it even more ominous and unsettling. At first we struggled in getting good visible shadows, but once Brady adjusted the lighting outside the room, the shadows appeared much clearer.

So that's it for day 2! We'll have to make sure to review our plans ahead of day 3.