My short film package-
https://theplayer1120.wixsite.com/film
How do your products represent social groups or issues?
My product represents social groups who are interested in sports, such as soccer. Soccer has a large fan base, with almost half of the world playing and watching the sport. My product relates with many people throughout the whole product. Many people play soccer, especially in young ages around high school and such. This creates the audience targeted for my film, people, young and elders, who enjoy the sport. The main issue with playing a sport is the dangers of an injury. Getting injured is pretty common for any athlete, in soccer many players have leg injuries. I wanted to highlight the issue with that, and make my movie about how easy soccer injuries can occur. Proven actually by the fact that during this whole filming process my actor did get an injury from playing soccer.
Even though i worked on the social media assignment but i wanted to talk a little more about how i felt about it and how it was. Whenever i had a project at school, ever since i was little i would love to do the creative parts of the project. I would love to do those big boards with glue and coloring the letters and just making it all creative. So when my teacher assigned us this and it said we would have to create our own website, Instagram, Facebook, and twitter account i was really excited. So i first began working on my website, at first i was so stressed because it wasn't looking the way i wanted it to look but then i started getting the hang of it. The website was my favorite thing to do because i could design it in any way i wanted When i was doing my website i started finding pictures i wanted to use and then i found the perfect picture and it was just perfect for the website and it matched the movie so well. The wix website itself has plenty templates for anything you want and i was really glad because then i had some ideas of what i wanted it to look like. My template was for a short film about a travel movie so the pictures were not what i needed and wanted. But after finding the pictures i added them and started working on editing the words and writing everything. Then after i was almost done with the website i started working on the social media’s which i had to add onto my website. The website itself took me around 2-3 hours, which was a lot. Then the social media’s took around another 2 hours because i had some complications with getting it all together and naming them. For Facebook it took me the longest because to make a Facebook account it has to be a real name, not a business name. So i had to open a page through my actual personal facebook account which i only realized after making two new emails and adding other numbers. Twitter and Instagram were the easiest since i, myself, have both and i knew how to create them and how easy it was.
Getting to work in a small group was honestly good and bad. Since it was just me and Lucio it was difficult since he wasn’t in the class, he never learned what i did which meant he couldn’t help much with anything other than filming and helping me with some ideas for editing and writing about stuff. He couldn’t edit for me, help with blogs, or anything like that. When working with the group last year in AICE Media AS, we had a group of 4. Each person in the group had a role in something, we all did one thing or two to help each other out so it would be easier for us to edit, do blogs, film, and brainstorm. We would have one person drawing the storyboard, one person coming up with ideas for the movie, one person for editing, and one for the blogs we would divide into paragraphs instead of having just one person writing the blogs when we were able to have all the blogs looking the same. This year i was by myself on editing, writing blogs, getting ideas and all. It was tough but i got through it all and i hope it all came out good. I’ve never liked working in groups because then we depend on eachother for stuff and there’s always people who don’t do what they’re supposed to and they’re lazy with their work. Working on my own has its pros and cons and i’m okay with that. Lucio helped a lot when he offered to help me film. When i first told him about it he was actually excited and he asked if we could film about something he likes so it could look better and he wouldn’t have to act or fake anything. That’s when we chose to film about soccer. Lucio has played soccer ever since he was little, he fell in love with the sport and hasn’t stopped since. Even though he wasn’t really good at the sport until a year or two ago he still liked to play and have fun. After we filmed, around a day or two after, Lucio was playing soccer on thanksgiving day and he got badly injured. He tore his ligament on his left leg. He isnt able to play for almost two months, which wasn’t great for me because i wasn’t able to re-shoot and change what i didn’t like about the footage we first got. But at the end i had to work with what i had because i wasn’t going to be able to find someone new in such a short period of time.
To be honest my short film isn’t great but it honestly came out better than i thought it would’ve become. Of course i thought it was going to be great because i had everything planned out in my head but at the end it wasn’t the worst thing i’ve seen technically.
At the end im very proud of what we have done and created, even though he got a bad injury we got everything done at the end and im very glad we did. My family and his family enjoyed watching and i hope others like it as well.
Overall a very fun experience for us both and my family as well since they helped with feedback and was there through the stressful times.
but since i wasn’t able to re shoot because of my actors injury so i had to work with what i had since the beginning, and it honestly wasn’t easy to re edit because i barely had any different footage to add onto the short film so i kept it mostly the same i tried to cut out some clips but it just wouldn’t look good so i kept it mostly the same as before. Some things that i have changed on the short film while re editing is the police sirens and i took out the subtitles. I felt like subtitles didn’t really matter and it was just taking up too much of my time, everything in the short film, all the dialogue is very clear and audible so adding subtitles wouldn’t do much affect. Also my mother had also mentioned as to why the subtitles were there because it’s a person choice if they want close captioning and subtitles. So i took them out and just left it normal.
After i was done i sent the finished short film to my friends and i asked them if they preferred the re edited version or the old one i showed them and they said that they liked both but they preferred the new and re edited version that i had sent to them today.
I also sent it to my father and showed it to my mother, my father said he liked it and that even though there wasnt much of a difference between the old one and the new one he said he liked the new one more. My mother said the same as well and she said i did a great job and that she would be sending it to my aunt and to my grandma so they could tell what they thought as well. At the end they said they really liked it and i was really glad they did
I texted two of my friends, Maria and Felipe. I asked them both what they thought about the re-edited version of the short film.
Maria was the first one to answer so i sent her the short film and she said that shed watch it and let me know what she thought. After she was done she said she liked it s alot and that it was very similar to the other one and i told her i was not able to re film or add any footage due to Lucios injury. and she told me she had heard about it and that the short film is still good and that she enjoyed watching it. She said she wished that there was more action for the injury rather than just the background but that it was still good. She said that this was also similar to what she saw last year, our music video. Because she was with me and my parents when i showed them it last year. She said she thought it was good. She did say she preffered the music video over the short film which i agree with her since it was better and it took us more time editing.
I texted Felipe and after a little while he texted me back, Felipe is my cousin so i had a higher chance of him being 100% honest with me than my friends. I sent him the short film and asked him if he could tell me what he thought about it and to let me know what he liked and he didnt like. After a couplle minutes he texted me saying he was done watching it and that he was in between liking it and disliking it. He said the same thing pretty much everyone said but he said the only reason he was in between about things was because there was very little actions and he enjoys action movies a lot and my movie would fall in that perfect category. He works a lot with television and radio and commercial stuff in brazil, hes a couple years older than me and he works with a television and radio company so he knows a lot of stuff about editing and commercials and videos
After i was done asking my friends to tell me their opinions on my short film i waited for my parents to get home and tell me their opinion on my short film. First i asked my mother her opinion and she watched it and told me it was great and that she really liked it and i told her if there was anything i could fix or that she didn’t like and she told me she really liked it and that there was honestly nothing to fix overall. She even asked me to send it to her so she could show my grandmother and my aunts and she said they loved it. Even though they couldn’t understand much because they don’t speak english but they loved it. I told them that i wasn’t 100% done with it and that i’m still going to re edit and maybe re shoot
it but that i wasn’t completely sure but i’d be showing them the final product and everything soon and they said they couldn’t wait.
After talking to my dad i waited for my dad to get home and when he did i showed him the short film and let him watch it. After he was done i asked him what he thought about it he told me he liked it and that it was good. I asked him what his favorite part was and he told me it was the part where he gets injured but he said that there could have been more time at the end where it happens and that there could’ve been more action during it. He said i could’ve made the short film more about the injury rather than just the backstory and then the final game and then the injury. but he did say he liked it and when he watched it he was with his coworker and his co worker said i did really good and that they are both proud of what i did, i told them that i will still be re editing and that i will show them the final and complete version in a couple days once im all done with everything and that i would send it to them.
When i was all done with editing and just overall done, i texted my friend Sophia and asked her to watch my short film and i told her that it was for a school project and that i needed her opinion on it, her honest opinion. After she watched it she texted me saying it was good and since she's the type of person to not take anything serious of course she found the ending, when Lucio gets injured, funny. I did call her after to get her honest opinion and she told me it was good but that there was something missing and she couldn't place her finger on it. I told her i felt the same way but i had a feeling it was the footage and that there was honestly nothing else i could do because we aren't able to re film due to Lucio's injury. She agreed but she did say that was we had was fine and it worked fine as well. She found the end funny because the way he fell right after the shot and he was on the ground. I did agree that it was funny and that i should've made the injury part much longer.
After Sophia, i texted my friend Jose asked him to watch my short film and i told him that it was for a school project and that i needed his opinion on it, his honest opinion. He agreed and texted me after watching it saying that he liked it and that it was really cool. I did the same thing i did with Sophia, i went and called him when he had his free time. After talking for a while he told me his honest opinion about the whole thing and he said that it was really good and that he has never seen something like that in his life before. I told him about Sophia's opinion and he kind of agreed but he said for him it was good the way it was and he also knew about that Lucio had gotten injured so he said it was really cool and funny that the day after we stopped filming he actually got injured. He thought it was ironic that we were filming a short movie about a soccer athlete who gets injured and then after were one filming he actually gets badly injured and isn't able to play for a while.
After i had everything downloaded onto iMovie and almost done the taking parts out and cropping each clip i had, i began watching over every clip to see if it had sounds in the background and most of them did so i had to go over every clip and cut the beginnings of most of them out. I was good though because i did have almost 10 minutes of the clips when they weren't edited but then after i did that i had around 7 minutes. After i did that i started fixing the volumes on each clip because i had some clips that the volume was too loud due to wind or it was too quiet so i had to go over most them and either put the volume up or down. Most of the clips were fine i just had issues with the clips that were shot outside due to the wind it was too loud and too hard to hear if there was any dialogue. After everything little thing i did to the film i went and re-watched the whole thing to make sure nothing was missing and to make sure i didn't accidentally edit something out that was important, every little detail is important and very noticeable if there is a mistake. Luckily i didn't make any mistake but i did forget a couple details every time.
After i was done using iMovie i began using an app called Splice. I honestly thought that it wouldn't work but it was actually a good app to work with and it was easy to use. I was a little confused at first but i got the hang of it after a while. Using Splice i worked with adding subtitles and added things that were needed. I did have to wait a couple days for Lucio to available for us to work on it together because since it was just us 2 in the group we had to use our voices to voice over the other characters that were in the short film but didn't appear in it such as coach and Lucio's mother. After adding the subtitles all i had left was to place them on the right place of the screen and the right timing and added some sound affects such as the ambulance sirens when he got injured and added them as background noise to make it seem like they were far away but still close and on their way.
Since i filmed thought the thanksgiving break i thought i would get a head start on my editing during this first week of December to just get it all done and over with so i don't have to worry about anything after this week. Since we have midterms from the 14th to the 18th its going to be a stressful week. I really want to finish everything by the next week, so i don't have to worry about doing any work over winter break while i have family over and then Christmas and new years gatherings. I began editing on November 29th and i finished on December 1st. On November 29th i gathered all the footage i got from filming in the week before and i watched everything over again just to make sure i had everything right and that it looked the same as the storyboard, which they were and i was so happy. Lucio and i re-watched everything together after we filmed on the same day and we laughed about some of the videos we shot because they were so bad that it was funny, i will be adding some of them to our website for bloopers and behind the scenes.
When i first started editing i had some issues with the footage downloading. I had to spend like four or five hours just deleting stuff off of my phone because i had around 16 thousand pictures and videos on my phone. After that it would still take like 15 min for everything to get downloaded into iMovie. I used Imovie to get everything down and just see how many minutes and in total i had almost 10 minutes of just footage. So after i had all the footage down i started cutting everything don and editing out the parts in each clip that either took too long to get to the point or it just wasn't working with the whole film. Then i started adding the transition which took a while because i couldn't choose which ones looked better and i also couldn't decide how long i wanted them to be but at the end i kept them at either 0.5 or 1 second long each...
During the thanksgiving break, on the 26th, Lucio got injured. He went to play soccer with his family members, cousins and friends, and one of his friends side tackled him and kicked his ankle/shin. While his friend got up he noticed he wasn't being able to stand and he noticed that he was starting to feel pain but also his leg went numb. They went to the hospital because he couldn't feel his leg, and he was in a lot of pain. He spent around three hours at the hospital, and when he got out he had crutches and a little cast. The doctors told him that he tore his ligament and that he would be okay to walk in two weeks but to play soccer he would have to wait around four to six weeks. Due to his injury i believe i wont be able to re-shoot any scenes or re-shoot at all in any way. We had just started filming on Monday of thanksgiving break and we finished on Tuesday and he got injured on Wednesday. Having to turn this in, in January doesn't give us enough time to re-shoot since he wont be able to play by then.
At the end we do have something good and presentable to work with. On the day we finished filming, i went home and started going over all the footage we took. We had way more than we needed and i was glad because i really was starting to think that it was too short. When i went over all the footage we had i separated them and put the bloopers and the clips we weren't going to use in one folder and the ones that were good and that we were going to use in the other folder named "short film". Most of the footage we had was long and not short at all and we had at least two of each scene. When we were filming i wanted to be sure we had everything right and good to go so i decided for us to film two of each scene we were recording in case we did have to re-film. When i went over the re-shoots i took, i noticed that i was missing three scenes. So i will have to do with what i got from the first shots. I find it funny how the short film is about a highschool soccer athlete getting badly injured and it really happens in real life!
Since Covid-19 cases have been going up during these past two weeks my family has decided to cancel the thanksgiving trip and we decided to just spend it at my house. Since the plans have changed i will be filming from Monday the 23rd to Wednesday the 25th. I feel like that is enough time to film and have everything set. Today is Monday the 23rd and the weather is pretty weird and the actor isn't able to film today due to some family problems, so we will be filming tomorrow and Wednesday if everything goes to plan. Today is Tuesday the 24th and we started filming the scenes in the house and getting some of the scenes in the car done for tomorrow. The weather is great and everything came together, we did have to film a couple scenes like three times because either we had some background noise that messed up the audio or we just had a minor issue like when i was recording and i walked passed a mirror you were able to see me so that messed us up and we had to re-shoot it. Then my actor just forgot his lines or what he had to do and where he had to stop or do a certain movement. So we had some minor issues and we also stuck with the storyboard that we had all we did was add some movements and new dialogue but other than that we kept or well we tried to keep things as similar to the storyboard as possible. After we were done with the first half i then went over all the footage we had and then i picked the ones that looked good and then i separated them into a folder and then i took the ones that weren't going and put them in another folder with the bloopers to put up on the website. We then started to re-shoot all the scenes that we messed up or the ones we just needed to fix in general. Today is wednesday the 25th and tofay we filmed the soccer field scenes and they came out great and we were done with filming and now we just need to edit and have everything done. The weather wasnt too great but we had great footage and we finished in three days.
I am not going to film during the thanksgiving break. Me and my family will be going out of state to visit Nashville, Tennessee. We will be leaving on Sunday and coming back the other week I would only have one day to film and it wouldn’t make a difference because i want to get everything done in two days, one after the other and if I film on Saturday and then film like two weeks later I don’t feel like it would come out good. So my plan for now is to film during the first weekend of December, around the 4th, 5th and maybe 6th. That way i can start editing and getting everything done in that first week. We will be starting early in the morning and then start filming at the house for the house and bedroom scenes and then leaving right after to go film at the soccer field. I think it wont take me too long too shoot all the scenes, I have a feeling it will be like a max of 3 hours because we do have to re-watch all the scenes we filmed and then pick which ones we should do a retake and which ones we should keep and just edit. and of course there are many scenes that might take long because there could be mistakes or the camera did not work and all of that sort. There have been some questioning about the scenes. I went over the storyboard and i saw that some things needed fixing and the dialogue and the script and I think there will be some changes and i think i will have to add or maybe even cut some scenes and add some new ones because when i looked over the story board and the script i felt like there was something missing and i needed to change it. I think i might just think over and brainstorm some extra ideas to add. So there might be some minor changes in the short film. and because of covid we have to be careful with where we go and we have to be safe.
For the website and building the social media accounts i had some majors issues which i then overcame them at the end. First I knew i had to open a new Gmail account for this whole process because it would have made it so difficult if i didn't do that. Then i opened my website account for me to start the website. After i was done picking the layout i wanted I began changing and adding pictures and I also began adding my pages and then added the titles and texts i needed for each page. After all that I began working on creating the social media accounts. It took me around 2 hours just to create the social media accounts. I began with Facebook which took the longest to make because Facebook does not allow your name to be something that isn't name appropriate, so then i just used my own fakebook account and opened a page just for the movie. After i created the Instagram and twitter account which were both easy and fast with no complications. Then I created the YouTube page and i had lots of issues with that also because I accidentally connected my actual YouTube account with the one i was creating for the movie page. After that i began working on the rest of the pictures i had to add on and started fixing the little mistakes there were. On my website i added pictures of the people working on my movie, i added my parents as if they were the editor and the camera director but in the actual filming and editing and directing it is just me in end. On the day after i started working on my website I used my photography camera to take the pictures of the actor, the editor, and the camera director and i took my own picture because i didn't like how they took mine which is why it looks closer and less professional. I then had some difficulties getting my phone to connect to the camera so then i took my moms phone to do it and it worked so then i downloaded the pictures i edited them so they looked right and then i sent them to my email and saved it onto the computer and then added them onto my website.
I will start filming after we create our websites and everything else. I have my schedule for when we do begin filming which will be during the weekend usually in the morning if we go to the park to film at the soccer fields or throughout the day when we film the other scenes at the house or in the car. The locations we have so far are the park, my house or the actors house, my backyard and his car. The scenes which take place at my house or his house will be done at night or throughout the evening during the weekends. At the park in the soccer fields will be done during the mornings o the weekends or when we are on break. The car scenes can be done whenever we have time left since they will be rather short. The participants will be me, Luisa, and the soccer athlete which is Lucio. I chose to have a small group, very small actually. Last years group was too complicated and always had issues. Due to Covid-19 we will be taking precautions, if other people are around we will be using masks and we will also be bringing hand sanitizer and gloves to be as safe as possible. For the props we have a simple set of props. There will be soccer balls, whistles, and the usual stuff that are in cars, bedrooms, anything in the house. For costumes it will be kept short and simple too. The soccer player when playing in his game will be wearing his soccer uniform and gear, the teams jersey, the cleats the socks everything. In the other scenes it will be normal casual school and staying home outfits. Such as jeans, plain or graphic t-shirt and normal shoes such as vans or Nikes. Overall everything could possibly change when we begin filming but hopefully even because of covid our short film will be great and all i have talked about in this planning blog helps me structure everything a little better and i hope it helps a lot at the end. I have known the actor for some time now and with his help i can finish everything i need and he will help out a lot by doing this with me even if it is stressful.