Media While Quarantined

  Hey guys! So today "spring break" has offcially ended and we started online school today. I used to say that I wanted to be homeschooled, but I take that back now... let me tell you it is pretty stressful! Canvas was down so we couldn't reach any of our teachers or do any of our work. But luckily it's up and running now. So my first assignment for media is to make a blog post on how media has been beneficial during the quarantine process. So here I am!

     Obviously throughout this, the media is allowing me to lay in bed for hours and binge watch a series which is beneficial during the quarantine process. I've spent a lot of my free time binge watching Love Island on Hulu... Im OBSESSED! But, there are other media and technology tools that allowed me to remain connected to the world outside my home.

     Zoom is something that I have found extremely beneficial throught all of this for many different examples. Zoom is an American video communications company that allows you to video and auido conference with multiple people from all over. This website/app has been extremely benefical to me in two ways. Being a competitive dancer, I am always training and taking class. Due to corona, unfortunately my studio has been closed until further notice. But, us dancers can't stop training or else we will get behind. With that being said, my dance studio has decided to do live Zoom dance classes everyday. This helps out so much because I get to continue to train with my team and stay connected with my teachers. Zoom has also helped with school. Talking and communicating to your teachers can be hard at times like these. Most of my teachers decided to have meetings to inform us what is going on with this new way of learning. I found this extremely benefical during this process allowing me to stay connected outside my home.

Distribution

     Hey guys! In todays blog post im going to talk about what distribution we would use as real media text.

     Since we are on a low budget and are rookies in the film industry we decided that we are going to upload our first film to platforms such as Youtube and Vimeo.

YouTube is an American online video-sharing platform headquartered in San Bruno, California.  We thought it was a good idea to use youtube because it is free and has easy acess.

Vimeo is an American ad-free video platform headquartered in New York City, providing free video viewing services as a competitor to YouTube. In 2007, Vimeo became the first video sharing site to support high-definition video. 

Both of these sites are free and are websites that support high definition video. We feel they are good sites to get our "career" going.

Thanks for tuning in! See you guys soon <3

Our UPDATED storyline

Hi guys! Here is how we are going to fix our storyline. 

     At first, we were doing a muscial genre. Andrea composed her own music and we were going to do one big flash mob dance scene to it. Due to the fact that we can no longer meet up with people we had to make some minor changes in our film which included taking out the flash mob scene. We were so upset that we had to do this because we thought it would be really different from the other projects. Now with this conflict, we decided that it is best we take out the genre of a muscial and just leave it to the drama genre. We had to make some other changes to our film opening so here are the complete ideas.

    

   Initially we were going to start at school, since we can no longer do so, we changed the time to take place in the summer. We are going to have me riding a bike during the time around sunset. We are still going to keep the idea of me listening to music and taking the headphones out. Then when I get home, I will check my mailbox hopefully expecting an acceptance letter from my dream school New York University. The mailbox has nothing placed inside, so I continue to walk to my door. Before I do so, I take of my LGBTQ+ pins attatched to my shirt and walk inside. I say hello to my mother and go to my room. In my room I have posters of my dream school all over along with my goals for the year being to perform on stage and get accepted into NYU. I sit on my bed and go on my computer to check my email to see if I got my acceptance or not. As im sitting there that is when the daydream will take place. We didn't know what we were going to do because initally we were going to film the daydream on a blank stage. But luckily, I was looking through my camera roll and found a bunch of clips from backstage at my recital in June. The clips I found have great quality and are shot with a steady cam. The shot also has a mystical affect which helps out with the context of this part being a day dream. So we really lucked out on this one! In our original concept, we were going to have the bell ringing which would make me snap our of the day dream, but now we are going to have me getting a phone call. Once my phone rings I "wake up" from my daydream and realize it's not reality. I look to see who is calling and it is New York University. I scramble out of bed and say "hello... this is her speaking.." and the film opening ends there. Leaving the audience on a cliff hanger wondering if I got accepted or not. 

Below is one of the clips I found in my camera roll from my recital that we will use for the daydream.  We will add some type of filter to it to make sure it looks like it isn't reality. We arent going to use the whole clip but this is just the raw footage.

Solution to our problem!

Hey guys!

     It's been kinda crazy here in the Q... trying to maintain my normal life yet not being able to go out really anywhere is extremely tough! Andrea, Raisa, and I have been back and forth communicating through our group chat trying to figure out what we are going to do with our project. Due to corona, we aren't able to meet up with each other, making the process of this project really hard. And with that being said there are certain parts of our film opening that we had to dispose. For example, we can no longer do our flash mob which was an extremely crucial part of our opening. With school being cancelled, we can no longer film inside the classroom our auditorium. We were in a big pickle due to the fact that all of these places were crucial to our film. After days of talking to each other, my group and I figured out a solution to our problem in regards to filming and editing!

     "If we are in a group and can't be together, how are we going to film and edit?" That's a question that we all asked ourselves. Well, this is how we are going to go about it. Since I myself am the main character of this film, I am going to do all the filming at home with the help of my brother. Since I am filming by myself and this is a group effort, Andrea and Raisa are going to split the editing portion. "How are we going to split the editing if we can't be together?" is another question we asked ourselves. A solution to this problem is that Andrea is going to edit half and put it on a flash drive with all the raw footage and leave it in Raisas mailbox for her to edit the other half. We find this the only way to complete our group project without physically being together. While filming im going to Facetime the girls to show them what is going on and make sure it is being filmed the way we want it to so they can take part in it as well.

   We came up with solutions to fill in the holes that we can no longer film such as the school and auditorium scene. I explain this in my next blog. Not going to lie, this has been quite stressful with everything going on in the world. Having a complete idea and just starting to film all going down the drain is quite inconvenient, but nothing always works out perfectly always!

Until next time! <3

   
   

COVID-19 UPDATE

Hiiiii... STILL STUCK IN MY HOUSE! This is crazy... it feels like the world is ending. The Florida’s Department of Health confirmed 200 additional cases of COVID-19, bringing the state total of confirmed cases to 763 and a death toll of 12. Broward county has this most cases!! There's about 200 new cases a day. Im still here freaking out qabout my project. We haven't thought of anything to do. Our minds are everywhere with all of this craziness in the world. We are planning on speaking with our teacher soon. That's about it with the corona virus update... gets scarier each day. I'll be sure to keep you guys updated with any further changes to our project !!

Virtual Meeting...

Hey guys! We are still stuck at home with self-quarantine. Yesterday we had a virtual meeting with our teacher to give us updates on our project and how this is going to all workout due to the corona virus. We were informed that our project is extended until April 12th. This helps out obviously due to the fact that we are stuck at home not being able to do anything, but it is still stressful because we aren't supposed to go back to school until April 15th. My group and I are planning on having a group meeting with our teacher to discuss our individual project and our concerns due to the fact we can no longer meet with each other due to social distancing. The virtual meeting helped answer questions that people had and their concerns. Everyone seems to be on the same boat. Hopefully this gets figured out soon! I'll keep you guys updated.. talk to you soon!

Editing software and cameras

Hey guys! I decided to tell you which cameras and editing softwares I have and will be using for my project.

    For planning purposes and rough drafts my group and I have been using google docs. This helps use maintain our organization throughout this long and crazy process. Google docs gives us the  opportunity to share documents with each other so we can all edit all together.

To edit our film opening, we will be using Imovie. I have been usuing Imovie ever since I was in elementary school. I find this software the easiest for me just because of the amount of times I've used this software. In my opinion it is easy to work with. 

  We wanted to use a professional camera to film, but unfortunately my brother left all of his camera equipment at school in Indiana. So with that being said, we will be filming on Iphone 11 pros. The camera quality is actually really good on this phone. We used phones to film for our last project and the quality actually looked amazing! 

 

Stores closed? Lets compromise!

Hiii! So during this time as we practice social distancing and put ourselves in self-quarantine, I was trying to think of what I can do to help my project in the slightest bit. While sitting in my bed for however many hours (majority of the day) I came to the realization that due to stores closing, I can't go shopping for wardrobe for this project. So, I decided to put something together from my own closet. This actually works out because it saves money! With our plot taking place in the 90s, this actually works out perfect because the 90s asthetic tends to be the trend right now in 2020! So this is what I put together from my own clothes:

Outfit 1: Mom Jeans, shoelace belt, Black loose crop top, scrunch, and clear glasses 

Outfit 1:Mom Jeans, shoelace belt, Black loose crop top, scrunch, and clear glasses

Outfit 2: Mom jeans, loose white long sleeve with rainbow stripes

Outfit 3: Jean skirt with white ruffled tank top

Please ignore my messy room!! That's what quarantine does to you!! Im stuck between these three outfits. But outfit number one I think is really cute and fits thr time era. Mom jeans were really big back then and I feel like this outfit suits it! I would pair this with high socks and Reebok shoes that I luckily have that I needed for a dance competiton! Outfit number 2 helps represent our character and how she is apart of the LGBTQ+ community. The shirt has a rainbow stripe across it and I think it fits  perfectly. Outfit number 3 is my least favorite, although jean skirts were really in right now, I feel as if it doesn't fit our character Mia that we have created. As of now, I think outfit one is the winner!! Its basic and fits the character perfectly. We have the rainbow pins coming in the mail, so we will attatch it to the shirt.

Uh oh! A Bump in The Road!

Hi guys! So we have a big problem! Unfortunately do to the huge outbreak of the corona virus, school has been cancelled for the following week until further notice. This is not good for my group and I!! We were supposed to being filiming and have all of our rae footage by Friday. With this time off, we are trying to braindstorm different ideas that we can do on our own time to help create a successful project. This is hard because with the virus being so contagious we have to be in self-isolation. We will continue to figure out what we are going to do with our project without trying to stress during this crazy time in history!!

Screenplay

Hi guys! below are photos of a screenplay that my group and I created for our film opening. Although our opening doesn't have much dialogue, we decided to create one that shows stage direction and actions. Here it is:

The website we used is www.celtx.com, this website is great for creating screenplays if you are beginners like us. This website makes creating a screenplay as simple as possible. At first we weren't really sure if we should create one due to the fact there isn't much dialogue in our script. But, we did some research on why screenplays were important to help us understand why we needed to do this. "It is impossible to envision a film without a script, as the script is the base for what appears onscreen. It contains, as Assistant Professor of Film Debbie Danielpour explained in a November 10 lecture to the Boston University (BU) College of Communication (COM), what is both seen and heard. This includes a film’s structure, its dialogue, and perhaps most importantly (as movies were silent until 1926) a description of the scene’s most significant action." This is what we found while reasrching. This made up our minds and what guided us into creating our screenplay. 

Below is the link to the website where we found our research from: http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/172/the-significance-of-the-screenplay

Storyboard

Below are photos of our story board that we created in class:

 

     Creating this story board helps my group and I fully establish what are ideas are and how we want them to come to life. Learning about story boarding in the beginning of the year truly helped my group with our previous project "Trouble". Storyboarding helped us a lot during the filming process. It made us keep organized and have our ideas set straight. 

     

     Before creating our storyboard, we did some research on the importance of storyboarding. Below is a link to a webiste that really helped me undertsand key factors of storyboarding. https://elearningindustry.com/8-reasons-storyboarding-important-jumping-off-elearning-development

   Now that our storyboard is complete, this means it is time to start the filming process! I can't wait to see our vision come to life! 

Our OFFICAL story line

     Last class, Andrea, Raisa and I finally came up with our complete story line!!  We felt that after meeting with different groups and discussing different ideas we finally agreed to a complete story.


     Sooooo here it is!!!

Our main character, Mia will be sitting anxiously at her desk in class. She is tapping her pen and begins to drift off into a daydream. You can hear the voice of her teacher talking about how college applications are due soon. But all Mia can think and envison her self doing is performing on stage and persuing her dance dream. She is lost in a daydream and quickly snaps out of it as soon as the bell rings. She walks out of class and puts her headphones in. This is where the music starts. She is walkig home and she is just carelessly dancing around the street. The beat of the music kicks in and all of Mia's neighbors are around and begin to dance with her. Soon enough around 15 dancers are all doing a flash mob with Mia. As the music and flash mob ends her "normal life" resumes and eveything goes back into action like as if that scene never happened. Mia then takes her headphones out, and gets the mail which has college letters in it. Before entering her house she removes her rainbow pins from her shirt to hide it from her strict mother. She goes in and greets her mother and this is where the film opening ends leaving the audience wondering what will happen next and will Mia ever pursue her dance dream.


We had two different story lines and we couldn't decide which one we wanted. But this is the one we went with! Below is our two ideas;

Genre Challenges

   Our group decided to go outside the box and comfort zone and chose to go in the genre of a musical. We noticed that all the other groups mainly chose to do a horror film which is basic. With stepping outside our comfort zone and exploring different genres, comes many challenges.

    One of the first challenges we are going to have to over come is the music of course! It wouldn't be a musical without music! This part is going to be a bit tricky because 1. we are composing our own music. and 2. we have to incorporate it into our film without making it look and have the affect of a music video. So how we are overcoming this is we decided to do a flash mob dance scene to our composed song. This is very common in musical films as I found while researching. We are making sure that the main character Mia is the only character lip singing the song so we don't have to have multiple voices recorded for our music.

   A challenge that we also will have to over come is musicals tend to have multiple amounts of extras and dancers. Well, there is only 3 of us in a group we thought this would be really hard. To hop over this crack in the road, I decided to ask about 15 of my dance friends to take part in this flash mob and luckily they said yes!

   Filming musicals, especially the flash mob scene is going to be quite hard. We are going to use multiple cameras and angles to create this look that we have envisioned. There are multiple genre challenges that come with musicals, but we are ready and excited to overcome them and create our master piece!!

   http://www.cinemablography.org/blog/the-musical-film-genre-capturing-the-magic-of-the-stage-on-the-screen
Above is a link about musical film genres:

Target Auidence

    While researching the genre of musicals, we found out that the target auidence of the musical genre can range from many ages. To be specific movies such as High School Musical typically targets young kids around the age of seven to typically teenagers. On the other hand, films such as La La Land is generally target towards more adults as it is a more mature film.

     For our film, we decided we wanted a target audience of highschoolers usually ranging in the age from 15-18. We decided this audience would be most interested in our film considering that our story has to do with high school challenges, such as college acceptence. We feel that all high schoolers can relate to the pressure of starting the next chapter in your life, and that begins with college. Another big factor we wanted to include was the diversity in between characters. With having our character apart of the LGTBQ+ community, we wanted to make it clear that everyone is equal.

   I did some research on the two films of La La Land and High school muscial and these were some reviews regarding audiences.

https://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/film/why-la-la-land-is-set-to-split-audiences-a3439841.html
https://www.commonsensemedia.org/movie-reviews/high-school-musical

Group meetings!!

     This Tuesday, during our class time we met with people from other groups and expressed our ideas for our film openings. I thought this was extremely helpful. After pitching my groups idea, there were a lot of critiques towards my project that opened up my eyes a lot.

     Some of the feedback that I got from my peers was to make a part in the beginning more of like a day dream of myself performing on stage. This will help show how I am constantly thinking about my future of wanting to be a professional dancer. I liked this idea a lot, I feel that this would help the film opening have a clear understanding to develop the conflict of the film.

     Another idea that was recommended was to have shot of Mia's mom making her remove her rainbow pins on her shirt. Mia is apart of the LGBTQ community and and having this shot will help show that she is not accepted by her own parent.

    Other group members were saying how we might have too much going on. Since it is a film opening, we need to have just enough for it to leave viewers on a cliff hanger. With that being said, my group and I took what everybody said into perspective and made some changes to our outline. We decided that we are going to incorporate a big flash mob scene since it is a musical. We took the critiques into consideration and are going to have our film open up with the daydreaming scene.


    These group meetings helped a lot, after meeting with people my group and I came up with a concrete outline of our film. I cant wait to meet with groups again!
   

Our characters "look"

     Since we decided that we want our character, Mia to be apart of the LGBTQ+ community and be kind of an outcast in her town, we decided to have her costuming have a 90s vibe to it. We thought this would be a good idea to make Mia stand out living in contemporary time. 

     

     We did some research, and found cute 90s outfit inspiration that we will potentially use for our wardrobe for the film. While researching, we got some inspiration from the film Clueless as it was a film that took place in the 90s.  Different outfits such as mom jeans, plaid skirts, and overalls were some things we found that were worn a lot during this time era. For the shoes we also saw that Reeboks were really in style. I have a pair actually that I used for a dance competiton so we thought it would be perfect to add to Mia's outfit.

We also wanted to incorporate that Mia is apart of the LGBTQ+ community so we are also going to invest in buying rainbow pins to attatch to her backpack and even shirt.