How did your production skills develop through this project?
Friday, December 15, 2023
CCR Written Questions
How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?
Our movie starts off with both actors in white, showing an equal chance of winning the game. This would set up the expectation that the person with white pieces is going to win. However the Winner has is playing with black pieces and the Loser is playing with white pieces. The Winner is happy they won while the Loser is extremely angry. The issue here is that even though you may have all the good cards handed to you, if you don't play them right, you will lose it all. The Loser wasted all his pieces on bad moves while the Winner was smart with his plays. The Loser became desperate and ended up losing, making him angry and filled with hatred.
How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?
Our movie engages with audiences by keeping them in suspense, wondering whats going to happen next. It is a horror film so its predictable to an extent but we had the intrigue of chicken-man. Audience members will be curious as to what the chicken-man will do. I would distribute the film through YouTube because it is only 1 minute long. Before releasing it, I would promote it through social media to get more people to watch it. Maybe making a viral meme out of it that would boost views.
How did you integrate technologies-software, hardware, online- in this project?
For this film, we shot the entire thing on an IPhone 15 camera. This camera gave us pretty good quality shots. For editing we used Adobe premier rush. This was used to brighten/darken our shots so it looked like the same day. It was needed to color correct the one scene where our actor had to move the chess piece for the Winner.
Monday, December 4, 2023
Chess Film Day 14
This is the last fine cut before the final cut. We followed all the suggestions from our teacher. The color was added back in, the chicken mask pops, and we cut out the last few seconds of the ending shot. We have credits (my name was accidentally spelled wrong) and all we need is a title card for us to be done.
There was a brief debate over the audio, the cinematographer wanted to take out the footstep sound effect from the walking in the beginning of scene 2. The sound effect did sound a little weird in between the music but it was a little too late to go back and change it. It would sound worse if there was no audio in the middle. We wanted to get that full day of blogging before Tuesday so the audio stayed the way it is.
Fine cut/edit 6:
SCREENING DAY 13
In class we did a screening of all the chess films made by every group. We screened edit 5 of the film with no audio and received feedback from our peers on how we did. We got a lot of suggestions from our teacher on how to make it better. Starting with the fact that the entire movie was too dark, it bled so much color that it was hard to see. Its possible to keep a dark, creepy mood without the audience having to squint at the screen the entire time.
Other feedback was that the color correcting was extremely obvious when paused, but we had to work with it. The hand movement is fast so its not that noticeable if your not looking for it. Also, our teacher said to highlight the chicken mask more so it pops out and doesn't look dull. Another thing was that a few shots were just out of focus but we couldn't do much with that now.
Still from The Batman, 2022 that is really dark but
is a little visible.
Still from House of the Dragon, 2022 that is difficult to see
because its so dark.
Our teacher mentioned one shot in particular, where chicken-man is finished putting on the medal, he is aligned on the left rule of thirds line, and stays aligned there. This creates the expectation that someone is going to attack him from the right because there is so much space there. We should have put him in the middle or right, not the left.
Lastly, the ending shot where chicken-man walks away is too long. Its nice how he disappears behind the pole but he takes too much time to walk over there. We should have done that part closer or faster.
Now we just need to make these corrections, add the title card, then we have our Final Cut!
Chess Film Day 12
During this stage of editing, the editor noticed a problem with the framing of one shot. All this time, the Loser has been playing on the left rule of thirds line and the Winner on the right. The day the actor who plays Winner did not show up, we shot this with the other actor, but it was the opposite of what it was supposed to be. The "Winner" was on the left rule of thirds line instead of the Loser. He flipped the shot so it aligned with where we established the characters.
The editor played with color a bit, making everything darker to give a more horror vibe. Some parts were a little bit too dark which made it hard to see what was going on. The dragging shot was re-added because it gave more meaning and implied violence to the film.The audio was also added to test it out.
Edit 5:
https://youtu.be/ssWufpgg9P0?si=KwGNS2l9VRKhuc0W
Chess Film Day 11
Today's work was really focused on shortening the film and adding audio. We collectively decided to cut the dragging and the corner shot while also shortening the part where the Winner walks down the hallway. This left us with 57 seconds total, under the limit with enough space to add the title card later. The film felt drastically different without the shots we cut, but it still worked story-wise.
In this edit, the editor added a zoom in + tilt when the Winner walks in at the beginning of scene 2. This gave a more distorted, creepy effect. You know something bad is going to happen to that character.
Chess film edit 2 (it says 4 but it was the next link he sent to us):
https://youtu.be/-cSH6QK8LWE?si=fiEOXToG8KRcP6LI
Chess Film Day 10
Our editor sent over a rough cut of the movie to get our input. He trimmed the clips and put them in order. The shots were what we planned out on the storyboard so we knew it should fit together. One major problem is that the film is over our time limit. We are at 1 minute and 15 seconds when we should have 1 minute maximum. Another problem is that we need some very heavy editing to make all the footage look like it was shot the same day.
To shorten the film, I wanted to take out a couple seconds from a few shots instead of cutting them out entirely. Starting with the dragging scene at 0:45 then at 0:50 where chicken man turns the corner. By shortening a few more shots I think we will be at the time limit. The editor does have quite a bit of work to do over the next few weeks.
The link to the first edit/rough cut:
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