CAP Hollywood Reflection #3

First off, just so you know Mr. Mayo, I fully acknowledge that my third reflection is a full week late. I'm sorry.

That said, quite a bit has happened in the past two weeks. Last weekend, which is when I would have written this post if it was on time, we had finished filming. Saturday morning, I recorded voiceovers with one of our actors.That afternoon, Kirin and I went with our actors to film the second and third acts of our film in Dupont Circle. I set up each shot and directed the actors in the shot. Kirin kept track of each shot and made sure that we had filmed everything we needed to. She also gave input as to how shots should be set up.

This past week, I came in before school on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and after school  Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday to edit our footage. Because there was HSA testing happening, I had three hours to edit during those mornings. On Monday morning, Kirin and I went in to edit. We imported the new footage from the camera and edited the footage of the chase scene and the final scene of our film. By the end of the morning, our film was almost done. It needed to be cut shorter and the audio needed to be edited, but besides that, the film was really coming together.

On Tuesday afternoon, I came in afterschool to finish up the film, to find that the hard drive on which we were saving our film had been dropped and our entire timeline was deleted. That day, I stayed after school until 5:30 attempting to salvage some of the raw footage that we had used by dragging it from the hard drive to the media storage on the computer.

The next day, Kirin and I came in again. We found an earlier version of our film saved onto another computer and re-imported the new footage onto that computer. I transferred the voiceovers from the hard drive on which they were saved, to the new computer, using a flash drive. Kirin and I then re-edited the entire second half of the film. We did this in considerably less time than it took us the first time, as we knew what clips needed to be cut, what order shots would be in, and what clips could be cut shorter. With this knowledge, not only did we finish editing more quickly, but we also cut our film down to an acceptable length (four minutes). Kirin and I worked well together. I pieced together the end sequences and kirin worked to cut down the film to the correct length.

After school that day, I came in an edited the audio to make sure all of the sound was at the right levels. The next morning, I came in again to do some fine-tuning and after school, we exported. We effectively completed the majority of our film in a day.

Speaking to your question about my goals, this time last week, our goals were to finish editing and export our film by Friday afternoon. In retrospect, I'd say that we did extremely well with achieving those goals.