BULLY RESHOOT!

 TREY'S BULLY (HOW LONG CAN WE KEEP THIS UP?)

Today we refilmed the Bully scenes. We decided to film in my neighborhood since our friend, who also happens to have a good camera, lives there as well. Plus, it looked much more natural than it would in a school setting. We filmed at 9:30am to get it done fast; it would only take us 15-20 minutes.

Filming went great, and even better than we filmed the first time! I'm going to import this footage into the timeline today, along with adding the sound and the music. FOLLOW UP NEXT TIME ON TREY'S SPLIT POST-PRODUCTION Z KAI!

EDITING TREY

 THE START OF A NEW TREY
Today I will be finally editing Trey's Split. I imported all of our clips into Premiere and started working on it.

I removed the audio and cut out the extra filler from the clips we got for the opening to be concise and natural. The microphone on the camera is poor, so I completely left it out. As I was rendering the rest of the clips, I noticed that the colors on the footage were very bland and desaturated, which didn't fit with the theme of Trey's Split. To fix this, I added an adjustment layer above the raw footage and color-graded it to make the scenes more colorful, perfectly fit with the movie's spirit, as well as meet the audience's desires. Here's a before and after.

BEFORE

AFTER

Before I added any effects or music, I made a line edit of all the clips I wanted to include in the final cut just so I had a clear picture of what I wanted for the opening. Throwing everything that you've recorded into the timeline isn't a good idea, since you're not going to like every shot you've gotten in pre-production. Only including the best ones will make your life much easier (Trey wouldn't know anything about that LOL!).

I'm gonna add music and audio tomorrow, which happens to be the same day where we're going to refilm the bully scene! Stay tuned for the next episode of Trey's Split Production Z Kai! (We're going to have to work on that name...)

CCR

 I’m currently working on the CCR

Problems

We ran into quite an issue today. As we begin the editing process for the video, we’ve come to realize that we had actually lost the footage for the bully scene. Me and Drew were very stressed about this, not knowing what to do next. We used someone else’s SD card and so we went to them to see if he had the footage, and to our dismay, he did not. 

We decided to refilm our video on Tuesday to make up for this.  We’ll let you know how it goes!

Time to Hit The Booth!

TREY'S LINES

 Today I went to the soundbooth in the CBTV room to record my lines, and I went into this knowing it'd be tough. I naturally speak very fast, so reading a full fledged script would be difficult for me. So by the time I checked out a mic, sat comfortably in a chair, and cleared my throat to speak, my assumptions were correct. I mumbled, stuttered, and all sorts of obstacles arose. To remedy this, I slowed down my speech and spoke more thoroughly. 

I decided to give Trey a bit of a Floridian accent when he gets emotional to show that he code switches between two dialects: that of proper English and AAVE. While I read over the lines about the nicknames, I decided to throw in an additional N-WORD  because I felt like it would be synonymous with how other kids his age speak and illustrate his cultural background.

I finished, listened back to the recordings, and decided to re record the lines at a later date.

The Plan For This Week

Drew and I have planned to begin the following processes this week.

VOICE OVER
We plan to record the voice-over tomorrow during our seventh hour together. A professional mic will be used to record my voice reading Trey's dialogue, and it should take us the entire period depending on how many times I screw up. I want to portray my character in the best way possible, so I don't want it to sound unprofessional or choppy.

 NAMETAG PICTURES

We're planning to take pictures of the nametags we wrote on and scan them so we can use them in the opening. This should take us five minutes since we're both working on it, and we plan to do this during our Aice Media Studies period. We're going to plug them into Premiere to see if they fill out the frame, and if they don't, we'll just simply write some more.

GRAPHIC RESEARCH

As we begin our editing process, we plan to do some extensive research on the graphics that will be used for the video. We want to ensure that the VFX looks good and professional, even if we have to use After Effects. We're going to take a look at comic books, video game aesthetics, and tutorials to help bring our vision to life.

EDITING

We're going to make a line edit of the film without music or graphics just so we have a good baseline to start from. We plan to work on this after school and during spring break.




I'm looking forward to this project!

Filming The Bike Scenes

 TREY RIDES

Right from the start, Drew and I decided to film the biking scenes very experimentally rather than just placing a camera on a tripod and having it track the bike riding in a straight line. Instead, we tried multiple techniques to see what stuck and best fit the film. 

 GENERIC WAY

At first, we went the basic route and placed the camera on a tripod, but we made it more creative by framing the shot to look more unique. We liked how it looked, but some of the shots were too plain to include in the final cut, so we ended up choosing a handful of unique ones.

 COOLER WAY
We asked our friend to drive his car while Drew filmed me from the side in the passenger seat. We liked how it looked, but in some parts of the footage, I drove too far away from the frame. However, what we recorded was still usable, and we plan to edit out the bad parts of the shot.

 COOLEST WAY
This time, we decided to get a shot of me biking from the back of the car, but we didn't really know how to execute the shot. Drew tried filming me from the backseat sticking out the window, but it was unusable because you could see the car. Thus, we only had one choice... THE TRUNK. By far, this was the best biking angle we've gotten during filming. However, I biked a little too far away from the camera, so we decided to keep in the shots where I was proximate to the camera.