AICE Media Studies Blog

https://youtu.be/82h0hsgTgbQ

          Never thought I would make it to the point of writing this final post, because the past few months have felt like an eternity because of all the time and effort that went into coming up with the finished product. As I've said before, it took a lot of collaboration and long work nights to pull this off. I'm actually updating this post late at night on deadline day, so work began at the very start and didn't end until the last minute it seems. I guess that's a good thing because I think it looks amazing as a film and hopefully other people will think so as well.           Looking back on the overall work process, our instructor did a great job with pacing us and making sure we had the right material for the right sections, all ordered correctly. Starting with preproduction, the research and thinking was very extensive for how I wanted my film to look and feel, and overall, what I wanted it to be. Once I got that finalized, I...

          Well, the perfect plan for the sound and background music ended up being not so perfect, and some other aspects of the project have been shifted around in the last week. I guess I should come to expect that at this point in the project, being that our efforts have been filled with surprises, hurdles, and changes from start to finish. Although its a little frustrating to backtrack on previous steps, I'm finding new ways around the problem that will hopefully make the finished as good or better than previously.           The main issue I just ran into was that the great background music I had chosen for the clip ended up being unusable, because the source prevented it from being downloaded in the way I intended. It's really annoying considering I now have to go back and find completely new music tracks, but I've actually already done some researching across a source I hadn't approached before: YouTube. Turns out there ...

          So the editing is finally done and looks great, but now I have the job of making it sound like a movie. My previous research into the genre taught me that sound effects and music are huge in sci-fi, and I can personally confirm this as well. When I look at all the great sci-fi film openings, from the ominous empire theme entrance of Star Wars to the optimistic, emotional music of Star Trek , music plays a big part in the opening.           I started off just doing a general search for any source of background music tracks but I actually found a good source relatively fast. It's called melodyloops.com and they had hundreds of tracks (royalty free) that were sci-fi themed and downloadable. After an hour of scrolling and listening, I had picked out two tracks that fit the tone of the scene perfectly. One of which, labeled "Tense Chase" perfectly captured the mood and theme of the chase scene and we will use that music duri...

          Since editing isn't really my strong suit in the filmmaking process as I've said already, I'm getting a lot of this information from Noah for these editing posts because even though editing isn't my role in the project, I still want to explain how we are going through the process, what tools we are using, etc.

          Now that we've gotten the filming done, we've been focused on editing for the last few days. I will actually admit that the raw footage didn't really look all that great before editing, but when we cut it all together, it actually turned out way better than I expected. It honestly looks like a very clean product and once we add sound, it will be finished for the most part, which is really satisfying to say considering all the months of planning and research and work that went into this.           Through this project, I'm starting to realize that Noah and I are working as a team pretty well throughout all this. We are collaborating on decisions for the most part, but we're both fitting to individual roles. I was mostly the creative leader for the production process and came up with the overall concept for the story, while Noah was the technological mind behind all the editing and making it actually look good as a film. Ev...