Creative Critical Reflection

 

My creative critical reflection! I loved putting this PowerPoint together and making it match the film created with our group.

Final Film

Our film takes place in present time and revolves around a Hispanic teenager, Carla, who has high expectations to meet due to her mom’s strict behavior. Carla is walking out of class one day when suddenly, she receives a notification from her teacher, Mr. Johnson, regarding her final. Looking at her F, she panics and starts to think of her mom yelling at her for not meeting her high standards. Carla snaps out of it and goes inside the theater to talk to Mr. Johnson. Inside, Carla tries to negotiate with Mr. Johnson but is met with failure. As she walks away in defeat, Carla starts to feel overwhelmed by negative emotions, until she spots a knife. Carla slowly walks up to the knife and stabs Mr. Johnson behind his back. His now dead body lying next to her, she takes his laptop, changes her grade and quickly leaves, taking the evidence with her. The next day, one of Carla's teachers, Ms. E, approaches her during class and asks questions about how Carla is feeling and if she heard about what happened to Mr. Johnson. Carla, confused by the question, answers nervously. Ms. E is clearly suspicious of Carla and starts to interrogate her until the film cuts, will we ever know if Ms. E caught Carla? or maybe it was just a bluff...

 After receiving feedback from my peers, my group and I made several changes to our film and finalized the product. As stressful as the journey was, I'm proud of how this film came out. I especially enjoyed collaborating ideas with my group and creating something straight from our brains. The process of picking a location to editing is all crucial in making a film and it's a lot more complex than picking up a camera and acting. There's so much tech stuff that goes behind it like picking camera angles and framing. This is definitely one of the more fun tests I've had this year.

The biggest challenge of re-editing this film was definitely adding a voiceover. Sound in general was the most tedious aspect of editing this film since wrong timing can easily take an audience out of the film world and back into reality. Adding internal monologue in a character mean's digging deep in who your character is and how they think. There was a long thought process behind our group in figuring out phrases or words our character Carla would say.

Post-Production: Editing

After filming all scenes in the film, including the final interrogation scene that was added, it was only a matter of editing. Jada was in charge of the editing but all of us had to sit down to decide how the sound should be edited in certain scenes, or what transitions would be best between specific clips. Here's a breakdown of all the editing techniques used in the film and why they were added.

The first thing added after putting all the clips together was the voiceover. Originally, we weren't going to add a voiceover because we felt as if it took away from the suspense of the film. The silence of the film did make certain clips look awkward though, so we added voice over of Carla's internal monologue to let the audience know what is going through her head. This gives the audience a chance to relate to Carla.

The next and easiest thing was transitions. Transitions move a story along and if they look out of place, it can really take the audience out of the world in the story. Flashback scenes for example, had blurry transitions to resemble the time-travelling in Carla's head. If this transition were used for all clips, it would look choppy. The black fade in was used in two scenes. One, to transition from Carla's walking to her talk with Mr. Johnson and second time to transition from the murder scene to the next day.

Filters weren't used as much as the other editing factors, but they still played a big role especially in the Flashback scenes. The flashback scenes had to be a different color to resemble the scene taking place in a different time. The clips were changed to a less saturated, almost grey, color to resemble the past.

The most tedious part of this whole process was the sound editing. The sound of clips had to be controlled. If there was noise in the background it had to be reduced and the voice of the characters had to be increased. Music, voiceover, and sound effects had to fit in with scene and complement each other. A good example of all these factors working together is the scene where Carla picks up the knife and kills her teacher. Carla's mom's and Mr. Johnson's voice are duplicated to be used in those clips; they're given an echo to resemble Carla's mind. A heartbeat sound effect is added which makes the audience aware of what Carla is feeling and hints what she's about to do. A small voiceover is added until Carla's mind goes blank and loud of the voices in her head, resembling her breaking under pressure.

A small detail was the end title scene. Depending on the movie, most movies have the title after the opening scene and credits. We decided to do this because it gives a strong ending.

Production Week: Final Day

After receiving feedback on our movie, our group realized we still had a little more work to do. While I thought the first draft was great, I'll admit it was missing a lot of things like a voiceover, credits, title, production logo, and time. Another short filming day had to be planned to make up for these mistakes.

We were never able to film the first scene in Ms. Vincent's class, however, we felt that the introduction would be too long if we added another scene to the beginning. Our end was good, but it wasn't strong. The audience should have a reason to want to see more of a film after watching the first few scenes. After some discussion, we decided to add a scene, with another teacher questioning Carla in a suspicious manner. This leaves the audience wondering "was she caught?" or "will she get away with it?" and makes them want to watch more. 

The day of filming, I wore dark colored clothes to contrast the costume the beginning of the movie. This portrays the evolution of Carla's character. She went from a bright, smart girl to a dark killer. Jada and I added another small prop too, a folder for Carla to mindlessly flip around as she thinks of what she did.

Later that day me and Jada met up to film the final scene since Brandon had class. We went to our teacher's room and asked her if she wanted to play the teacher who would interrogate Carla and she gladly accepted. We named her character Ms. E and discussed how we wanted the scene to go. Our group was on a time crunch, so we didn't have much time to write and memorize lines, all we could do was make a general outline.

The scene takes place the following day and Carla is wondrously flipping through her folder with no thoughts, just guilt, until Ms. E stops her and asks if she's heard about Mr. Johnson's death. Carla gets nervous and asks, "what do you mean" to which Ms. E responds "Carla I think we know."

After talking about the outline, we quickly filmed the scene, which was mostly improvisation, but we made it work. The camera work was kept fairly simple since the scene was really short, being less than 30 seconds. The camera movement went from a slow zoom (before Ms. E) to random movement. This portrays Carla's mind which is all over the place after committing a crime. The shot goes from medium full to just medium and the angle stays eye level. The camera framing remains one shot, only showing Ms. E's hand. This was done to give Ms. E a sense of power, the audience can only hear her voice and see her hand, making her a mysterious yet intimidating character, leaving Carla in a vulnerable perspective.

Jada and I took two takes and chose the best one for the final scene. After we finished, we added the clip to the movie to finalize editing, including adding a voiceover.