AICE Media Studies

                                                                               Critical Reflection How do your products represent social groups or issues? 1-     My products where based and researched behind the topic of horror specifically about two incidents, kidnapping and murder. Both of these topics are real world issues that affect multiple people worldwide and are a cause for many people to end up depressed or even kill themselves. Well within the world of film certain movies will have topics based upon real world events, as my short film represents two of the most known horrific incidents caused around the world. My products of my social media accounts/website and 5-minute film portray these actions with pictures and dialogue. A pict...

Trapped https://youtu.be/zImE9XpCrcA Post Card (Front of the Post Card) (Back of the Post Card) Website link https://dylanravid101.wixsite.com/website Website Homepage

Today was about finishing a process behind my website and social media accounts, specifically certain pictures. For these pictures they were made for the profile picture and also my main account picture for the website which is still in the works at the moment. I started by finding a painting within my house and taking a picture of it, as within my film the main item is a painting of a woman with no face. I tried to keep ties into my film with my social media accounts without going too far in depth of my actual film, and the process in creating the logo began within an editing phone app. The phone app I had used made it so that the formation and coloring of this picture could be edited to look as if the lady had no face. The painting itself wasn't changed so much, however as the size wasn't a great deal big the editing was able to be much different compared to my film. As far as my film goes, the painting used in the final scene was not only darkened with a flashlight to illumi...

           Today's blog will be about my steps to regather certain props for my film. Now this film is still in works from given spectator comments as well as my own personal opinion, so changing the props was necessary in the final film. The certain mistakes which played through the first take of the film came as not getting the correct clocks for the hallway scene, using the wrong version of blood, and getting a new mask/costume and painting. Now some of these weren't mistakes, however it was and will be improvements with the final week I have to work on this project. Getting straight into it I came across parts in my film where I knew it could have been better, both in filming and features. The hallway scene came to a surprise for me as I thought my work was perfect, but as I took a look back the clocks just weren't doing it. So as I mark down on my phone certain items to find while school ended I began the search for the perfect medium sized w...

                     To begin the process of my voice overs/audio inserts, I needed to have certain equipment and materials. My close friend provided me with a mic, and also was a great help with the music and special sounds. The mic's quality of sound performance was on key, however the audio for the monster was just my own voice but inserted onto a computer app and distorted. Luckily I had a friend who was an expert at technology and was able to adapt my voice in a voice simulator and change the frequency and accent. Step one of my progress was complete, of course it was all saved on separate files. Next I needed to record my own lines for each part of internal dialogue in my script which didn't take long. Each recording was saved in a separate file and then worked upon by myself and my good friend Eric to check for any mistakes in sound. There were a few bumps in the road when testing out the audio change...

   This blog is going to elaborate on the finishing touches of both my edits on the scenes with props and without. In the past few days I have completed a majority of editing for both sections of my film and saved them on a drive. Today I worked upon completing and putting both sections together to create my final film within Imovie. FilmoraGo wasn't very useful in the end run and I decided not to go ahead and finish my film on that app. On Imovie I dragged all the footage I had edited and first looked at the length, which turned out to be around 5 minutes which is where we need it to be. Not over 6 and not under 5 so my length was at a reasonable size, then came time to rewatch for any errors. As I put each scene in the corresponding order in which my story board was created, I found that some transitions weren't going as smooth as I hoped it to be. Now this issue may come from the app itself, but as seen that I've used it before it meant that I needed to fix something. Th...

                The next set of scenes which I needed to edit was my scenes which included props. Those scenes were shot after the scenes without and were given more time due to the immense amounts of retakes. There were about 10 duplicate shots taken for each scene which filled up my drive quite a bit and forced me to take action on looking through and deleting many. In the next few hours I decided to take a chance to look at all my scenes. I went ahead and deleted all of the unusable footage and kept all the ones worth editing. Each scene of course was put into the app, however I used a couple to see which one would come out the best. For the app itself I decided to use both Imovie and filmoraGo, in order to capture detail and see what effects are different between them. I started off by clipping the unused footage and taking out sound for the scenes which included voice overs. That process alone took quite a while since each scen...

                The of editing of my end scenes as well as my pictures for my characters was being done on my phone. Now comes my first step/process of editing on my computer using editing apps. For these editing softwares, I decided to use two which were free and able to be accessed on my laptop. These two editing apps are called, "Imovie", and "FilmoraGo", however Imovie is the main one I used. I decided to go with these two since they were free and both were apple product editing softwares. In the future I may come across some type of software which works better which may be stated in my up coming blogs about my editing process. For now these work, they are simple and take clips and do as necessary by cutting them and inserting transitions from scene to scene. I kept Imovie, since my phone had the ability to access the app and transport over the edited clips so I went from there. My beginning process was trying to start on the ed...

           Music is no doubt a really important aspect in filming. Well for my film in particular I decided to go beyond finding music from some one else, I decided if I needed music Id use my friends piano/keyboard. My friend Eric is a learning musician and decided to take interest in piano which to me helped greatly. He thought of getting either a musical or electronic one, and the decision for electronic was the better one. He could be able to create different songs and effects all by pressing buttons. Sure, back before I wanted to incorporate him I did decided on finding samples of sounds but the longer the process the harder it was. I wanted to try and challenge myself in creating something new that others wouldn't think off. Take the approach to my back ground sounds for example, the sounds I use for the scratching and the monsters voice are all going to be edited versions of sounds I will be preforming. It came to me as I research from cert...

              As the day began, I began to look over certain scenes from filming from the past couple days. Within the time of looking over, I came across certain mistakes which were posed in the final end scenes. I started to edit the scenes which were the shortest and do certain cut downs with the longer scenes and came across a few errors in my final scenes which I filmed. The first of the problems was the camera angles and the characters facial expressions. In the last few shots including the monster and the character reaching for the painting, my mid shot was to far down and included the knees up which wasn't what I was going for. The facial expressions of the character also seemed to be pretty forced as instead of having a scared face, the actor seemed to have a confused facial expression. These few detail were easy enough to fix as the whole day I was able to film the last scenes. I began the scenes with a new approach, I kept the lighting ...

                After the filming process was in completion, then came the work being done for the characters. With the film also comes different forms of media which must be touched upon in the process. With the media link accounts and our official movie website, I needed multiple picture of my character. The first picture started as my profile picture for my movie website and all four media accounts, the idea for my main picture sprung from kidnapping and was transformed into a man who was tied up and having cried black tears taken in black and white. This process was for our website as we needed to show our audience a picture which correlated back to the film. For the profile picture came the idea behind our painting, the painting resembled the most important item in the film, and due to the fact that the prop I used was my own design I decided to take a picture of my re-created painting. These touches are being worked upon and edited so a...

                As winter break came to a start, the process to film the second scenes began which included the scenes of only props. The period between the first take of scenes till now was built with task to gather up my props, and midterm studying. As I retrieved my props for filming from various locations I began to film. The props all had different scenes and all need crucial time to set up right so I had help from my cousin Noam who also was the camera man behind the scenes. Coming to a start was the begging on scene nine and ten, scene nine had a wall which had blood dripped down the wall which of course was "fake" blood. To make this happen I needed to get the right poor from the top of the wall to drip down which overall took a few tries and clean ups, but in the end came out very well. We shot the Establishing shot and focused on the next scene with the envelope. Now this was wasn't to difficult to create, we needed an envelope...

        Starting from Saturday, November 21 till Tuesday, November 24, I began to film for my short film. With this process came the challenge of starting to film certain scenes with and without props. Getting into the characters and filming process, we start with myself being the main character "Jason", and my cousin Noam who plays the shadow creature as well as the camera man. I choose to have Noam as both since the shadow figure has only a few roles towards the end, and once his scene comes i'll have my father film the last few scenes. On Saturday came time for me to film, I decided to take parts of my short film which didn't include props since that time I didn't have all my props ready. The first few scenes I believe up until the bathroom scene was shot. It mainly included close ups of myself and then tracking of the character walking. It was reasonably simple as the dialogue was internal for all of those scenes which meant I could insert my voice speaking ...

    Within any movie or short film, one must have certain props to create detailed scenes and bring forth attention to their genre. As I began filming for my short film, I decided to focus down and pick seven props to use. Each prop will be used in different scenes but all have a connection within the film, as my genre is horror many of these will have a connection to that specific genre. Starting off, my first few scenes involve one of my props, " Note ". The note within the film is this paper with direction the main protagonist must follow in order to survive, bringing the anticipation higher. Continuing from that scene comes " Blood ", now this prop will be used in the wall scene continuing from the note. As the character reads the note he sees a wall with blood dripping down from it. This does play a role in the horror aspect and brings into key as the blood is shown as a symbol for the shadow creature, as well as the note. Next comes " Clocks ", this ...

           Within this blog I will be discussing the further actions I took on my website for my social media accounts. One aspect of the A level Media class is the requirement for a website to be formed with social media platforms linked to that specific website. Within this website comes four separate media social accounts needed; Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube. Before I started on these websites I needed to figure out a name for my short film. My short film is based on a horror movie, which made me think of titles giving off a scary theme to it, not to mention my character is trapped within a house. The aspect was the name itself, "Trapped". Once I had my inspiration and name behind my film, I needed to create four separate accounts yet each account had the same username as it followed with my film. The username which I chose was a formation between the title of the film and the actor's name, called "Trapped_Jason". Now as ...

                  This assignment was to create a story board for our 5 minute film project. When I created this story board I followed the certain format which my script followed per scene. Not only did I have the whole movie portrayed within my mind, but I knew what I wanted to draw per scene. For the drawing aspect I decided to take pictures of each scene in action with my father to help me as the character to get a good idea at what i'm looking at. For the writing aspect is where some of my script came out in, as I brought each scene to live stating what was going on in that one box which is one scene, not only did I number them I also stated whether there was dialogue or not. Within the text box to show which camera angles I wanted to use, I wrote each angle or camera shot per scene. During this process it took me around three to four days, as I needed to collect the pictures, then draw out each scene to the best of my ability ...

           My short film, has yet to be filmed and during this time I am on my way to prepare the steps needed to film. Begging on this process is my schedule, with my schedule comes day where I can and can't film. Throughout the whole school year and on I have created a schedule based on the days in which I can film and with that information I can decided for about 3-4 days. Those days include Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, now about time management with those days comes a working challenge. With Wednesday and Friday my filming time must start after 2:40 as this is when school ends, but for Saturday I have all day to work on filming, and Sunday must be after 4:00 due to my work. The days that I have not mentioned are days in which are taken by busy work, Monday and Tuesday are school and then my job, and Thursday is my scheduled gym and college prep, however things could always change in editing those around, however I do indeed have a base set u...

        One aspect within the short film which was not to be found in the long film was the insertion of sound. The short film contained no actual sound from the characters only having object sounds. The full length film contained around nine separate characters which all portrayed their own speaking voice, I believe that the short film was meant as soundless audio to only pertain what was going on. Unlike the longer lengthen film which create story plot and character development. Speaking of character development the short film portrayed two characters which were puppets numbered nine, and five, however with the long film there were nine puppets: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9. The story spread out the characters with there own description in the featured film, each had their own definition. Nine was the antagonist and main character, eight was this big body guard for number one, number seven was a trained puppet useful to protect, six was a creepy misunderstood character who wa...

        This movie was so inspirational, it was a peak highlight in motion picture animation movie.The newly adaptation of the film was a add on to the short film, it carried a few aspects to the movie with the ending as well as some of the characters. My personally preference was just to personally say that this was an amazing movie, filled with high quality editing and motion capturing as well as plot/character development expressed further on. The main plot/summary to this movie was about this world after a large attack by machines which had adapted to learn and focus on humans, these last soul survivors where puppets which each had a piece of soul fragments of the scientist who created them. Each of them where numbered 1-9, each character will be delved deeper into, however the story continued as the search for identity came, where these puppets where, who was attacking them, and how many more where there? Nine which was the main antagonist had ventured out and d...

      This short film was created in such a creative way. How i interpreted this movie as a story where these puppets numbered (9) and (5), both are trapped in this scavenger apocalyptic universe with a creature hunting them down. They seem to have this glowing alien type of technology in which it beeps whenever this monster grows closer, and or even have a connection between both of these puppets. As this film goes on a scene appears where one of the puppets dies while the other must run away, in a very creative chasing scene the puppet makes a trap for the monster in order to gain some time, once given he finds an edge of this wooden floor beam. Puppet (9) got the monster to fall off and then it died, or just well got trapped. In the end of losing a friend he figured out that these two communication devices when connected create a holographic message of the soul which has passed, as this machine captures the soul which posses the bodies of these puppets. Overall I loved...