Production Journal #4

Okay, this might actually shade some light.
My friend and I went back to the place in Salem.
I tried to email the Oregon Film Organization, but nothing came back and I figure I would be on my own.
Bad news is, the state began demolishing the buildings again:

Like this building is completely gone now. It was still intact last time we visited the place.

The good news is that I was able to get into one building and get some footage inside:

Production Journal #3 Website

I did the prototype for the website in photoshop and Dreamweaver since my coding ability has really rusty.

The website itself was quite simple: the title is cropped from a screenshot from the footage. I was having a hard time to come up with a name of this project, and all the sudden this frame hit me. I think "Always Watching" sounds like an appropriate title for a horror movie.

For the navigation bar, I used the default font from photoshop. During the meeting, Liz suggested me using a hand-written font instead of the default fonts.

And the website is not responsive as I intend it to be.

So during spring break, I made some modification.
I started another website from the scratch. This time I choice to code everything from the beginning.

I took Liz's suggestion and re-did the entire navigation bat. I hand-written and scaned each button, photoshopped them into png images with a transparent background.

I forgot to change the quality of the images when I first did it. So each button is bout 1 MB big. I realized this when reading an unrealized online post about how to make the navigation bar responsive. So I change it right afterwards.





It took me a while to figure out how to make the page responsive.
There' are still some issues with the responsive. I think I'll arrange a meeting with a COMP faculty to discuss how to perfect the web page.

Production Journal #2

I had the talk with prof. Huntsberger.
Partly it was required for my the capstone class. In the other hand, I am pretty much stuck at this moment, so I could use some help as well.
The meeting was brief and short. I showed him the stuff I had so far.
He's suggestion was having me doing a script and treatment.
This might've hard for me right now since I only have a brief story outline the story.
Venues have been a biggest issue for this project. It breaks down my entire creating processing.
I need to start the web page for the project so at least I will have something done by next week.

Production Journal

The editing has been rough. 

Initially, my goal was to have a 10 minutes long "found footage" and a 40 seconds long "movie trailer". Becuase I shot all the footage at the alternative site, so there's no script for that Saturday's on location shooting. Me and my friend were just acting along and see what we got. 

4K seems like a horrible life choice. Aside from the frame rate and the ambient noise, the resolution of the footages are amazing. I think my phone is just can't handle such intensive shooting, it's not a professional equipment, after all. 

When I was conducting the videos, my friend and I really tried to make the story coherent. At least t was we tried. But lots of the video have these wired glitches: losing several frames at once, audio keeping skipping the pace. These glitches have made my editing process extremely hard. 

For example:

This clip here was supposed to be the one right after the introduction, where I show an overall view of the location. The audio was totally distorted with the wind sound. It sounded fine When I replayed it on the cell phone. Although there're no dropped frames, but the entries video looked wired. The video is shaky, unstable, which is really wired since I enabled the optical image stabilization. 

My biggest problem right now is the lack of transitioning video clips. The story line is broken and the clips are not coherent. Worse case scenario, I might have to go there again and re-shoot some footages. The problems is the there are too many variables I can't control, like the angle of the sunlight of the total amount of it. I have no idea about how to edit around those obvious ripped shots. I hope my meet with the MSCM facility will help me sort out some of the issues here.

During the seminar session, Audry suggested green screen. This is an appealing idea though I have no I idea how to deploy it. The worse it will make this fake enough. But since the story is supposed to be scared and two people walking across some abandoned building doesn't really address that. I am still in debating. 

The future plan is I will take a pause here and start building the website. I hope that I'll be able to finish the primary website by the end of spring break. 

Entry #2

I went to shoot on site on the 28th of February.

Since the site of my original plan had been demonised last year. I had to go to the backup site. 

The backup site is a abandoned mental institution located in Salem. 

According to Wikipedia, the Fairview Training Center was established in 1908. It was a state run facility dedicated to people with developmental disabilities. The training center was closed down on March 1, 2000.
From my research, I learnt that the site had been used as the field set for the movie Population: 2.
Unlike the film crew, I don't have the access to any of the buildings in the training center, which significantly limited my choices. I had to change the script of the story to match with the footages. I might have to abandon or at least alter my previous movie story.
The weather was good that day so I was really lucky to obtain a large portion of the footages I needs. The rest will have to depend on my editing.
Plans for next week is to develop another story, processing the raw footages, and to start building up the website.