Production Journal ＃5

Good news: I was able to finish the video pre-production today during the last weekend.
All the things consider, I was really stressed on Monday the last week. ( and it felt almost like a month ago, but it was just last Monday) The plan for the costume wasn't working and my friend said she won't be available after the weekend until graduation. The tight and troublesome scheduling along with the lack of personnel and venue had make my production process extremely difficult. I was sure that I won't be able to finish shooting by April.
I am glad everything turned out fine.
For the costumes, I did online research and found out that the local theater has costume rental service. The costume shop operates on Monday and Friday from 3 pm - 6pm. I missed the window on Monday, so I emailed them right after I got out from the film class on Monday. They have cloaks, they have several of them.
Well, the story wasn't exactly like that. They do have cloaks, but most of them are either the red riding hood cloak, or the victorian style velvet cloak with laces. I found two sleeveless thin cloaks and a sleeved one which was originally a judicial robe, the costume shop owner added a hood onto it.
The total fee was $30 for the costumes and $100 for the safety deposit ( I did get the deposit refund). It wasn't a really good deal, but I was desperate. The two sleeveless cloaks caused a little trouble during the shooting and I had the re-recorded the entire sequence. It was dark and the ground was wet because of the rain, I slipped and almost got my eyes poked by the tree branches.
Lesson: never shooting in the slippery wood without enough people. Even the Blair Witch Craft Project's director had a small team with him.

As for the location, I chose Tice park.
My original plan was to light up a small bone fire to create the sense of a cult ritual. I even went to talk to the studio art professor to see if I could "steal" some wood. Then I changed my mind. Instead of burning actual wood, I decided to use alcohol in a set of ceramic bowls. First, it is safer than using the wood because I don't need to use too much alcohol, it is easier to control and the fire is also easier to put out. Second, By add water between the ceramic bowls, the majority of the heat will be absorbed by the water, so the outside bowl will be nice and chill. My friend could hold the flames safely.
I was able to get another friend to help me on Thursday. With her help, I was able to finish the shooting. It took us two days to finalize it.

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.

Proposal and initial thought for my capstone project

For my capstone project, I am going to make a mocked website for a fake independent horror movie project. The idea was the compromise I have to make because the lack of equipments and programming ability. My original idea was to create a cross-media project associated with the AR (Augmented Reality) technology, which became a trendy subject in the recent creative industry. project. My finalized idea kept a portion of the original idea, and I will be focusing on my specialties.

The project includes an interactive website, two short edited video and generated content. The goal of my capstone project is to demonstrate learning outcomes as an EART student. The final project will include 45% of its content from the mass communication department, 25% of the content from the computer science department, and the rest of the content from art and visual design department. 

My project is set to be a mocked website for an independent horror movie. I will make the website from scratch. I will also script and produce the "trailer" and the "found footage". In addition, some edited audios might be added as well as supporting of the content. I will also composed some simple music pieces as the background music. The goal of the website is to imitate semi-real horror film propaganda, similar to the Blair witch project.