This Upcoming Week

For this new week, there is a lot that we still have to do. For starters, we still have to come up with a name. I already gave my own opinion on the name, but we still have to decide what we want our final name to be. We also have to get all of our foley done as well as getting the music and the news commentators that we want. I sent the script to see newscasters but have still gotten no response. I think that we will be using a friend of Tomas called Marcus that does a lot of reporting for the school news program. Personally, I still have to begin writing my CCR script as that is something I have to do on my own. I also need to do this with time as I am not as experienced with editing, so anything that I need to do or any questions that I need to ask, I can direct them to Tomas who is very knowledgeable with editing. I will be posting about all this next week in my blog posting long with my final project and my CCR. It has been a long road since the beginning, and a lot of ideas have changed, but I think that we will have a great final product, and that what we have done and all the bumps in the road have been worth it, and that our product is going to be great.

What We Have Been Up To

We have not been up to much lately. Not much at all actually. Tomas and Arianna were at their trip in Seattle, and are now on their way back. We spoke about all the foley that we have left, and that we have to do it as soon as possible to be able to finish the video to submit and do the CCR too. We are cutting it a bit close, but we had a very heavy weekend of filming a couple of weeks ago, and have used these past two weeks as more of a chill period. We will be done in time and Ariana and Tomas are pretty good at editing and can do a very good job in little time. Plus, we already have two drafts that are pretty much almost complete, all we need to add is the sound, and come up with a title. After this, we should be done for our CCR and done for the project overall. At one point, I was a little nervous that I wasn't going to have time to do the CCR video and Tomas decided to mess with me that we weren't going to have the video done in time, so I began to panic a little bit more, and I kept on assuring him that we would be fine and he would keep on saying no and that he couldn't find time to edit, and that Arianna outdent either. It was a pretty panicky moment not going to lie. I did begin to doubt at on point that we wouldn't finish until Tomas finally said he was kidding. That gave me a sigh of relief and confirmed that we would get it done. Next week will be a tough week with a lot of last minute things to finish. I will be talking about all the stuff we have left to do in my next post as it is a lot to go over.

Roles as of now

As we are almost done with the video and only have a few things to do, and our roles have been pretty balanced as of now. We all had pretty equal roles in the production of the film opening. For the creative aspects of the film, we all had pretty equal input, all imputing our own opinions into what we believed would be the best version of the movie. For the actual filming of the movie, we all also had pretty equal input on how we wanted the shots to look like, and how we wanted the camera to move. While the camera was moving though, I didn't have much input since I was the one in the shot. But that is whatever, if I didn't like the shot, we could reshoot it until i liked it. This actually happened a lot for example when I would laugh if something funny happened in the shot. Post production, we all also have separate roles that we are each responsible for. Tomas and Arianna are both in charge of editing as they are the ones that are most familiar with the the editing software. Tomas and I are also going to be the ones trying to gather all the sounds so they can use it in the editing. This is because Tomas is the one that is most familiar with the footage and is the one that filmed it. He is also fairly familiar with foley as he has done it before. Im super excited to get this done and see the final product. I know it's going to turn out great, and that as a group, we have found a way to balance all of our skills to get the video exactly how we envisioned it. We are all really creative people with our own skills that allow us to do our best work and making it super creative as we assemble our final product. The past blog posts have been super short, but we haven't been up to much the past days as we just did a couple of weeks of a lot of hard work.

Complications

We have one very big problem that has no solution. That is that Tomas and Arianna are going on a scholastic's trip this week for spring break. It would be fine if it was there own trip with their family, but they are competing in a production competition in Seattle, so they most likely will have no time to do any work on our project while they are competing. At their competition, they are competing in events in which they have 8 hours to come up with a video, film, and edit it. Of course, they won't have any time to work on our project. that basically leads me and Jonathan here alone to do any work that has to be done. The problem is that Arianna really wanted to edit, so we want to leave that to her. Moreover, Jonathan has to work during spring break and has a very tough schedule to balance. I also can't work too much as I am volunteering here at the Miami Open, so I won't have that much time to do anything anyway. This has been on ongoing problem throughout the project. We all have different schedules that don't coincide at all. Jonathan works almost everyday, I have practice everyday, and Tomas and Arianna are always busy with their school work and family stuff. Moreover, It has been a struggle for all of us to be in class as Arianna was involved in a car accident the other day, and Jonathans grandma passed away. This has prevented them from coming to class the past two classes, not allowing us to plan for the upcoming weeks and to complete what is left. We do have a group chat in which we talk in, but it is hard to get a consensus on what we are each going to do and what we have left to do.

Title

We have not yet come up with a title and it really sucks. We want to do something meaningful that has a lot of meaning but is also really short. Most boxing movies have the names of the boxer as the title, but we find that to not be very creative and very common. Instead, we want to have a meaningful and impactful name that sort of tells the story of Vincent coming back from his recovery. I was thinking something more personal about him being great and coming back from a fall. In my opinion I like the title “The Return” since it tells the story of him coming back and returning back to his formal self if not better. This title can also make the audience think that its going to be a long return and that he might face some tough complications along the way. It is a very simple title, but it also gives a gist of the movie without giving too much away. All the viewers will know is that it involves something returning, in this case the boxer returning to his former glory. In class, we got together in groups to get input from other people from other groups. When I asked about the title, they all said that they liked the name, but that we could get a bit more creative with it. This was on Thursday, and only me and Tomas were in class, and now it is spring break, so it is going to b kind of hard to come up with a name now. While in groups, we were also told a lot that our video is really good, and that once we add the sound, it will be perfect. So as of now, we have to finish editing, adding the sound, and coming up with a title. It sounds like a few tasks, bit it will still take a long time as they are all very time consuming tasks that require a large group effort. Something that has been hard to find since we all have different schedules. 

Foley

As mentioned in my previous blog, the audio that we had in our raw footage wasn’t the best. The audio was very low, and we couldn’t hear much due to not having an external microphone. The footage was all really good, but it was hard to distinguish what was a punch, what was a dodge, and any of the engine sounds, grunts, and feet shuffling that we wanted to include. When Arianna began to edit what we want our final project to look like, she added on a bunch of royalty free sound effects, but we all agreed that they sounded too cartoony and not real at all. She also couldn’t include any of the diagedic sound that we wanted to include like the sound of the engines, the feet shuffling on the ground, and the crowd cheering. All these sounds aren’t payed much attention to by the viewer, but they add another layer of intensity and deepness to the scene. To create all these sounds, we want to try to do foley for as much as possible. For things such as the engine noises and the crowd cheering, we plan on getting the actual audio since it is very hard to make a foley noise like this. For the cars, we plan on taping a bunch of cars and layering all their sounds on top of each other to give it the right effect of a lot of cars. For the crowds, we plan to either tape at a soccer game at a local park, or the Miami Open, a tennis tournament is in town these next two weeks. 

For the foley sounds, we talked about getting a textbook and wrapping it in duct tape to dropping it on the floor or punching it. We hope that this will give the best effect of an actual punch. If that doesn’t work, we will try to punch the textbook instead. If we aren’t satisfied wit that, we will try bunching actual cuts of meat and seeing if it gives the same effect. I already tried it at the supermarket but wasn’t very satisfied since it had the plastic wrapped around it. If worst comes to worst, we will actually punch each other and get what the real sound sounds like. For the dodges, we will most likely get a long flexible stick, like a PVC pipe as swing it so it sounds like a “woosh”. We will try this multiple times to get a variety of sounds that we can add. For the feet shuffling we will record our feet shuffling on wet asphalt and synchronize it to what is seen on screen. The only sound that we think is left is the grunts, which we will record our actors doing certain grunts at certain times to match what is on screen. After we have all the sound we want, we will distort and layer it to make sure the volumes are at the right volume, and to make sure that it sounds how we want it to sound. We will probably get together and tape out sounds in the coming days when we can all get together.

Sound

We had Tomas edit the footage as sort of a first draft to see how the footage had turned out. We were very happy with how the footage had turned out. We did find though that we have to record sound to add more effect to the fight scene. With the hospital scene, we recorded the sounds of the heart monitor to have a background noise and set that over the footage to add more of an effect that we were in a hospital room. We still need to get someone to record their voice to be the news anchor and tell the story of Vincent Montoya. For the fight scene, it looks really funny without the sound effects we want to add. I've attached some videos that have a similar effect in famous movies. There is also one that shows how different musics can change the message/feeling of the movie. 

This video shows the trailer of the movie The Mummy, where there is no sound effects, and you can hear just the actors scream.

This, similar to the video above, is Star Wars without any sound effects, instead, it is the raw footage.

This is Pirates of the Caribbean with different types of music in the same scene, to show the different effects that music can have on a scene.

We are planning on making foley sounds, or finding different royalty free sounds online that we can use to make up the different sounds that are shown, such as the showts and cheers of the crowds, as well as the grunts of the fighters, and the punches of the fighters. Below are both clips. The hospital scene has the beeping sound, but not the newscast sound. The fight scene is the raw footage, and doesn't have any of the sound that we want to use.

Fight Scene

Hospital Scene