Reflection Period

The End of the Road

So, this is the end of the road. I enjoyed our memories together! But before I say goodbye to your blog, I’d like to go over and reflect on this project. I know what you’re thinking, what is there that you haven’t already said, Lee? How much more can you possibly talk about?

My answer is, no matter how much I talk about there is always more for me to talk about! Looking back, there are things I did that I needed to improve upon this project and there are things I did oh so right.  

 

The Opening

Okay, let’s stop being vague and explain my exact thoughts on this project. To start, I was very excited to start. Making my own film! It sounded so cool. But the daunting task of these blogs scared me. A lot. But honestly, I wish I had made more! Writing blogs filled me with ideas and strategies on how to carry out those ideas. It gave me more energy and determination to complete my opening and everything around it. One could argue that I should have a better structure to my blogs and maybe make it more formal, but just writing out the first thoughts that come to mind does me more good than waiting until I can phrase my thoughts properly. This way I get more thoughts and more ideas. I can just talk and talk and talk some more, which will help me plan and plan some more. 

Overall, the blogs are a way for me to brainstorm and organize my many thoughts. I always looked back through my blogs and it always made me figure something out or helped me remember what I wanted for a certain aspect of the project. I loved having them and enjoyed making them because I was able to fully put my personality into them.

Group Work

When it came to working with a group… well, to be incredibly honest with you… I wouldn’t do it again. Don’t get me wrong! My group was awesome. They helped me out so much and came up with terrific ideas. They brought skills into the project that I could only dream of currently having. This project is (hopefully) successful because of them. With that, we did a story completely different than what I wanted, which is fine, seeing as it was a team effort, and having to plan around so many schedules was rough. It was overall great to work with them! But I do wonder how much different my story would be on my own, and how much better scheduling would be if I chose to only have maybe one other teammate or myself. There would be many parts to my film that would be poor without such an awesome and large team, but the opening would feel more like mine and I may of had a better handle over the project with only myself or maybe one other person.

The opening came out great. The shots look gorgeous and it is edited in a very clean and crisp way. The story overall make sense, and it fits our vision. We ran into a lot of issues making the opening, but were able to save those issues in a super awesome way! I will say, there is one specific part of the opening that I edited that I was proud of and very happy about, because it was a way to fix a missing shot and to make the story of the opening make sense, Then my partner took my draft took the part away for “looking goofy” and replaced it with something that made the story less apparent. The rest of the group was fine with it, so despite me asking if we could find a way to bring that aspect back in, we never did. And with other missing shots, and the story being changed so much, it isn’t what I wanted it to be.

My opening is overall great. But I want to be honest with you guys when reflecting, but do not take my criticisms for anger or disappointment. At the end of the day my team and I are very happy with how the opening turned out!

The CCRs

The CCRs were to be honest, a little brutal to make. I made them as fun as I could, but I just finished making the opening and was exhausted with a lot of my classes. Making the blog posts for the CCRs helped, but couldn’t prepare me for the rough and long shoots and, to be honest, miserable editing process. It took longer than I planned to finish them. I planned to take only two days to film both and a day or two to edit both as well. Unfortunately, it took four days for me to fully film, and three days to finish editing. I had a 6-hour editing session just to not finish my first CCR. There may be a part of me being a slow editor, but man, it took me a while. I do think that the reflection that CCRs forced me to do was very valuable, but the work I put into it currently does not feel worth it.

Overall, this project was fun! I enjoyed the production process and growing as a content creator! These blogs were honestly the most useful I learned about, and I will try to incorporate something like this for future projects! Thank you for reading all this time, and I’ll miss you blog!

XOXO,

Lee!