Media CCR

MY CCR IS FINISHED AND HERE IT IS

CCR VIDEO (higher quality)

Project Reflection

Overall I think the project went alright I guess. I think if i could change one thing that happened I would change Our decision to change the whole film last minute. Although this was just a little bump in the road it did annoy me as to why we did it. I feel that what we had before was really good original idea and it sucks we had to throw it out the window. Over all the project turned out good and I'm happy that it did although I'm a little disappointed in the switch up we made and how we did it.

Final Product

Through all the bumps and bruises we finally made it. And to be honest its a good one i really gotta give shouts to Dean for his camera work. Anyways ENJOY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

          

Sciolism - Film Opening [4K]

FINAL PRODUCTION FOR THE AICE MEDIA STUDIES AS LEVEL PROJECT. Camera nerdy like me? :3 Emil Lorwa Nadya Ackermanian Dean Milan Alyssa Wheelock Technical stuf...

www.youtube.com

Week.8 Part.3

We are officially done filming. It took us about 3 hours to film in total and we have about 50 minutes worth of footage. Yes that number is real we have 50 minutes of video for a full 2 minute film opening. Although this seems like overkill it is nice that we have some options to work with while editing.

  One of the reasons it took so long to film was because Dean has some very high tech equipment that to  awhile to set up in between each shot. We had to switch from sliders to tripods to cranes and all that fun stuff even going as far as switching the camera lens. I am very exited to see what the finnal out come will look like.

Week.8 Part.2

Today me and dean went out scouting for what we thought the right spot was and boy were we right. 

This spot right here is where we plan to have our male character julian lay on the ground because he is hurt and disorientated to where he is.
This part is the main dirt road that we plan to have the running scene for emma

  

It was a quick little tip just to make sure everything we thought of was possible.

We did check the weather for tomorrow and it seems that it will be pouring rain in the afternoon so we gotta do it early in the morning to start filming. 

Week.8 Part.1

Dean and I spoke today. We had a real quick brainstorm session together. We plan to stay with the kidnapped idea but we took away the tied up part about it. 

So here is our idea 

                                we have our male character (julian) He wakes up in a forest in distress 

                   then we have our female character (Emma) she is introduced right after Julian wakes up and she is being chased by some mysterious guy. 

                                                   After both characters  are introduced then we will have both the characters yelling out for each other. 

                                                   Julian appears to be so hurt he can't even move from where he is so Emma just ends up leaving him. 

I'm pretty happy that we got this idea down because i have a perfect spot to film this. The location is secluded dirt road with nice forestry vibes to it.   

Week 7 Part.3

I did some research on saw and wow its terrible. I dont even know how someone can think of that its just crazy.

But any how. Now that I have done some research and watched some clips and I feel like we can do great things with it.

So i want to stick with the two people stuck in a in a weird place but instead of just waking up there.
They wake up and are hand cuffed to a pole or something and they have to try to escape before whoever is keeping there comes back. With out all the blood and gore is my goal so its not 100% a rip off of Saw. I will speak to dean again soon and see if he has any changes to what he wants to do.

Week.7 Part.2

Yesterday we left off with our whole project being flipped upside down. But i have been thinking and now I have some pretty cool ideas.

I was thinking that we cold do something with Deans scary location. He said it was a really run down area and it had lost of graffiti in the area. So I feel that this could be a good chance to create a Saw inspired movie film thing. I feel that it could be a cool concept.
Although I haven't watched any saw movies I could do my research.

OPEN;
               Two people wake up not knowing where they are. (could be one or two people)
                They have to try to find where they are and try to escape.

I feel that it would be could to do something along those lines.

Week 7 Part.1

So to day Dean called me and told me that he wants to change up out whole project. I did not agree with this at the start but it was a 2 against 1 depression with Alyssa join sides with Dean.
So Dean asked me to think about some things that we could do for the new film opening. Sadly though I could not put my head around anything. Because of this i asked Dean if he had any idea of what he wanted to do and he also said no. But he came out and said he knew a scary location we could shoot and then BOOM! Ideas started flying around my head. I am again exited For where this can go. I believe that we are going into a horror movie area.

COVID-19 part.3

EVERYTHING IS CLOSING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Broward county the county that i live in has ordered a full shut down of none essential stores.
The problem with this is that I work at a none essential store and guess what my store is not closing.
Oh but im not done people at my work are "scared" to work so they all dropped there shifts leaving me to pick up half of them. Next week is going to be a disaster.

In other news my group is stuck in a stand still because we have no idea what to do with this  COVID-19 problem. I am actually starting to get a little worried now because what id we dont get to complete the project.???????????????

COVID-19 Part.2

Hello there so nothing new or nothing special happened but I did talk to my mother about going out a filming. She said that as long as I do not come in contact with many people then we should be fine. But she said that she is not worried for me but more worried for other people AKA older people. She said " I dont care if you get it, but you could be a carrier and i dont want the possibility of you killing any to get bigger." So she has agreed to letting me fill within certain boundaries. All i am waiting on now is my group to respond to the texts i sent out. Yes that is an actual problem i have my group is not responding to my text LOL. I didn't mean to throw them under the bus. 

COVID-19 Part.1

So I guess this is some what big news, Corona virus is destroying the world. Hahah jk not really....well kinda. So basically lots of people are not allowed to go out and film. And yes I sadly am one of those people. My mother is only letting me go out to buy stuff, and she is only letting me choose three friends to come over and hangout with. I guess its a good thing I only have one good friend then haha. This is definitely a very big hurdle that we have to over come.....

Week5 Day4

So today we didnt have the opportunity to talk but I did lean something cool. Dean in in T.V production class so he has high quality equipment like good cameras and box lamps and all that cool stuff that I dont really know how to use. But besides that its pretty cool stuff that hes working with and im pretty exited that we will be working with that level of equipment.
 On the other hand im feeling quite sick and dont worry I dont have Corona virus. Its just a little cold I picked up from my sister mixed with my allergies. Im hopping it doesnt get any worse because i really want to start filming this week. I think that these blog post are hyping me up a lot and getting me more and more exited about completing this project everyday.

FEELING/MOOD: Exited but down :(

Week5 Day3

So sadly of Dean his STN commotion got cancelled for this week, but good for us he is now available so we start filming this week Yayyy.
All we are waiting for Alyssa to finish writing a script for our film but once that is done we are starting. But one problem is that we were expecting to not film so our set in not ready yet but tmr we are having a meeting to speak on that matter. This is all kind of perfect timing because school recently got cancelled so now we have two weeks of spring break to work on this project which honestly is so stress reliving and easy to work with haha. But i believe what we would do to fix our little set up issues is just mess around in Alyssa's garage for a while and hopefully something works.

I would like to use this post to answer one of the CCR questions. The question i would like to answer goes as following. "How does your project engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?"

So I would like to start off with answering the first part of that.  ENGAGE 
 We had the idea of use a snobby rich kid as our main antagonist, because nobody really likes a snobby rich kid that wears Gucci belts and $400 shoes. Those kids that flex those kinds of items while we all know that it was "daddy's money" Who pays for it are not the most likable people lets put it that way. So we chose that character on purpose to have our audience kind of want to go along with the pain this annoying kid is gonna go through.

Now to the second part DISTRIBUTION 

When it comes to how we distribute the film we plan on heavily relying on YouTube and small local film festivals. Am amateur film makers we have a realistic goal of building our way up, and not just trying to release our film in theaters world wide. We know that its not a very realistic plan to do that. 

Week 5 Day 1

These blog posts are annoying BUT and its a very big but. As much as they annoy me i have actually learned a lot from them. Usually i am not the person to plan weeks ahead. I normally just think of a general idea and go off that. But what these blog post force me to do is plan weeks and weeks ahead. And to be honest its kind of helped me a lot. Now I feel 100% comfortable with here i am there is no stress and everything is flowing smoothly.

Im happy that i was given the opportunity to do this. Because now I can take what i have learned and use it not only for this project but also for future projects for different classes. This whole blog thing really made me understand the benefits of just taking one day at a time and putting actually quality time into something to make it a lot easier.

Week4 Day 4

Hello everyone, hope everyone is having a nice day.

To start I have a couple thing that I would like to update you guys on.
For starters we have found out what our main antagonist would look like. We wanted him to look rich so he should have a bunch of designer clothes and stuff like that. We want him to look like this because it represents who our main character is after, the snobby rich kid that has money.
it fits the poker scam thing very well.

Another thing I would like to speak about is I have found something to help our problem of finding extra people to play as supporting characters. Well i haven't 100% solved it but i do have something that can help. So in our film we have a girl character and she is supposed to play the role of  the best friend. And i have someone that can help. My amazing actual best friend in real life. I asked her if she would like to play the role and she was ok with it. 

Week 4 Day 3

So basically its the day after trying to solve the problem of no back ground actors and there is still no solution. So that is definitely a big problem on our hands. But we will talk about that on a latter dated. for now i am going to just cover what dean had suggested the "Poker room" would look like.

Dean came up with some pretty cool ideas of what our set should look like. Obviously like iv said in previous blog post it is going to be set in a garage of some sort. dean pointed out that the background should be messy as it is a house of a struggling family. So it would make sense of so trash laying around like broken bikes, old boxes and things like that. I believe that the best place to film this is in Alyssa's house as her garage is already messy. My house wouldn't be a good option because well i have no room in my garage as there is already a bunch of random stuff laying around so there would be no room to work with no room to work with.  And  Deans garage is very clean and i dint want to ruin it because that would be bad.

So Alyssa's garage is the plan make it look messy which is not going to be hard to do haha. fix up the lighting a little bit we can do that with a DIY tape and flash light set up. And then just set up the poker table in the middle of the room and maybe even place a light over it for dramatic affect. 

Week 4 Part 2

HELLOOO!!!!

So far everything as of now has stayed the same. Our main problem is still to do with getting the extra actors to play in the film its self. Other then that the over all project hasn't really made any big moves yet, although we did just get off a face time call where we discussed little things like timing and pacing of the fill opening itself.

we all kind of agreed on that the two scene of the opening wouldn't be enough for 2 minutes so we were kinda brain storming little ideas as time fillers. We came up with a cool little idea of introducing the victim of the pokers scam first as hes walking towards the main characters house and then then the the "bad beat" title shows up and then we cut to the montage of the people wanting to get in.

        - kid walking out of house saying by to mom
- asks where hes going
-he says hes doing homework at a friends
- walks (at night) w/ backpack and hood on to the back door of a garage
- walks in and the poker game is there

Another little problem i mentioned in the last post was that we didn't know how to spin the camera around the whole table showing everyone's faces. But lucky i found a little solution to that. I what this poker chip set at my house and it is set on a mini turn table so if some hoe we could set the camera on it then its a problem solved. 

Feedback Group Meetings

          Today in class we had the chance to come together and speak about or projects.
I got some pretty good feed back on what i could change and to be honest they were pretty good suggestions. Our original idea was to play a poker scene as the opening and then introduce the characters. Once the poker scene was over we would transition into a scene of people signing up to play.

After the group meetings and all the suggestions. We have agreed to do the opposite and switch it up a bit. We have chosen to do a montage kind of vibe of people signing up to play and sliding papers and money in a quick fashion at the begging. After the montage then we will cut to the poker scene where we will introduce our characters buy movie the camera in a circle around the poker table showing the faces of our main characters.

We plan to transition from the montage scene to the poker scene by using a graphic match of a poker card. The card would be thrown on a desk in school and then picked up by someone in the poker scene.

The main problem we have with this is that we need a lot of extras to play in the montage and in the poker scene

Week 3 day 3

Schedule And Idea changes. 

Schedule

February 

21st. Start figuring out set design

23. Week 2 (2/17-23) blog posts due: 3 

March
1St. Week 3 (2/24-3/1) / Blog post due: 3 

2. Start writing script

8th. Week 4 (3/2-8) blog post due: 4

9th. Have production plan/ script done

10th. Dean STN

11th. Dean STN

12th. Dean STN

13th. Dean STN

14th. Dean STN

15th. Dean STN

20th. Spring break

21st. Spring break

22 Spring break

23 Spring break / Have everything ready for product

24th. Spring break / Filming

25th. Spring break / Filming

26th. Spring break / Editing

27th.Spring break / Editing

28th. Spring break / Editing

29th. Spring break

30th. Finishing touches this week

Idea Changes 

    School kids/school setting
- causes scheduling problem if done in school setting

General outline of opening:
- Boy walks (at night) w/ backpack and hood on to the back door of a garage
- walks in and the poker game is there

Films to research:
        - Fight club (1999): A depressed man (Edward Norton) suffering from insomnia meets a strange soap salesman named Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) and soon finds himself living in his squalid house after his perfect apartment is destroyed. The two bored men form an underground club with strict rules and fight other men who are fed up with their mundane lives. Their perfect partnership frays when Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), a fellow support group crasher, attracts Tyler's attention.
       

Extra Ideas/Brainstorming:
- still keep a team of three working together
- they invite who gets to play them (like in Fight Club)
- idea for ending: try to save shave some time from the poker game to add a scene - one of the group walks up to the rest of them with a list (or something) with t people who want to play them next

week.3 part.2

 
 Poker research 


POKER RESEARCH 


In poker, bad beat is a subjective term for a hand in which a player with what appear to be strong cards nevertheless loses.

            - This is what we have decided to make our project name "BAD BEAT" as it describes what we are going for perfectly. In our film we are running a poker scam to gain money and find out the past history of the father and why he got arrested. But the people we are playing against have already lost before the game even started. But the whole time they are led to believe that they are winning so they can play the highest bet and then lose on a "bad beat".      

               

                For the film opening it is not necessary for us to know poker but just to pretend like we know poker. Every once in a while say some poker terminology here and there to make it sound real. 

For the film opening itself as of now we have a general idea of what we want to but nothing is 100% yet, but we obviously want a poker scene but we haven't agreed on what we want to do for the rest of the opening.

  - Ways to cheat in poker.

                                    - Method 1 Holding Out

1. Wait for a card you want. 

2. Keep an eye on your hands for any cards you might want to hold.
3. Hide the card you want to keep. 

4. Take your whole hand under the table and leave the card you want to hide hidden somewhere on you.
5. Drop your hand.
6. Keep playing.
7. Switch the card or play it.
8. Wrap things up.
                                     - Method 2 Colluding With Friends

1. Gather a friend or friends
2. Select friends you can trust.
3. Decide your communications.
4. Practice with your friends
5. Keep your team work a secret

        We will most likely to go with the second method because it follows our group scam idea better.  

A film to take inspiration from is 21 here is a little summary of the film. 

Ben Campbell, a brilliant student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, needs some quick cash to pay his tuition bills. He joins a group of students who, under the leadership of unorthodox professor Mickey Rosa, use their math skills to win big in Las Vegas. Seduced by a beautiful teammate and loads of money, Ben learns that the stakes are higher than he ever imagined when he crosses paths with casino enforcer Cole Williams.  (This summary is from Wikipedia)

Week.3 Part.1

     Today is Monday, February 24th and it is week 3 of the project and now we are starting to make big moves with our project. First thing i would like to share with you is our basic plot that we brain stormed over the week end. 

Basic Plot:(opening)

-Father of main character gets arrested for tax evasion - fraud, poker scam H

-Lost their fortune and property.

-Main character is a young man who now has to live in a poor house. He now runs a poker scam, talented from high school experience.

-His goal is to get the money to pay off the crooks his dad has beef with, and to discover the truth behind his dad’s history.

-Lives with his uncle now and works with his best friend and uncle to run the poker scam.

-Challenges Mafia people to poker game to dispute the payment, he beats them

So for the characters we plan on having me (Emil lorwa) on playing the main character of "Nathan Hill". Sadly we have not found anybody to play the two other characters of  Best friend (F):Rebecca Martin, and Uncle (older M): Chester Hill (preferably an older male (if we can find an actor))

  Really the only problem we have with this right now is getting hold of a poker table. I have everything else i have poker cards and poker chips just don't have a poker table. We have come up with a solution of buying a round plastic table from Walmart and tapping or stabling some green felt to it. Or we plan on all chipping in and buying an actual table and then return it when we are done with it. But i will look around my house a little harder just to make sure in case I have one. 

     So far everything else to do with the project so far has stayed the same no major changes as of yet. Although we have come up with some movie names. We came up with the idea of naming it after a card or a move in  poker. o what we have so far is (BET, ALL IN, ACE, and CLUB) but we have not decided yet so it is still to be determined. 

Part. 2

    So it's day two of week two and so far no real changes have been made to any of our plan for this project. As of right now it is defiantly going to be harder to write about something on this blog post because well nothing has changed. I hope in to future i will have something to update everyone on.
    But I have been doing some more research and found a film to take scenic inspiration from.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdYQyIJiOyU

So i don't know how to make a playable video link. So what i will do is explain the scene and add some pictures.


pic.1




As you can see here it is a picture the scene is like something that i explained before. It has the yellow under tone lighting and is kind of dark. But most important of all It is a sketchy poker scene in a run down dirty place. And its Perfect because its a film opening too so its easy for us to inspire from.
    So over all not much has changed about our filming locations and filming and editing days but we are starting to find things like the example above.

Week. two

    As of this moment our group hasn't started on the project just yet. Although we have started to brainstorm a few ideas for what we want out film intro to look like but we will talk about that latter on. Right our group is just focusing on planing seeing what time and day works for everyone and things like that.
   We have come up with a scheduled everyone that everyone is okay with and that everyone can work around. We agreed on everyone will be available Tuesday and Wednesday, which for me is kind of bummer because  i have to skip soccer practice for the project but i can suck it up. So Tuesdays and Wednesdays we film and then on the weekend we look back and reflect to see what we still need and what we can do better. Then we just repeat the cycle till we done with the project.

the pictures below show examples of what we want our set to look like.

Right now we have a general idea of what we want with the "garage scene" and it goes something like this....

Poker scammers (dark comedy drama): Young 20 year old just lost all of his family fortune because his father got arrested for tax fraud. He now runs an underground poker scam, searches for the reason his dad got exposed/caught.

Settings:

Garage

Beaches

Everglades (bottom locations still being discussed)

High school

Houses

Genre research pt.2

Our idea 

             

               An idea that our group has come up with is to go some where along the lines of discovery. 

A look for the stars kind of idea as our character goes out searching for something or someone they get drawn into a long adventure. An inspiration for this what’s the lion king. The lion king takes us on an adventure of self discovery send be who you’re meant to be. Throughout the whole movie here switching he’s searching for who he wants/needs to be. But as you search your name we are taken On his whole journey. While the adventurous journey is still an interesting part of the film the focus is more what is happening to the character and not where he is going or where he’s at. .

                      

  Also the film opening for the lion king is something that we can also use as an inspiration. The opening scene of the lion king tells a brief story going to happen. This is something that I would like to include in my project as it’s not telling you directly what is going to happen but it is telling you that it’s a story about growing up and living life. 

portfolio genre research

Action - Drama 

                           The Action-Drama genre is an interesting genre because of how different the two singular genres are.  Dramas often give actors a chance to emphasizes the role and the character more then usual compared to other genres that wouldn't allow them to. This is because drama films focus on building up characters that the audience can engage with and not the actions or environment that is unfolding around the character. The plot does not depend on EXTREME action stunts or anything like that to drive the movie forward, rather it uses action as a side story booster while still being an important part of the film.

                          The cool thing about the Action-Drama genre is that it allows both things to happen. 

In most Action-Drama films the main focus is on the character themselves while all the action is still taking place but the action is not the main focus and is used as a plot builder. 

                          An example of a movie like this would be the "Hurt Locker". 

                           The hurt locker blends these two as close to perfect as you can get.The characters in this film are the central points and the conflict is between the men themselves and the action is all being play out around them. This mix of  telling a story about someone in adventurous way is something I hope I Achieve successfully. 

Music Marketing

               Our music marketing project was based in the pop genre. As we did our research found that many artists that work in the pop genre have their own unique way to market and distribute their music. For example Billie Eilish released her albums with exclusive content on certain streaming services. An example of this is on Spotify. She has short videos that go along with the song that is exclusive to Spotify. So inspired by this we came up with the idea to have our debut album come out in February and have an exclusive album cover only for people who bought it in February for Valentine’s Day theme.

          Running with the theme of Love and Valentines we also use jukebox as a distribution service so couples could listen to the songs that we released. our artist Luke Ross was a love pop artist and was focused on the target audience of teenagers and young 20s. We wanted his character to be relatable to the target audience so he can make music for them and they would be interested. We wanted his character to be able to spread love and happiness to his followers and to bring his followers together. We want people to listen to his music and wanted them to feel a connection with other people as they listened. 

                     One thing that I learned while making this project was how to develop a character that people could relate to. At first I was just trying to create somebody from scratch but then I realize that it’s better to go off of what you know and to convey that into a person that possibly could have an impact on other people by connecting to them and speaking to them in a different way. Also another thing I learned was no matter what you create you have to create something that will catch the attention of the people you’re trying to sell your product to. You can’t just make something and hope for the best do you have to make something that speaks to people and give them a reason why they should feel a connection to what you’re making.