Creative Critical Reflection

 Question 1-Word Document: Link To File:

Question 1

Question 2-PowerPoint Presentation link: 

Question 2

Question 3-Link to Video (Audio Recording):

Question 3

Question 4-Creative Critical Reflection

Film Intro

 

This is the link to the film intro- Film Intro

Week 26

 I went to the Channel 10 News Station on a field trip this week, and it was amazing. It was amazing to see how a news station works and to learn about its history. We got to visit the studio where they tape the news and weather and the offices where they cut the news, create the reporters, create the graphics and animations, and monitor the whole broadcast. The experience revealed to me the amount of work that goes into airing the news. I understood about commercials and the importance of capturing viewers' attention and converting them, something we were taught in AICE Media Studies. At the end of the journey, I learned much more about the importance of knowing your audience, as well as the various career opportunities that editing and producing can open up in the media industry.

Week 25

 One of the most important things I've realized this year is how to handle setbacks, and filmmaking is full of them. The biggest issue we've had with this film has been computers themselves. The software tends to glitch and sometimes crash, which makes editing a real pain. We haven't lost any of our footage, but it's still frustrating working with these kinds of technical issues. Despite all these hindrances, we are aware that we cannot lose hope now. This project is worth too much, and we're committed to doing everything that we can with it. With the deadline looming over us, we're committed to weathering the storm. These challenges remind us of how long and grueling the process of filmmaking is, but they also remind us of the necessity to keep going in order to complete the work.

Week 24

 As we start editing our final project, my partner and I are becoming more and more eager to play around with new tools and techniques. By this point in the class, I'm getting pretty comfortable with Adobe Premiere Pro, and it's been great to be able to experiment with some new tricks. Our footage looks pretty solid on its own—we really put a lot of work into the cinematography—but we’ve been playing around with a few creative editing elements to take it to the next level. We've tried color grading to enhance the mood and tone, added graphics for a touch of visual flair, experimented with text masking to get cool text animations, used transitions to make our cuts smoother, and spent time on music and sound mixing to have the audio perfect and create the right atmosphere. We've been rushing around putting it all together, and watching the footage in retrospect, it's amazing what we've done. Both of us attempted to leave everything we had on this project, and I think that comes through in the work that we've accomplished so far. All the work that we've put into it has literally been paying dividends, and one can see it in the overall quality of the film on so many different fronts. This has been an enormous learning curve for the two of us, not only technically but also in learning how to make a story work within a film.

Week 23 (Editing)

 We've done great with the project so far! We've got all the outdoor scenes and a couple of the school shots done, so we're about halfway through. As the deadline is approaching, we figured it was time to start editing. To our surprise, we had no issues bringing our footage into Premiere Pro, which was a relief in itself. We're both totally psyched about the editing process, and we've decided to go the whole way with it. We've been experimenting with all sorts of color grades and effects in an attempt to get the footage as similar as possible to how we had envisioned it originally when we first started brainstorming the project. We're going out of our way to experiment and get the clips as lively as they can be. Of course, we've also had a little bit of a challenge. The biggest issue is that the graphics and text we've added are slowing down the computers. It hasn't been an easy thing to get everything so efficient, particularly when we are making some quick edits that don't have to be a problem. Aside from that, the computers seem to be degrading some of our photos. To work around this, we’ve been using color grading and other editing tricks to try and enhance the footage, but it’s definitely been a bit of a struggle to get everything looking just right. Even with these hurdles, we’re staying optimistic and pushing forward, knowing that the final product will be worth the effort!

Week 22 (Filming)

 We've finally started shooting for our last project! With our script, storyboard, and a lot of planning, we were able to acquire some good video. We shot at home, the park near our area, and at school on the second day. The storyboard really worked out for us when it was time to make things happen—it gave us a clear direction and kept us organized. We were very innovative with the photos we took, both in and out of school. Although we've managed to get quite a lot of film completed, there are still loads of shots remaining to be shot. We didn't have enough time to cover part of the outdoor shots, so we'll need to schedule another day to do them. Aside from that, though, the footage we have is great, and I think we can manage to cut it. I'm really excited to see the project coming along, and it's great to be accomplishing things!

Week 21 (Blog)

 Since the year was coming to a close really quickly, our instructor told us to make sure that we updated our blogs. I had quite a bit to get caught up on, including changing the look of my blog to make it more professional. She also told us to review some of the past weeks and edit and add to our earlier blogs. I also devoted some time in personalizing my theme to make my blog appear fresh. As I reread my posts, I can look back at all the things I have learned and done this year. It has been lovely to collaborate with my friends, work together as a team, and come up with work that we can all be really proud of. It has also been great to look at the other students in my class producing fantastic work. Overall, it's been fun, and I am glad I've finished the year on a high!

Week 20 (Final project continuation)

 After working on our final project for a while now, we’ve finally set a date for filming. We’ve got our costumes, locations, props, and actors all lined up and ready to go. The preparation stage has taken longer than we initially expected, but it feels good to have the foundations of our film in place. Both of us are hoping that once we start filming, things will go smoothly and our ideas will come across clearly. Turning a collection of ideas into a finished short film is no easy task—it requires a lot of planning, effort, and problem-solving along the way. But I’m confident that if we continue putting in the thought and care this project deserves, it will turn out really well in the end!

Week 19 (Final project, blogs)

 This week, Ms. Pistocchi encouraged us to spend time working on our blogs. It became clear that many students had written very few blogs, and most of us hadn't done enough to stay on track. Having a dedicated day to focus on our blogs gave me the chance to not only catch up on old posts but also create new ones. I even took some time to customize my blog page to make it look more personal and polished. On top of that, we had some time to focus on our final project. My partner and I continued working on our storyboard and doing more research to refine our ideas. We also decided to set a filming date since we have a lot to accomplish in the coming weeks. We’ll need to recruit additional actors and scout locations, so there’s a lot to plan out. Overall, I feel like we’ve made solid progress, and I’m really excited to see how the project turns out!

Week 18 (Returning from break)

 Now that winter break is over, we’re diving right back into working on our final projects. We’ve started putting together our storyboard, and we’re in the process of researching music and scouting locations. Developing the story is a bit tricky because it has to be a film introduction, and we only have two minutes to work with. It’s challenging to fit everything into such a short time frame while still making it engaging and effective. Our teacher has asked us to create a logline for the film to give her an overview of the plot and general concept. This will help us refine the direction we want to take with the project. In addition to that, we’ve been looking at other AICE Media film intros on YouTube, especially those created by past students. While what we’ve seen so far looks great, we’re aiming to take things to the next level. Since this is our final project, we want to make sure ours stands out and is something we can be really proud of.

Week 17 (Midterm)

 For our AICE Media midterm, we had to analyze a scene from the show Your Honor. We watched the clip five times, taking notes each time, before writing an essay based on what we observed. This was really helpful practice for the upcoming AICE test, giving us a chance to focus on specific film techniques. We paid attention to:

- Sound

- Editing

- Mise-en-scène

- Camera shots

- And how all of these were used to convey emotion

The only tricky part was that we had to watch the clip on a small TV, which made it a bit harder to catch all the details. Even with that challenge, I think my essay turned out well. I’d never seen the show before, so the clip was a little confusing, and I didn’t have much context to go off of. Instead, I had to rely on the technical aspects of the filmmaking. In the end, I think I did a decent job analyzing how the techniques worked to create emotion, even if the story itself was hard to follow. It was definitely a useful exercise and made me feel more prepared for the actual test.

Week 16 (Final Project)

Our AICE Media final project has officially been announced, and it’s going to be a 2-minute narrative film introduction. This is a big creative challenge that will require a lot of time, planning, and effort. Our teacher has already encouraged us to start working on the storyboards, which is the first step in organizing everything. The project is due by the end of the year, so we have about six months to work on it. While that might seem like a lot of time, we know filmmaking is a long and detailed process, even for something as short as a two-minute intro.

There’s so much to consider for this project, and my partner and I have already started brainstorming. We’ve thought about the storyline, the characters, the costumes, possible locations, the music, and even the title. These are just some of the elements that go into making a film. Filmmaking is all about attention to detail—those tiny things that the audience might not even consciously notice but that help bring the story to life. It’s amazing how much work goes into the small touches that make a film feel complete.

Even though it’s going to be a lot of work, I’m really excited about creating this film.

Week 15 (Vocabulary)

All of the groups had finished the vocabulary project in which we had been working on. project. One of the things I really enjoyed about this project was how it wasn’t about actually making a film. Instead, we focused on learning the terminology and concepts that filmmakers use behind the scenes. It was a nice change of pace from the usual film projects, where we’re out there shooting and editing footage. This time, it was all about understanding the language of filmmaking and how those words translate into the work done on set.

Now that the project is over, I’m kind of excited because I have a feeling our next project might involve making an actual film. With all this new knowledge about the technical side of filmmaking, I feel a lot more prepared to jump into something like that. I’m looking forward to seeing how we can apply what we’ve learned to a real project!

Week 14

 11/13/24

Class today was very easy. As I had already finished my vocabulary presentation, I went around and looked at what other people had done for their in order to add more information to mine. Some of my classmates had very incredible presentations, so I used some ideas from them, I also learned other vocabulary as everyone had different vocab. I also learned how one can incorporate different transitions into their film in order to add emotion and effect. 

11/15/24

Today in class I helped my partners finish their vocabulary if they didn't already. Most of them had finished, so we spent the rest of class watching other film intros and analyzing them in order to prepare for our final film intro. Our teacher had also handed us another paper to present us with what we must include in our final film. We had also looked into previous students film intro to see what they had done in order to give us ideas on what we can make our film into about.

Week 13

 11/6/24

Today we had to do a poll on starting on film intro or another project. Doing another project had won so we had to construct a PowerPoint of vocabulary in which our teacher handed to us individually. Our group would split the vocabulary up where every person in the group had on two vocabulary slides to do. I finished my slides and went on to help my group with their words and studied what the words meant in order to prepare for the AICE examination.

11/8/24

Today we finished watching the documentary's that we did not finishing watching two classes ago. We were able to see our and compare our film with other groups. We had realized we had much to learn as we are new to the whole editing and filming process. I also went on to touch up on the PowerPoint, making sure that we had enough information in our PowerPoint to get a very good grade, as well as boost others understanding on the vocabulary.

Week 12

10/28/24

This week we had our film to be due. So in order to finish everything up, my partner and I had to write a description of everything we used in order to make our film. While we were doing this, my other partner was finishing the credits to make sure nothing is missing in the final film. Although, through the editing my group had realized that we could include more scenes into out film so we decided to film a few other scenes and finished them up in class.

10/30/24

It was the last day to edit so my partners and I focused mainly on editing, we were adding effects, sound, as well as a zoom effect to add more appeal to our film. We had some trouble as our scenes were blending together, as Thor's hammer would blend into Captain America's shield. So my group had only that to worry about fixing in order to submit our film to the teacher. We also had other classmates review our film in order to make sure it was good. Some classmates gave us feedback on what we could improve, but with time so limited we had decided to write down the feedback in order to include it in our future films.

11/1/24

Today was the big day in which the class would watch our peers documentary's. All of the documentary's were quite amazing and I had a lot to learn about them. Not only that, but the people presenting made the documentary entertaining, so we had a quiz at the end of all the films and we would win a prize. Although we were not able to watch our film since time was limited, we were able to observe the films of others. My favorite film that we watched was the Lego movie as it was very well put together, and it really did seem like an actually composed film.

Week 11

10/22/24

This week our teacher gave us the class in order to finish up our blogs and give those that have not done a few to catch up. We went over loglines, editing and vocabulary. We were also given time to reflect on what we can improve in the following film. We then started to think of what we were going to do for our scenes. Our teacher had told us that we had to be more specific when making our blogs. We also had the bright idea to include scenes from our films into the blogs to show our work as well as the process to finish our film. So this week was mostly made up of catching up and reflecting on our progress throughout the school year.

10/24/24

 This week me and my partner Eduardo were assigned a group project. We were thinking about doing a film on a soccer player. As his team is reaching states the pressure is mounting on to preform. He does not want to let the team down, and the pressure is getting to him. We might get back to the idea to film a commercial as the filming will be hard to get access to since we need permission from the security to go down to the field. We were also handed a paper explaining what our blogs should look like and how they should be formatted according to Cambridge. We were a given our storyboard in which me and my partner started brainstorming on and we were able to finish it halfway. We are planning to start filming this weekend in order to give ourselves time to edit and figure out what we can do better.

Week 10

10/16/24

PSAT

10/18/24

This week we were presented with a serious obstacle. When my group and I were trying to open our documentary the file said that it was corrupted. We were faced with a decision of waiting and losing time recovering what we had done, or we could restart the whole editing progress. Luckily for us this file was easily recovered, after only 20 minutes my partner Eduardo managed to recover it by opening a later file that was not corrupted. This is what we called a learning process, it helped us learn what we can do next time this problem occurs. We all our our assigned things to do some worked on the script while I worked on editing our film. To do this out teacher gave us a rubric on what we needed to include in our film. My group later got together to finish up the credits so that we would make sure al the music and extra videos were credited. We made a valuable amount of progress today, and I hope it continues going like this.

Week 9

 10/7/24

Today was a slow start for our group. We had just came back from the weekend and we did not feel like working, but all things must come to an end. We eventually started working by watching the clips we had already edited. We all noticed that one of our clips was blurry, so we had to refilm it. We had to wait until one of the other groups was finished in order to finish up on our filming. Our microphone was picking up all the other conversation around the room, so we just decided to finish the filming at home.

10/9/24

We had some miscommunication and ended up not recording anything which would delay our filming and give us more work to do in the class. After 20 minutes of logging into the computers since the WIFI was very slow we got into the green room and recorded our scenes. We had started editing our clips, as well as adding some very needed voice overs to make out film more original. We had finished filming as had been said over and over, and we were on to the next day.

10/11/24

We were actually finished with editing, now all that was left was for my partner Eduardo to download clips and put them into our film. He did a very good job and it led to us being finished before the end of class, so I decided to spend the rest of the class working on my blog for this week. This week was very stressful, but my group did very well and handled the various situations.

Week 8

 9/30/24

Since our region of school was having hurricane threats we were behind on our film. All of the rush led to shots we were not quite accomplished with. We had retake the shot 6 times, and ultimately ended up picking the least worst one. The shots were voice overs so we had to go into a quiet room in order to film. It took us longer than expected since we had to be entirely quiet. Even with these issues, my group was able to have most of our shots done and we were able to start focusing on the most stressing part of editing, but in order to even get to that part we had to troubleshoot many, many times. We were all caught up where we should have been, now it was onto the next day.

10/2/24

Today was the day we finish our film. We decided to add two more shots in order to compose more original shots into our film. Me and Eduardo were focused on editing, until we realized it would be more efficient if only one person edited and the other worked on the other parts of the documentary. So I had started creating a marketing poster on the film with my two other partners, Kyle, and Garrett. We were finally done with the film and we spent the few minutes left of class catching up on our blogs.

Week 7

9/24/24

Today's class was quite similar to last class. We mostly spent our time accordingly in trying to find the best clips to produce and successful film. This proved to be worth the while since we were doing our film on the Avengers, we had to pick in choose through a vast variety of their film series. In my group since we all have a different mindset, it was known that we would want to include different clips into the film. While some wanted fighting scenes, others wanted montage on how the film was made. We had gotten some progress done and we were on track to making a promising film.

Week 6

 9/16/24

While I was in class, today was the day that every groups short film was presented. We were the 5th group to present. I was able to realize that our audio had to be better after seeing what other groups had created. Other groups had also incorporated shots that can convey emotions into their films. It is a good thing I was able to see other films and receive feedback on what my group can improve on.

9/18/24

We finished the last groups film in the beginning of class since they were not able to present before. After that, a new filmed was assigned. This time was a documentary. After discussing with the group, we decided on a documentary of the Avengers film series. We did the documentary on all the films they have created since they were all too great to decide. This was our new project.

Week 5

 9/10/24

Today we had completed our editing. We had quite the scare as our film was reset and we had thought this meant and new restart. Luckily for us we had a last saved file, although not being the final project as we thought we had done, most of our work was saved. We spent the rest of class catching up on all the work that was reset. Since we already knew how things should go and go to edit with ease, we finished in no time.

9/12/24

It is the day before interim reports. I tried to catch up on all the work I was missing, although not much it still took quite some time to completely finish. I had to finish a poster for my groups short film. After this we went on to editing and were finished, and saved. This gave my the last 15 minutes of class to complete the blog that I had missed.

Week 4

9/4/24

Week , we just came back from a three day weekend not feeling like working much, but my group continued the process of editing our short film in order to be able to finish it on time. Most of the time was consumed by trying to learn how to add text announcement bar effect. Once it was figured out we were able to complete 3 whole scenes. The scenes were to introduce all the characters in our film.

9/6/24 

Going into class, we had already finished quite a bit of our project. So we had to give our last effort in order to finish our project. After grabbing computers and only focusing on the editing, we were done. We added effects to make the film have more emotion. We were all able to learn this due to Tom, coming into the class and giving us a informative presentation on short films. All that was left was to add miniscule details such as a small amount of sound effects.

Week 3

8/26/24

We spent the entire day editing in class. To begin editing, we walked to a computer, but it was incredibly slow and took ten minutes or more to boot up. After that, we spent an additional fifteen minutes downloading and uploading each footage to the editing program. We made the decision to include some sound effects because we had roughly thirty minutes remaining. After a long attempt to record them, we gave up and downloaded them off the internet because of the slow equipment.

8/30/24

I am off to class this Friday morning. I was aware that we would not be able to continue working on our movie. This is because we had a special guest in our class today who came to teach us about various equipment, shots, and films. This was crucial because it gave us a goal and offered us valuable lessons that we could apply to our films. He gave us examples of what to do by showing us several films that had won awards. In addition to showing me several images I would use in future film projects, it was really instructive. He also described how filming in Florida is quite successful.

Week 2

8/20/24

Our teacher assigned the class our first group project of the year. It consisted in a group of four which we all settled on doing a wrestling film. Our film has to consist of two shots that introduces our two main characters. We spent the first day planning everything out, from planning what we were going to do on the film, to where we were going to film the rest of it. I enjoyed being able to communicate with others, and having fun planning out each different shot on a story board.

8/22/24

Today was the day that the group filming began. We were able to go into the green screen room where we filmed the first shots of our film. We were able to include different shots to introduce our main characters. After filming, I sent the videos that we already filmed to the person in out group that was editing the video. Considering that today was our first day filming I believe we did a really good job on our work.

8/26/24

In class today, we spent it mostly on editing, while our computers took some time to load up, we were thinking of how else our film could be improved. When our computers booted up, we started the editing process, from the music, to the background sounds, all they way to voicing the characters, and introducing them. Overall our group did very good in the editing process, and I am sure we all enjoyed the editing process.

Week 1

 My first day in AICE Media studies was fun, the group activity that we had to do was entertaining because of the fact I got to meet new people and learn about their summer. I also liked the fact that it was different from what I did in my other classes, as this class gave me a chance to communicate with others. The fact that everybody had to present in front of the class gave me a chance to learn about others, learn about what they did during their summer, how different everybody is, and how everybody has totally different lives.

My second day of AICE Media studies, although we had a ton of technical issues, was still very enjoyable. We had some technical issues the first half of class as we are learning to use a new platform, but it gave me a chance to communicate with others. I also appreciate the fact that the teacher is letting us work through it and allowing us to help others out, allowing me to me to learn about others, and it even allowed me to make new friends. I have a good feeling about this class, and believe it will be a very enjoyable year.