Film Opening Project: Final Shots

 The Final Shots

    Hey everyone! I am back to fill you all in with the progress of me and Natalia's film opening project. This is officially the last thing that me and Natalia had to do in terms of the production process. So, right after this, we will be jumping straight into the editing process. But for now, I will be explaining how we went about filming the last three shots. 

The Last of Filming

    So, as you all know, most of the shots were filmed at our school auditorium to resemble the theater, and the rest were filmed in my bedroom with a set design that represents Stella. However, there is a small moment in the film opening that uses an eyeline match from Stella to a shot of what she is watching. The film being played on the screen is super important, since it hints towards Stella's inner conflict towards the journeys of her future with acting. That is why we decided that the film Stella is watching should be a documentary of a famous actress (Patricia Sarmiento), who in the documentary is shown describing her journey while reaching success in the acting industry, while also giving advice to aspiring actresses like Stella. 

    The reason why these scenes were pushed so far back was that the person playing this part wasn't going to be available until this week. Now you may be asking yourselves, "Why didn't Hannah or Natalia play the part?" Natalia could not play the actress because she was already playing Stella, so it would confuse the audience since there would be two of her showing. I didn't play the actress because I am not comfortable being in front of a camera to act and am in recovery from a surgery that limits me from doing so. For those reasons, we decided to wait until the person playing the actress was ready. As soon as the person playing "Patricia Sarmiento" was ready, we took her to a nice location with lots of plants to set up the documentary scenes where she gives influential and emotional advice that moves Stella. 

    Thankfully, filming these scenes did not take too long, since it was only three short shots of Patricia giving out advice. Even though it was not time consuming, we ran into two issues that we were luckily able to fix. We had two major issues...

Two Issues: How we dealt with them

#1: Audio

    The first issue that we ran into had to do with the audio. When we were recording the scenes, we decided to do a test run, where the actress for Patricia says anything, and then we make sure that everything is okay with that shot. So, after doing the test run, we noticed that we could barely hear what the actress was saying, as there were many background noises, making her speech inaudible. When trying to brainstorm ideas on how to fix this, I thought of using the little microphone attached to people's clothing during interviews to capture their dialogue, but we do not own one of those. Then, we came up with the idea of putting another iPhone very close to the face of the actress, but far enough so that it does not show in the video. With this technique, we were able to properly record Patricia while capturing her speech clearly.

#2: Memorization/ Shots

    The second issue that we ran into had to with the actress herself. English is not "Patricia's" first language, so it was challenging to have her memorize a whole speech to repeat while looking into a camera. After several test runs, it was clear that we had to think of another plan. We then thought of the idea to have her wear sunglasses, so that her eyes do not show when she reads off the script and to give her more of an "I'm famous" look. Even though this did help block her eye movement, it was still obvious that she did not memorize a script and was reading off of one. Which is why we than decided to separate the shots, showing different angles of Patricia's face. This would help separate the lines that she had to memorize, which was much easier for her and ended up working. With this technique, we were able to film the documentary while making it look like she was not reading off of a script. This also means that we had to sync the video with the audio, which wasn't too challenging...

    This is a screenshot of how we edited the video with the synced audio below! However, this is one of many aspects to our film opening project. I don't want to spoil too much of my next update, since I will be talking about the editing process. 

    Anyways, stay tuned for my next update on our journey towards the completion of our film opening project!