Cambridge Portfolio Project: Final Reflection

 Reflecting

    Hey everyone! I am back with more progress updates on the Cambridge Portfolio Project, as I have finished up the Creative Critical Reflection. I decided to take a moment to reflect on the whole process of working through the Film Opening and the Creative Critical Reflection. I want to start by saying that I have learned so much throughout this process; I learned some valuable lessons and learned more about myself along the way. I will now be talking about the 2 very valuable lessons that I learned. 

Lesson #1: Always Have a Back Up Plan

    As you can see from the title, we did not create any back up plans for the film opening project. There were several situations in which we could have used a backup plan, but didn't have one, causing us to solve these issues very quickly. Thankfully, we were able to face these obstacles, but the stress of solving them could have also been avoided. For instance, on the day that we filmed the film opening, the extra actors that were going to be in the film, who would have played Stella's plan, could not end up making it, so we had to completely eliminate them from the film opening. This was a huge issue that caused us lots of stress, since in our storyboard, the family took up lots of the shots...

    Above are the pictures of our storyboard, which as you can see, lots of the frames have the family involved. So, when me and Natalia got the news that the actors playing the family canceled, we were stressed, since we did not have a backup plan for this problem. Even though, as I mentioned earlier, we were luckily able to come up with a quick solution, which was to use tighter close-up shots on Stella, so that it would look like that was the plan all along. However, this process would have been a lot easier if we had a backup plan ready in case this happened. 

Lesson #2: Always do a Trial Run Before Filming

    So, for the next lesson I learned, it had to do with trial runs. Like the first lesson, this was one of our major erros during the production process. So, here's what happened: when we were filming the outdoor scenes of the film, instead of testing how the audio of the shot would sound like, we just began filming without checking on any factors that could possibly affect the film. After recording quite a few shots, we finally decided to check our progress (While we did check the shots, we should have checked the first shot we did right away instead of waiting). This is when we noticed that the device we were using to record, did not capture the audio correctly, so it looked like the dialogue was muted. With this problem in mind, we had to reshoot all of the shots we had. 

       This made us lose a lot of time that we could not get back, which honestly was a bummer, since losing so much time is something that we could have prevented. However, I am just thankful that we at least checked the shots at some point in the production process. However, we now know that we must take trial runs to make sure that everything about the shot is okay.

   Anyways, those were the two main lessons that I learned while working through this project, and I hope that you all learned something from my experiences, and make sure not to repeat my mistakes! This was definitely a long yet meaningful journey, but I am glad that I managed to learn so much from this. This chapter is finally ending, but that does not mean it is completely over! I still have to share with you all my final film opening and CCR, which will be in my next update. 

    So, stay tuned for my next update!