This movie is one of the hardest finals I have had to take. Why? It was long, annoying, frustrating, irritating, tiresome, and much more. It was difficult to find times when we were all free because we had other obligations such as Tae Kwon Do, going back home to visit family, fencing competitions, and a macaulay meeting. Then doing the prologue by myself was difficult because of so many technical difficulties and drawbacks. I had to deal with a scanner that took 15 minutes to scan an image. 15 minutes is a ridiculous amount of time. Then the black background would have a different hue every other scan so I had to scan each image twice. It was during an arts in nyc class when I realized that the photos wouldn’t open because they were too large or rather there were too many pixels. When I resized the image, it would disappear even when I resized it by inches. Nothing would appear. Even Dobie tried to help me but to no avail. I had to rescan everything again after making my drawings smaller. Another thing my scanner couldn’t do is zoom in. I’m not adept with GIMP and I tried it before on a Dell but it frustrated me. I prefer photoshop for editing. So I transferred all my project pieces from the Mac to my Dell. Besides, the Mac was ridiculously slow whenever I tried to open up a program for editing. Macs are not all that.
After transferring all the pieces, I had my friend, Purum, come over to show me how she made her video. She, too, was annoyed that my scanner did not have a zoom-in and zoom-out feature. Anyway, her technique helped me to finish my work faster than if I had to do it on a Mac. She had a Mac before a Dell, but found a Dell to be easier to use. The same goes with me. Once I put all the images together and played it, I just needed to put music and save it as a movie compatible with the Mac. It was not too difficult finding a program to do that on a Dell. The only drawback with making the prologue on a Dell is the lack of transitions I could put into the film. There was no ripple effect I could place into the prologue and it was irksome to play with. Alas, there will always be pros and cons with everything.
Filming the project was fun and frustrating. It was frustrating trying to set dates because we all were busy. Plus, finals were coming up so we all were busy studying or trying to study (for me). Our story changed from what we had on our storyboard, but mainly in dialogue. We based our dialogue on the original script and kept some of it, but the rest were changed to fit with the film.
Hrrmmmmmm… this film… well, it gave me a chance to laugh a lot at… nothing. I really liked that. Even though the film gave a lot of stress it was also a stress reliever. Laughing with everyone made me forget about finals and made me relaxed. I’m glad for that because taking a test when I am stressed makes my mind too cloudy. Also, this film is the accumulation of all our hard work, especially Paramjoat’s. She had to deal with a lot of problems with the Mac. We thought we lost our movie a few days before it was due, but we didn’t. WHEW~ It also contains many of our bloopers and fun times we had while making the film. I think we had more film of us laughing than of the actual script. Even the voiceovers we recorded might have been more laughing and mistakes than the real, serious recordings. Also, this film had Purum help me and she was fast at making the earth, but my piece when played was a bit shaky in the beginning D: But it was great to hang out with my friend again. I guess this film also marks the ending of our first semester in college. Ugh, I really don’t want to think about it and yet I do.
The “best” moment I had was running out in the freezing cold in sweats and a thing sweater looking for Paramjoat. She left her Vado after we filmed in Marianna’s dorm. It was refreshing to run outside in the cold, but the searching part was not fun. Paramjoat just disappeared. I guess if it is cold outside you really rush to get to the bus stop. But running in the cold woke me up really well and it helped me concentrate on my studies. Hahahaha. That was really good. I don’t know if I should do it again because I am feeling sick. The film also made me realize the sacrifices we all had to make in order to make everything work. All of us had to sacrifice something. It wasn’t something we all wanted to do, but we needed to do it. Life is full of people sacrificing themselves for something.
Mmmmm… I guess this really is the last blog for this site. But it may not be the end. Meh.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JzGOiBXeD4
