Final Task: Film Opening

In this blog, I have attached my third and final film of the school year. I had to make a 1 minute and 50 seconds to 2 minutes long film opening. I was excited to start this project because it was what I was preparing for all school year. I had already created two films, so I felt prepared for this one. For the Final Task, I worked with my music video group-mate again. We were very productive together during the music video, so we thought it would be a good idea to work with each other again. The film my group-mate and I decided to create is titled, "Dysfunctional Spies," and it is an action film. The film's pitch is a spy movie where two teenage spies are on a mission to track down and briefcase. During the process, their friend gets kidnapped.

There was a lot more planning involved with this task than the other two. I began the project in January and had until April to finish it. I was given a lot of time to research, storyboard, film, and edit this opening, so I made sure not to waste any time. During the process of this project, I had the roles of researcher, storyboard artist, camerawoman, director, actress, and editor. When I was researching, I would look up the conventions of an action movie and take notes on the ones I wanted to include in my opening. I also watched action movie openings and took notes on the titles. This was my first project that needed to have titles, so I wanted to make sure I knew how to add them to my film correctly. As the storyboard artist, I outlined the scene for my group-mate who would later add more details to the drawings. When I was filming I took many takes from different shots and angles. I would also let the actress know if they were in the frame. A new role I had for this project was to be an actress. I didn't act in the commercial or music video, so this was a new experience for me. I wasn't a part of a lot of scenes, but I believe that the experience was very valuable. As the editor, I dumped and imported the footage. Furthermore, I organized the footage to be in the correct order. 

During this assignment, I learned a lot about titles and sound. I was able to gain knowledge of the different placements, fonts, designs, and sizes of titles. I didn't have to work with a lot of dialogue in my other two projects, so during this task, I learned the importance of how lines are said. Also, I learned how to adjust the sound to make the dialogue louder, so it would be easier for the audience to hear.

The process of making the opening was honestly very stressful. I came across a lot of issues and had to re-do many things during the span of this project. When I was supposed to be doing the finals edits on my film my school closed because of COVID-19, which created many editing issues. However, I learned how to overcome all the issues I faced during this project and I learned that things don't always go according to plan. In the end, I really liked how my film opening came out and I think I have improved a lot since the beginning of the school year.