Last Minute Touch-Ups...

 It wouldn't be a high school student project if there wasn't some last minute cramming done, would it? I'm writing this fairly late into the night, after preparing all day for tomorrow, the day I plan on shooting THE WHOLE FILM.

There's a lot riding on this one day, so I wanted to ensure everything runs smoothly. How did I get this done though?

1) Scheduling:

    First thing I did this morning was text my cinematographer, cast, and the park to make sure everything is good for shooting on Sunday at 2 pm. Luckily for me, everything worked out just right!

2) Getting Props & Equipment:

    Props-wise, I have most things accounted for at my house (easel, poster, chairs, computers, box, table, etc.) However, something I haven't found yet was a sort of podium for the speeches to be held at. I'm waking up early to pick one up from a friend tomorrow morning.

    I also need to pick up some camera equipment to film. To my mediocre mind, I figured that filming on my phone would get the job done, but my cinematographer Ren insisted that if they were going to help me, we'd need actually decent equipment. So I'm picking them up tomorrow early to go borrow a camera and other equipment from some of Ren's friends. So that's that covered.

3) Storyboarding:

    Incredibly, I decided to get a really, REALLY rough storyboard done tonight. After a couple hours blocking the scenes with the goofiest little caricatures and sketches to keep myself awake, I got the job done at 2 am. Despite some abysmal artwork from me, I think this will help us streamline the filming process to keep things smooth and snappy.

Overall, I think I'm ready to finally film this project! Now I just need a good night's rest to give my very best effort tomorrow! Eager to update you!

Scheduling is a Pain

 FINALLY. I WILL FILM. After mny days of putting this off and dreading filming, and then dealing with differing scheduling conflicts between my cast members and cinematographer, we finally settled on a day:

SUNDAY THE SECOND

 (Because filming on April Fools' would've been too on the nose)

I'm looking forward to getting this done this weekend! Production will come and go swiftly!!

Postcard Advertisement Research

     Hello! I'm going to quickly go over some example postcard advertisements that I analyzed some time ago for a school assignment.  I'll make sure to break down what's happening in each postcard and note what lesson/ advice I'm taking from my analysis of its techniques.

WHATS HAPPENING:

 A colorful display resembling a woman's silhouette faces a bunch of informative text detailing the date and location of a Woman's History Month Film Festival, boasting a variety of films that celebrate women in film, art, and music.

The bright colors immediately draw passerby's eyes to the postcard advertisement, and the floral patterns and feminine silhouette communicate the focus of the film festival wordlessly: women. The contrast between the yellow background and pink bands of text provide some variety in the text, allowing for a reader's eyes to drift downward naturally without getting lost in the text. The circle with big bold letters highlights the free admission detail of the film festival, which will probably be a huge selling point for any potential attendees.

WHAT DID I LEARN:

The color and vibrancy of the postcard doesn't really fit my film, so I'm likely not taking inspiration from that. I am probably going to learn from the different colored band technique for important text to provide some contrast / highlighting for my important info, like showing dates or contact information.

WHATS HAPPENING:

It's a very barebones design, with a sort of wall of text on the right of half of an owl's face.

The artwork for this postcard is very simple and massive on the postcard, demanding attention from passerby, and hopefully capturing enough attention from them to scan through the frankly bland listing of screenings on the right of the card. Date/Time is in blue text, Film name is in green text, and the location of the screening is in white text, providing some contrast between details for each screening.

WHAT DID I LEARN:

I like the idea of the artwork dominating the majority of the postcard, with the text details taking a backseat in order to demand more attention from people to read the postcard. I'm less inclined to mimic this advertisement's treatment of the text, since its bland and uninteresting to read through, and the text sort of disappears into the blue background. This reinforces my decision to highlight important text with bands of different color rather than have it typed directly onto the background

Keeping all of this in mind, I'll start work on my postcard advertisement sometime this week!

How Do Films Do Social Media Anyways?

 Hello! Another thing I've been up to lately is running the social media account for my short film, which you can follow on Twitter here!

I've never been big into (or big on) social media, it's one of those things I occasionally post on but typically just use to look at my friends' posts rather than making any posts of my own. So naturally, I had very few ideas on how to populate my film's Twitter account with promotional material. I started with a fairly tame "Welcome to the film's social media" post, but didn't know where to go from there.

After checking out several promotional social media accounts on Twitter for different films, I ended up studying the PLANE movie account (found here). I chose PLANE for more than just my familiarity with the film, taking into account the variety in different sorts of promotional material that the account posted. 

Some quick facts about PLANE very quickly:

-The promo account on Twitter had just under 1.5k followers, and averaged thousands of views per Tweet.

-The account made 225 promotional Tweets throughout its 5 month marketing period.

-With a budget of $25 million, it grossed $52 million at the box office, making a relatively decent profit.

Taking into account my personal experience with the film and its marketing, I knew that their marketing was RIDICULOUSLY lackluster, airing zero TV ads, with the only advertisement for the film I saw being in pre-movie advertisements at my movie theater and this Twitter account. Keeping this in mind, it's rational to believe that a good chunk of viewers of the film heard of it from Twitter, contributing to the movie's success.

GETTING BACK ON TRACK:

What sort of variety do I mean when I talk about PLANE's marketing posts? Here's some examples of different types of promotional Tweets that I could distinguish in their campaign.

The first type (and coincidentally the first ever post on the account) is the key art poster. Before even revealing any footage or trailers, the marketing team released a simple poster featuring the title, the tagline, and the main actors.

Its direct, to the point, and simple. Fairly easy to recreate. This should be my first "real" post, showing off the key art (or at least different iterations of it) before revealing anything else.)

The second type I noticed was the "stills post", a Tweet that showed off different shots and stills from the movie, without giving away any of the context. This is good to build hype, and would be a good opportunity to post some Behind the Scenes pictures alongside it.

I should post this after a day of filming!

The third type is much easier, and more up my alley- stupid jokes to farm social media impressions. As long as the Tweet has something tangentially related to the film, I can joke about anything in an attempt to "go viral" and start getting followers who otherwise wouldn't have been interested in the film.

The fourth type of post I noticed was anything focusing on the starring actors and showing off their looks/performance. Obviously, if your film has any actors with star power and fame, you want to capitalize off of their reputation and following. So this is another very popular and effective way of garnering social media clout.

(I chose this example because while it shows off Mike Colter, one of the leads in the movie who is fairly well known, it also mixes with the "joke" tweet format that I mentioned above, showing how well different promotional formats can work together.)

The final type of promotional tweet I saw on the PLANE account was the retweeting (the sharing of another user's tweet) of different reviewers or ratings sites discussing the movie, or posting articles about their opinions, in an effort to legitimize their film's quality.

(This won't be possible for my film because there's no sites to review it)

(...unless I fake an article..?)

Overall, this is good insight on how real world films promote their product on Twitter. Expect to see similarly formatted posts on my account soon!

Updated (ish?) Key Art

 Hello! I wish I could say I've been busy filming this week, as Spring Break would've been an optimal time to shoot all the scenes so I could get that over with as soon as possible. However, LOTS of scheduling conflicts arose, along with some other issues I had to deal with in my personal life, meaning I couldn't dedicate the time necessary to actually film this week, which is a MAJOR issue.

Needless to say, I'm NOT HAPPY with how things turned out. But there's no point dwelling on the past, and I can't afford to sit around moping about difficulties in getting stuff done. So I steeled my nerves and got to work on doing what little I COULD get done alone, meaning while there isn't a lot of progress on the short film production side of things, I've gotten LOADS of work done in other components of the portfolio project that I could do with little dependence on any outside parties, like running my social media page or working on the postcard advertisement, with blogs corresponding to each of those activities.

So lets get to the point of this blog. An updated key art post? What was wrong with the previous key art, the one I worked on in this blog post? Well, if you recall the image I posted, it had two major gripes that I intended on fixing: the screen display and the depth of the grave. The screen was an easy, but mandatory, fix. I simply traded computers again with my computer-dealing buddy, who had repaired the battery on the first computer (an exchange I talked about in this blog post). 

Now all I needed was a deeper grave. Once again, I contacted my buddy Sebi, who helped dig the first hole, and the friend who gave me the computer decided to tag along as well. Luckily, my choice in friends means they don't ask questions when I ask for help digging graves in forests, so we went on our way at once!

When we first dug the hole it was perfectly deep, but not wide enough. So enjoy this picture of me posing next to the too-small grave!

Finally, this is what I got. Honestly, It's almost perfect, save for two details: the brightness of the computer screen, and the dirty surroundings around the hole.

The brightness is a simple Photoshop fix, it's a non-issue. I'm still toying around with the idea of keeping the ground dirty and unkempt, instead of the nice grass in the last key art image. 

I'll update soon with my final revision of this image! Who know taking a picture of a computer in a hole would take so much time??

Cast and Crew!

 Hello again! Very quick post: I finalized the casting for my short film project! Let's run through the characters!

BLAKE CRAWFORD IS DAVID BABBAGE

Playing the role of the older brother with the politics-poisoned mind in the film is my close friend Blake Crawford, who you may recognize as the lead actor in my film opening last year, Clean Kill. Blake offered to help out in any way he could, so once again I will utilize his acting talents (?) to capture David's character onscreen.

CRISTI VAZQUEZ ALVEZ IS REBECCA BABBAGE

Joining David is his younger sister, Rebecca, who is played by Cristi Vazquez Alvez. Originally cast as Sharon Babbage, since Cristi and Blake date in real life, after the rewrite removing Sharon from the story, she will instead play Rebecca. Though I originally cast her since Blake and Cristi are dating in real life, when offered the choice between playing Blake's girlfriend or getting to yell at him a lot, she took the second option. Excited to see their dynamic play out!

TRISTAN DINGCONG IS PETER BABBAGE

Last but not least, my friend Tristan Dingcong will be playing the socially awkward gamer degenerate, Peter Babbage. When I discussed the film with him, he showed interest in acting in it, so I figured why not cast him, since he is certainly not lacking in passion. Pumped to see him perform soon!

And that's the main cast! Hope that you're as excited to see them get into character as I am!!

Ethically (???) Sourced Computers

 Hello again! This is going to be a shorter blog, and one that isn't as informational as any past blog posts, but I still figure its a pretty integral story to tell in relation to the production of the short film. As mentioned in the last blog post, I'm going to tell you now about how I got the broken computer props that will be used in the key art and short film.

    When I first started working on this film, I knew a big issue would be the computer prop that the film revolves around. Personally, I didn't want to destroy my own computer, and buying a whole new computer would've been expensive and a hassle. So, I reached out to a close friend of mine who is well-versed in everything computer related, and asked if he could help me out. Turns out, he has a bunch of old computers that are all old, big, and barely functional... perfect for me!

    When he sent the video above displaying one of the computers he was offering me, I was pleased enough that I was willing to pay a cheap price for the broken computer, meaning my film officially had a budget! How exciting! We made plans to meet and exchange goods.

    When I got home after the deal, the first thing I did was plug in the computer, log into the user, and try displaying the title screen for the film, to get an idea of how the key art would look, and safe to say, it looked pretty damn cool. Satisfied with my purchase, I put it away for the day, and made plans with my buddy Sebi to shoot the key art the following day.

    What I didn't expect was that a broken computer... would be broken. Huh. Go figure. When I unplugged the computer to take it to the shoot, the screen immediately went dark. Panicking, I pressed all the buttons, tapped the screen, and much more, before checking the inside of the computer, only to be met with a distinct empty space where the battery of the computer should've been. Uh oh.

This meant that the computer wouldn't be able to turn on without it being plugged into an outlet, which would be hard to find in a hole in the middle of a forest. Since this presented a serious technical issue, I furiously texted the computer dealer, asking where the hell the battery was. After a brief discussion, he said he could offer me a replacement computer, and he'd take back the one I currently had to fix it at his place. However, since it was too late to go replace the computer AND do the photoshoot, I opted to just take the dead computer and try my best anyways, which I go more into depth in this blog post.

    Anyways, the next day I came by his place, swapped computers, and tested out the new replacement laptop. Once again (somehow), I was surprised that a broken computer salesman would give me a broken computer. I had anticipated some damage, but not nearly to this extent. This was an ironic situation, as I now had a computer that was practically efficient, but visually unusable, as opposed to the previous computer, which was visually perfect, but practically unusable.



    So now that leads me to today, where we met up for dinner, and exchanged computers once again. Now, I have the original computer, which retains the perfect visual but with a battery attached to it after the day at his place. So I'm in the perfect place to shoot the real, official key art tomorrow! I'm so excited! Hope this was an interesting read, because it was certainly an interesting process to get my hands on ONE prop. Stay tuned for the casting list dropping today!!