Distribution

Hi guys!

Now that we have everything in place to film and edit, I thought I'd do a blogpost about our distribution techniques. This is a very low budget film and we are still beginners, so we decided we would upload our film onto Youtube and Vimeo. Sites like Amazon Prime and Netflix are way out of our reach since we are still a very small "business". These are both very user-friendly and convenient platforms in order to get our film out to a broad audience. To choose and understand the difference between these two sites, we did thorough research and found a lot of information on this site: https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/youtube-vs-vimeo/. We found there is no time limit for either site and the premium versions of both are not of high cost, making it a good investment for the project.

Free video viewing service, with the first video sharing site supporting high-quality video.

Youtube is easily accessible, free, and gets over 30 million visitors a day.

We want to appeal to an audience of young adults, especially people in high school or just starting college since our story is about a high school senior and her dream to become a professional dancer and attend NYU. We chose to use these two sites because they are easily navigated through a smartphone (in the U.S., 96% of 18-29-year-olds owned a smartphone in 2018) or a laptop, and we can also upload our film to this site at no cost but could upgrade for a very low cost making the benefits worth it. Making it easily accessible for our target audience and a very low cost for us, these sites are perfect for distributing our film.

Our New Storyline

As you guys know, our original storyline was going to be a musical. I even composed the music, but due to corona, the flashmob (requiring over 10 people getting together) will not happen. We cannot risk getting infected and spreading the virus. After lots of brainstorming, we decided that we would scratch the musical idea but keep our storyline and make it a drama.

Since we were originally supposed to film at school, but now we can’t anymore, we decided to have the film set during the summer. We decided to keep the idea of the music playing through the headphones and playing with diegetic/nondiegetic sound. The film opening will start off with Mia, the main character, Riding her bike and getting home. She checks the mail and sees college mail and she’s expecting a letter back from NYU but she does not have one yet. She continues to walk towards the door but before she enters her house. she takes off her pins which are representative of the LGBTQ community. As she enters her home, we kept part of the original storyline, and we are having her greet her mom and her mom neglecting her by saying “I’m busy right now “ or something along those lines. She will then enter her room, sit on her bed, and go on her computer to check email for more information about her acceptance to NYU. During this time she wanders off and daydreams about her dancing up on the stage. Janey has some footage from last year‘s dance recital so we will use that footage for the daydream scene. She eventually snaps out of it when she gets a phone call from NYU. The screen then goes black, leaving the viewers with a bit of suspense by the end of the film opening. 

I have attached a link to a voice memo of our whole process of developing a new storyline below:

Our New Film Opening

New Problems, New Solutions

Hey guys.

Unfortunately, we will not be able to use our documentary idea as we found out that it has to be a fictional film opening. Janey, Raisa, and I have been communicating back and forth for several days now trying to figure out what we were going to do. Due to the quarantine and safer at home order Broward County has officially set, it is impossible for us to get together and actually film.

However, we have found a solution to this problem. We are going to keep our original storyline but make it a drama instead of a musical. Since Janey is the main character, she will do all of the filming by herself at home while on Facetime with Raisa and me, and I will edit half of the footage and then send it over to Raisa so she can finish it. This way, everyone does some work and we can get a project ready in time. Hopefully it all works out like it's supposed to!

Technology

Hi guys!

I thought I'd do a blogpost on the kinds of technology that we will use in order to complete our project.

First off, the basic sites we use are Canvas as it is where the rubric for the project is uploaded on, and the way that we communicate with our teacher. To communicate, my group and I always use Snapchat because we can both text and send pictures as well.












For our screenplay we used Celtx. This is a great resource as it is so convenient and user friendly.

We will be filming using an iPhone 11 Pro (Raisa's) and iPhone 11 (mine). We thought about using a real camera (a DSLR), but chose to use our phones as it is more convenient, especially to export the footage, and they have great cameras installed in them. Below are the stats for the iPhone 11 Pro:

To edit, we will be using our MacBooks (we each own one), and we will be using the iMovie editing software as it is the one that we are the most friendly with and is available for free on all Macs. 

Lastly, since we have now moved to online learning due to Covid-19, we will be using Canvas conferences as well as Zoom to communicate with our class.

Our New Project

Hey guys!

As I mentioned before, we had to switch our whole project around since school was suspended due to the Coronavirus. Our idea of the musical (requiring a flash mob of 10+ people) will not be possible as we need to be in self-quarantine in order to contain this virus. Everything has been moved to a virtual platform, including class.

The idea that I came up with was switching our genre to a documentary. I wanted to showcase what is currently going on in the world with the virus and how the world has basically come to a stop - and convey the anxiety and uncertainty of the situation into a film. My group liked this idea, and so we decided to go with it. New research has to be done as we have completely switched our genre, but here is a basic overview of the documentary genre:

The purpose of a documentary is to inform the viewer, and our film will be based on informing people of what the situation is like for regular people in the midst of this chaos.

This is the basic outline:

We would have three different people, Raisa, Janey, and Andrea (me) star in the film. We would have the premise of the film be about how they were affected at the beginning of the virus and track their journey and process as they go through it all. We would touch on subjects such as how the virus affected their mental health by being locked up all day and also not being able to socialize as they did regularly at school. We also discussed covering how their health was impacted as well as their emotions. We want to include some vlog style clips documenting the process. 

We have yet to decide on a title, but I like the simplicity of just calling it "Covid-19".

Our Totally Normal Online Meeting

We had a meeting this week with our teacher, Mrs. Stoklosa to clear up some of the confusion going on with the Coronavirus. Everything is pretty crazy, and the video held through zoom helped me calm down a bit about this project.

Thankfully, the due date for the project has been moved back to April 12th. This will give us a bit more time to get everything ready (an extra week) since we had a huge setback due to Covid-19. Online learning will resume until April 15th, maybe even further. The situation is still very much unclear.

However, I quickly realized we have to restart our project from scratch. Since we cannot get together due to social distancing, we cannot do the flashmob as part of the musical that we wanted to do. I have to quickly contact the rest of my group and figure out what we're going to do.

We stay patiently waiting for news and updated on the whole situation, and I am often checking websites like  https://help.cambridgeinternational.org/hc/en-gb/articles/360006532458-Novel-coronavirus-Information-for-schools-about-the-COVID-19-coronavirus-outbreak and https://www.broward.org/CoronaVirus/Pages/default.aspx for updates.

Dealing with Covid-19

Unfortunately, due to the Coronavirus, our school has been canceled for the following week. This means that we won't have class time to get the footage we needed for our film opening. Although the spread of the coronavirus is a national emergency and I should probably be worried about more important things, my group and I are really worried because this really brought our project to our halt. Not only this, but we won't be able to get together for a while since we are supposed to be in self-isolation. I am hoping this all gets resolved soon so everyone can get on with their lives and everything can go back to normal. I will keep updating this blog as we figure out a way to make this all work.