My skills at the start of the year is quite limited. I did do a lot of filming and photographing but they were only used to record life and to entertain myself. The only time I shot professionally was in a filming class where we learned spacing, angle, etc., So this was my first time filming and producing a product for studies. Editing is also the same, I have been editing short videos and vlogs for fun but I’ve never edited something formally. Blogging in contrast is something that I’m more familiar with, I write small diaries about things that happened to me very frequently. So blogging was rather a easy to get on task for me.
What I learned most about was in the production part. I learned a lot of filming techniques and editing techniques. For example: Adding and changing soundtracks, color-grading to fit our genre, cut-on-action editing, eye-line shots, etc., But the best skill I gained was to utilize the limited amount of resources we have. For example, we stole a garbage bag filled with trash to fake a garbage bag that was holding corps. We also used things we had like a belt to do the murder instead of a knife. Neither did we go outside and spend money on our settings and costumes, the shots were all done in the apartment and the parking lot.
When filming, we used a lot of equipments and the most interesting thing is the functions of the cameras. The different cameras give a different atmosphere when filming due to the difference in its lenses. What I think we did well was that we played around with a lot of lighting. We had really dim outside environment with only streetlights, strong LED lighting right in front of the face, lights coming out from the television by the side, yellow room environmental lights, and also the backlight from a car, etc., we even added the closing and opening of lights into our footage to give more contrast. What I think needs to improve is our planning stages. Our planning was not detailed and perfect enough to start filming which triggered us having to film again and again..It also was more time consuming for editing…
When editing, we both are familiar with the software “JianYing” so it was easy for us to collaborate. When the other person is editing, we could just tell them on the phone what we thought might be better and they’ll know where to change it. The other things I used, excluding the official editing, was NetEase, TikTok, and LittleRedBook. These three apps gave me more choices, dimensions, and creativity on what I could edit. What could be done better next time is that we could use more advanced softwares where there are more functions we could explore and use.
When blogging, I feel accomplished because I’m looking back to all the things I’ve done. It never was struggling for me to write blogs because it doesn’t need very professional language and it doesn’t have any restrictions. I believe, it was the most enjoyable part of the journey because I see and reflect clearly on where I was successful and where I failed. What was hard for me was that I did not take a lot of pictures while shooting so there were not many images I could insert into my blogs…
