CCR Part 2

 1) How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues? 

    My product, "A Knight's Aim", challenges filming conventions in many parts of the film. The color, for one, is in black and white. This is frowned upon for today's movies, as it was more common back in the early-mid 1900s. Also, the whole film is mute, and the only thing heard is non-diegetic soundtracks and sound effects. Along with that, the film is only one minute long, which challenges the multiple hours of almost all films. Playing along with the old theme, the film also has title cards that help develop context without the use of diegetic audio. This film represents an older generation through the use of their film techniques. But the engaging fight sequence can appeal to younger audiences. There are no real issues represented it is more of a comedic battle between the piece and top hat man. The top hat man is the only one facing the issue after getting attacked from the chess piece. The conventions used here are from action and comedy. The laughability after the serious of the fight scene demonstrates this. The comedic conventions come from the sound effects and the action ones come primarily from the fight scene.

2) How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?

    My product, "A Knight's Aim", engages with audiences through the use of comedic conventions. The audience sees this through the comedic sound effects. They gain context for this through the title cards used in the film. They explain what is happening directly to the audience and even show dialogue without having any actual spoken words in the film. This will engage with the audience effectively enough to give them a sense of comedy. It will be distributed at a film festival for other people to give their opinions on it and for us to get a sense of feedback from it. This can prompt us to find out general information on our project and prepare us for the later one to come. 

4) How did you integrate technologies- software, hardware, and online- in this project?

    In my project, for sound design, I used a variety of software. The main one that I used for editing the sound was Adobe Rush. I found it simple to use and liked it's vast amounts of sound effects and soundtracks. Besides this though, I also found sound effects online through archives. For hardware I used the computers provided by the teacher and also my own, which I did most of the sound editing on. However, there were some setbacks that I faced. While trying to edit, it was hard to place different sounds upon one another and adjust the volume so that they both sound like they are supposed to be there. Some audios are very low  while others were extremely loud to the point I had to adjust my headset volume. Combining this elements was a challenge and throughout this project multiple times, I had to look up how to do certain things on YouTube and the official Adobe site. These technologies had to be integrated between team members too. It was a pain to share files but we found a site called WeTransfer that we used for the majority of the tasks involving the sharing around of the film. 

CCR Part 1

3) How did your production skills develop through this project?

Final Film

Research Reflection Post

 In pre-production, my research was not very effective. In the start, I was only researching what we could do with the storyline. My part focused on the sound design, so this research was irrelevant to my main line of development. The sound design was only focused on in the end of mid-production and postproduction. This effected how the sound worked together in the film.  My group loved the sound choices that I picked for the film (it was hilariously bad) It was so bad that it made it good. The sound is getting reworked and so are the title cards. 

 In class we had to fix all of those issues before we could put it into this blog. The sound and title cards were the main priority. All of these problems were addressed before it was uploaded. 

 This picture shows when we rewatched the film in class.

Difficulty with Uploading

 For some reason, my internet decided to back out as soon as it comes time to upload the film. I even tried going to my grandmothers house but the local city Wi-Fi’s upload speed was struggling in my area and it was not any better there.

 0.25 Mbps to upload would have taken me 10+ hours to even send the full film to one of my group members. I resorted to the good old fashioned way of saving it to a flash drive and hoping for the best.

 It is a shame that this masterpiece of a film is held back by the connection of my outdated router.

Sound Placement and Comedy

   The sounds that I chose had to be placed very intricately for their desired traits to be achieved. For example the jazz music in the background cannot be louder than a sound effect, that would take the whole point from it.

   Inputting and modifying sounds was a bit complicated on Premiere Rush. Since audio is on 3 different lines, I had to play with it a bit to overlay sound effects on an existing soundtrack. There were 2 main soundtracks to the film. One was only for the start before he encountered the chess piece.

Below are examples of how the sound is overlaid in Premiere Rush.

The fighting scene had the most complications to it. At one point I had to overlay 4 sounds together and mix the volume so it doesn’t sound odd.

Here is another example at the end of overlaying audio.

I tried to achieve comedy through the use of sound effects. When the chess piece was growing I put the Mario growing sound effect. When the character got kicked in the area I put a  very exaggerated screaming.

Sound Choices

 For most of the sounds, I used online archives and the provided Adobe Premiere Rush library. These sounds paired well together but the volume had to be adjusted a lot. It differed greatly between audios and was hard to sync up without it sounding messy. Placing them during key events is also a struggle.

 One of the online resources that I used was mixkit. It had a lot of free high quality audios to use that fit our film.

The audios paired well together and the panel on the left side made it easy to insert and control them. Splicing them into different parts was also relatively straightforward and sped up the process by a large margin.