CCR: Creative Response

 FINALLY!!

CCR:1 written response

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

Our film is about two opponent playing chess match, One who is an elegantly dressed man and one who is a more casual dressed woman. Our film has the more casually dressed woman win the game in the end after a dramatic match. Our film uses the conventions  of what people  believe a chess player looks like, which is usually a sophisticated man, to make the audience question their ideas once the outcome is revealed . At the same time this represents an issue that exists in the world of chess. Chess is a male dominated game, especially in high ranks. This has become a major topic of arguments in competitive chess, as it hasn't been a open space to women. This has been tried to be fixed a women's league but there is still the stereotype of women being worse. In our film we not only represented that women can be good at chess but that they can play and match against their male counterparts.

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

Our film engages with audiences by using their expectations against them. The game of chess comes with certain expectation of elegance  and sophistication, in the beginning our film follow these ideas. This makes the audience comfortable as the film is following their preconceive notions. As the film goes on the audience is surprised by the turn of events .The entrance of the rock music makes the audience confused yet makes them stop thinking about how the game is supposed to go. The audience start to enjoy  the dramatic and whacky actions that  are happening instead of taking the movie seriously. Our film would be distributed online through Youtube as its the best platform to show horizontal media that reaches a general audience and is economical.

how did your production skills develop throughout this project?

At the beginning of the film I had a general idea of what each role implied. I knew generally the goals of my role and the things I would be in charge of. But I didn't have any practical experience, everything I knew  was theorical. Which was a good starting point but throughout the production I learned more of the realities of making a film. A part of my role as a sound designer that I had to learn the most for throughout the production was the sound editing. It was my first time  editing anything, and through trial and error I learned important things. For example sound volume and mixing were very difficult to figure out. It took me a couple tries to get at the correct sound levels of the music, and making sure sound effects like birds chirping and chess pieces weren't obnoxious. One of the ways I figured how to make sure things weren't too loud was to get other people opinion that hadn't been working on the same clip for hours.

Chess Film Final Cut: Opponents

Fixing and Final touches

Final time working on the sound of the movie and I knew the specific things that needed to be fixed, removed or kept. The one thing I did for the entire thing was lowered its volume. This time I made sure to check in different devices how it sounded.

The rock part of the film got the least critiques so that stayed  and wasn't edited too much. I did a lot of volume changing in dividual clips to make transitions smoother. Specially where the  sound effect of the chess piece being put down plays. It took me a lot of time  finding a balance between the sound effect and the music. The transition between the sound effect playing and then not was very difficult. In the end i also decided to take off the sound from Bear Mcreary's "God of war:ragnorok" i liked the cleaner sound effect without the top layer. Though I add the same sound over some parts to add extra depth.

In general for all the transitions I ended cutting the sound clips into tiny parts and then lowering or raising the volume in increments. There might have been a better way to do them but I liked how much control it gave me over the clips.

After I finished the 2nd half, it was time to pay attention to the other part. The first part of the film had a lot of problems, it needed to be completely replaced. Finding music that match took me so long. It felt like most of the music was too preppy or too melancholic. In the end, I decided to show the director 3 different versions with three different songs in the beginning. In hopes that either one would be chosen or i would be given an idea on another song. The director ended up like the flute song from Barbie in the twelve dancing princesses. While the copyright free happy violin music and the accordion song Flambee Montalbanaise were rejected.

This is flambee Montalbanaise, I liked this song as it added rustic feeling our film and the song has an important history with another chess film.

This is the copy right free violin music that I felt like fit most to our film

This is theme of Barbie in the 12 dancing princesses that was chosen.I really liked how delicate and whimsical this tune is.

With that done the rest went smooth, I only needed to do finishing touches like adding the normal chess pieces sounds, and American robin sounds.

This what my timeline looked at the end

Relying on my group together ideas and opinion really helped me finish this in time. I was stuck at that part and I didn't know what to do, I had worked on the sound long enough that things were starting to meld together. But once I asked for a new perspective things became easier.

Technical issues

 With the knowledge of what I need to fix, my plan was to work on it over the weekend. Over the weeks that we have been working  on this film, I have learned a lot about the software we are using to record and edit which is Premier Pro Rush. Its a good a program a bit basic but does what it says well most of the time.

Premier Pro Rush is very finicky, a lot of times working with it feels like a gamble. One of the best features is the cloud, very easy to transfer things and when it works its really nice but then sometimes it doesn't work. like it happened to me over the weekend.

The error screen that I got constantly

No matter what I did, it never wanted to open the project not on my phone  and not on my computer. Pretty quickly i became frustrated every time I opened the program and it was a red screen. I tried a lot of ways to fix it, usually waiting is what fixes it as it gives time for the cloud to fully load. I waited a long time and it never loaded. Then I had to go troubleshooting, trying different videos, installing the program again. This was the biggest hurdle i got while working on the film, and it was very stressful.

But throughout the whole experience of using editing software, it taught me to be patient. Sometimes Wi-Fi is so slow but switching it off and on will just make it worse, so its better to wait. After a while I figured out Premier more and  learned how to work with the program instead of against it.

feedback and new game plan

 Feedback

On Friday, my group and I were able to show the reference cut of the film. We got a lot of feedback and so we made a plan to fix the issues over the weekend

From the video editing side of things, the one major feedback was that the title card  didn't reflect the tone of our movie. Which looking back is true as our original title card was more delicate and sophisticated. For that our video editor fixed that problem by adding a bolder font. The font is also less formal and more cartoon like which fits the tone of our film more

The original title card

The new version with a bolder font

Something that confused the watchers of the film was the fact that the opponent who wins changes clothes through halfway. This was intentional from our group part as we wanted to show a change of character between the first half and the second. Her wearing less color and new accessory and makeup represents how serious she is taking the game. We wanted to make the comedy be zany and unexpected, so we thought it would be a funny idea to have the character change out of nowhere. But as a viewer it is pretty confusing, especially cause there is no hints or physicals act of the clothes' changes. If we could go back I would have most likely had the character put on the black jacket dramatically or scratch the idea completely.

The major feedback about sound design I got was that the first song didn't match. Which was true, it was too loud and too fast. Our instructor described it as an "Irish Jigg" which now that he said it I  can't stop thinking about it as. So my first priority was finding a better song. Another critique was that some of the sounds weren't smoothly transitioned, specially the chess piece sound and the change from the "Irish Jigg" to rock. A big thing that I realized though I don't remember if anyone said anything about was that over all the volume was too high.

And I think the reason why is that I had my computer low the whole time I worked on the sound, and I never tried it full volume. So from my perspective things sounded softer and I didn't realize that, until the screening. Well that's a lesson on how important volume is, something as little as the volume of my device caused me to have such a different view of it.

After all of this, it was time to wait to get the real final edit and then finish my side.

Reference cut

A Reference

The day our editor finished the film, I wasn't there  at school to get it airdropped, which was the best way  for us to get a good quality version of the film, so I got sent the film through messeges. This caused the quality to really go down but  this version of the film didn't need to be the highest resolution for me to work on the sound. I just needed a version closest to the final cut so i could make a rough sound edit of the film.

The plan was that in class Friday we were going to have a day that we could share our films for feedback. Our group really wanted to have sound in the film by then so we could get feedback on every part of the movie. For this to happened we were going to have to show the lesser quality version that i was working on. So my deadline was very strict.

Before I started working on the edit, I showed my team my list, and also made them listens to some of the songs. The director and I talked a bit about other music selections, including using 80 rock bands. I didn't end up using them because of time constraint in the first rough draft. We agreed specifically that Riot Music Team's "Gwen the hallowed mistress" was too dark and dramatic. With in mind the sound design statement, the song didn't give good enough of a contrast.

Edit

when it came to actually editing, I ended up using a combinations of songs that felt like matched.

I used two songs composed by Dario Marianelli From the Pride and Prejudice 2005 adaptation. I used the first 15 seconds of Marianelli:Meryton Townhall for the beginning of our film . I liked how rumbustious and happy the song sounded. Its a very contrasting tone to the rock and roll. Though it also feels a bit too contrasting to what's happening on screen.

The second one was Marianelli:Dawn which  I used at the very end, for the contrasting serene piano to add the comedic ending.

Odyssey-rock Suite-Pt2 was the rock song that i used in 17  to 50 seconds of the film. But this song was tricky as I did a lot of cuts, so it would fit better  with the film. The main reason i use this song was the very harsh guitar distortion. I liked the idea of guitar becoming distorted same time the film fidelity too becomes distorted. Another reason was that cause it such a rhythm heavy song, it uses a lot of patterns this made it  easier to match with the actions in the screen.

This was my edited version that matched the film. I cut out the middle part were more instruments come in as the part with the drums worked better to make it feel more like a duel. That part  also connected easier to Marianelli:dawn.

For the over the top sound of the chess pieces, I did a combination of Bear MCreary's "God of War:Ragnorok" and Michael Giacchino's  "Highway to The Anger Zone" from The Batman 2022 .I wanted the sound of the chess pieces to have a very low fidelity in this part to exaggerate the action. I wasn't sure about the God of War:Ragnarok choir that I added on top. It felt like the sound became muddle and there wasn't the big oomph when the chess pieces hit.

Sound selection

The List

 Before getting a cut of the edited film, I started looking into possible music and sounds that I could use. I could not do a lot with a unedited version of the film but I wanted to get started to prepare for when I got a better version from the editor. So  I made a list on the notepad app with all the titles of the songs,  descriptions of my thought process in choosing them, and specific times in the songs  that had the sounds I wanted.

Overall most of the music of this list comes from soundtrack of  videogames and movies. Our film is very dramatic and what is happening on screen is very eye catching with its absurdity. I wanted the music to enhance the drama of the film, while also not being distracting. So I veered more to soundtracks than anything else.

Creation of the list

Things I kept in mind while making the list

• The sound design statement in our portfolio,
• The script's audio description, 
• The opinion of the rest of the team 
• If it matches what we had recorded

Making this lists was a lesson in choosing how close should I stay to the original vision of the production portfolio and at the same time making sure it fit the actual film. The creative vision of the film was originally very different from the product we ended with. In practice a lot of the  shots were cut and things were moved to make a better product that fell under our time constraint. This meant that audio ques and specific music in general had to be cut.

This shot was cut because of time constraints, and it was supposed to be a transition shot between classical music, choir music and rock. It allowed for more time to smoothly transition such contrasting genre, without this it meant that while making the list I had to keep in mind the fact this was going to be were the musical transitioned happened

for my selection I did not think too much about how close the script was, it ended up being more of a guidline. But I did specifically keep in mind a specific part of the sound design statement.

"Our film is a comedy that dramatizes such a simple game of chess to the point that it becomes unrealistic. We wished to have a tense dramatic tone to contrast with the mundane actions being shown. Our sound aesthetic follows this principle as it was decided to have lilting music of soft classical violin contrasted with heroic thunderous music, like a superhero theme."

No matter the changes that ended up happening, our film was always based around the ideas of this paragraph. And I knew that it was imperative that my list kept to this idea.

Pick ups

 

This is it

The final last day to finish filming. With the to do list ready, our group was prepared to get everything done.

thankfully unlike  the other productions days, the weather was not a factor for us to overcome. The weather was pretty nice, mild without any rain or a bright sun which was quite a relief. So without any weather obstacles we started as quick as possible.

Productive day

We got everything we wanted to do. Most of the shots we did were actually from the beginning and from the very end. Some of the shots were planned from the beginning of the script but others were shots created after seeing the rough edit and realizing that some needed to be replace.

originally our title card was the two characters shaking hand but once the edit happened the group agreed that  the handshake was taking too long  and the title card being on top was too distracting. So the first shots we took was the top view of the chess board as a title card and a quicker handshake.

The reason for these two shot created first was because the next shots we wanted to do needed accessories and cosmetics. It was more efficient to leave those to last so we wouldn't  have to take time doing changes.

The Bandanna shot

The hardest shot of this day was actually the one that needed the costume change. From the beginning of the script it was planned that there would be a scene were extras came in with a bandanna and war paint to put it on the main character. I got in charge of putting the bandanna and our cinematographer put the make up on. Originally someone else was supposed to put the make up on but they were having difficulty putting it straight. We had to redo this shot around 3 times and it took a long time to set up after each one. Another problem was that we couldn't stop laughing, as soon as one person cracked up, everybody went down.

In the end  it was decided that our editor would just cut the laugh and speed up the clip so it didn't look as clunky as real life.

The List

In the end we did a lot and had fun at the same time. The preplanning really did help give an idea of what things we needed to do. We weren't too stressed about if we were missing shots and took less time setting shots up. But we also didn't strictly follow the list as we filmed we realized that some of the shots listed weren't necessary, and we liked the film without them. We didn't force ourselves to follow the plan, it was really good way to keep on track but we didn't wanted to stifle our enjoyment and creativity while in the filming process.

    This was our lists by the end of the day, the green checklist meant what we had done,