What I Would Change If I Did It Again

My beloved teacher Mr. Engle had kindly warned us at the beginning of the school year that AICE Media Studies would be a slight challenge for us because of the work load. "This class is fun! .... Until 3rd quarter. Then it gets tough" ~ Engle 2018/2019 school year. I did not believe him at first, because all my teachers claim their classes are hard to their own extent. But Mr. Engle wasn't kidding this time! Though I would like to point out, I don't find this class to be difficult academically. Rather, it is a very demanding class. It requires a lot more time and attention than what I am used to. And I mean a lot more. HOWEVER! This class has taught me a lot as well, and I genuinely have enjoyed the entire process of creating a title sequence. It has been an exciting, long and rewarding journey.

Now that my sob story is over, I would like to take time to reflect upon what I would change if I did this whole process over again.

1) Understand that the Canon camera does not have to be used for everything

During our first round of production at Super 8, we had shot on the 2 Canons all night long. And, personally, I found that my iPhone was taking better footage than those cameras combined. I feel like as a group we had subconsciously agreed that because we were doing the closet thing to a "professional production" that we had done in our whole lives, we felt the need to use "professional equipment", even if it wasn't the best idea. If I could go back, I would honestly set the Canons on the shelf until we needed a rack focus, and just use the glorious iPhones. The Canons were bulky, heavy and sometimes straight up gave us grainy quality.

2) Understand that production does not have to be squeezed into one day

Again, this was another mistake we made during our first found of production at Super 8. We spent all day trying to cram all of our ideas into a few hours before it got too late. Even during our re-production in the health science room at our school, we became extremely anxious as a group when it got late on our first day of shooting and we weren't done. In reality, we just needed to step back and say "it's okay to take another day!" Similar to how writing a whole essay in one day can be a mistake, the same goes for shooting if not played out correctly. It's okay to take more than one day to film.

3) Tighten up on loose communication 

I had an AMAZING group, don't get me wrong. But, as with any important human interaction, there always seems to be some form of communication issues present. There were numerous times in the beginning of the title-sequence making process where none of us were on the same page. At times, there was confusion over what the plot of the movie was, there was a lack of communication over the shots that needed to be filmed, and there were misunderstandings over props, to name a few. All in all, we were able to communicate quite efficiently towards the end of the project and especially towards the editing stage, which is the most important. But over-all, better communication techniques would have essentially made the whole process smoother as a whole. "Perfect" communication can never be reached, considering we're only human, but we did try our absolute best. Never the less, I love my group so much and we came together to film a brilliant project.