Author Archives: carolinekim

Week2-3 Blogpost reflection (readings+videos)

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Reflection on the videos from Youtube

I’ve watched these two videos on Cambridge Analytica, which is a company that basically take personal information from users via an app they’ve developed and launched in Facebook. The first one was about them spending $1 million dollars on harvesting people’s facebook profiles. They wanted to have a culture war to win the president campaign vote. Doctor Aleksandr Kogan indicated one of Breitbart Doctrine’s idea which was “If you want to change politics, you first have to change culture, because politics flows from culture; if you want to change culture, you have to first understand what the units of culture and that people are the units of culture.”  Therefore, to achieve what they wanted, which was trying to change people’s psychological profile on facebook; so that they could manipulate the votes from them to change politics, (probably did some job on the presidential campaign). I personally don’t like the idea of stealing people’s personal information even though they claim this to be permitted by facebook users, however, I don’t think people that granted this app know what will happen to their accounts and profiles. And if they don’t know about, it’s violating their privacy and it isn’t right. The second video was a talk led by Alexander Nix; the whole vide was about how personality drives behaviour and how behaviour influences vote. He explains how this Cambridge Analytica works and introduced that if you know the personality of the audience you’re targeting, you can message to resonate moves more effectively, which in this scenario, change votes. It is smart to gain people’s private information and how they get permitted access to it, but I still don’t stand for their behaviour and their idea, and I won’t get any social media app like that if they tries to get my information. 

Assignment#4_Carolione_Due 18 Oct

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Part A: the link to our film: Bloodiest Mary : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dYMZTmQISECD2Y8UK50KMbal2AQ0PUJ7/view?usp=sharing

 

Part B: the Reflection

For our final assignment for this class, we made a short film called “Bloodiest Mary” within the genre of horror. It tells a story of five teenage girls having a sleep over, and try the legend of Bloody Mary, then got haunted one by one by the Bloody Mary. Kaushal had the script ready ahead of everything so that was quite delightedly easy. I was the person that controls the sound. 

Everything worked out so perfect, it was a nice group-working experience. During the pre-production part, other group members were really into the project and I was ill so I wasn’t able to help much. However, during the production part, I was the one that control the boom mic, even though it was my very first time using the boom mic, I managed to record with it successfully, it was quite handy to use actually. On the day of filming, it was rainy, and we were in suburbs, we were filming a horror film, so the environment suits our theme genre – horror. We waited till it was quite dark outside to film, because when it’s darker, the gloomy atmosphere starts to kick in. It took longer time than expected, we did not finish until mid-night, around 12 o’clock, which means some parts didn’t go as planned,  so next time when we do it, we should keep an eye on the time and be more stick to the plan.

For our first couple of scene, as well as the first couple of sequences were easy, so we completed them quicker. Later on,  for the scenes that Bloody Mary arrives, it got a bit tricky which dragged us down a bit, so it got slightly later than we expected. The boom mic was heavier than I thought it’d be, but I had really enjoyed the production part, where everyone is doing their jobs,  working our ways towards one goal and complete it successfully. I was so relieved when we finished filming,  it was at our best. I am satisfied with our finished piece. 

During the process of making a film on our own, I’ve learnt a lot. Before, I’ve only used MC-50 cameras to shoot, I haven’t used any recording equipments during shooting, I haven’t been in such a big crew either. For this assignment, I’ve learnt to use boom mic to record sound, both chatters, diagetic sounds, or just the environmental sound. I’ve learnt to hold it in just the right angle to the camera so it doesn’t get in to the picture. With more people in our project, means more cooperation skills are needed; the actors, and producers need to cooperate well.

If I could do it again, I would spend less time focusing on the beginning, the introduction that shows how the girl gathered together to have this sleepover thing. It is sort of cliché and waste of time, to make sure it’s filmed within the time frame, it’s better to shorten the introduction and focus more on the mirror scene and the haunting scene. Use more close-up shots on the actors when they are haunted, it explains better to the audience of how are the characters feeling and what their facial expressions are; it shows more haunting scenes to fit in the genre of horror, because this genre is supposed to make audience feel scared, not confused. Therefore, if more shots are filmed for the haunting scenes, it’d give a better understanding to the audience and create horror more. I think perhaps we could improve on time management next time, because it took too much more time than expected. 

For genre of horror, the scenes of horror needs to be dark enough. For lighting, we used few lights in the room, just the lighting equipments, (dedo lights and colour gels). Changing colour gels means changing mood, red, orange colour gels give a warm tone, it’s used for the opening scene; the girls having a nice sleep over, all happy and chatting around. Blue, green colour gels are used in later scene, haunting scenes and scary shots. It helps to give a dark, gloomy and scary atmosphere. For most scenes after the Bloody Mary, we only used the demo lights, no room lights at all. It was dark when filming, it gives the right amount of darkness and tension. And if some shots aren’t that perfect, we could adjust it later on during editing part in Premiere Pro. 

Challenges that we faced would probably be the SD memory card get full quite often, so we had to get everything out and transfer them to the laptop then delete them on the disc card, then put it back again to film, it did took some extra time. Another tricky thing was the short of hand, Marie had to act while helping with the filming, so that was in the way, but we managed to multitask. 

After this work was done, I learnt that my way of working would be better if working in fewer people, I feel that too many people work in the same group is harder to control, also because everyone has their own ideas, so it’d be trickier to come to the same idea. And I might apply the experience I had with filming for this work to the future projects. I might continue to develop this filming skills in the future as well.

Media 2 Assignment 1

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Links to the two in classes exercises

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i9T5-ftOFAOsdqgA9kZ0GqOxVGFwYfxa/view

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1az7Eg7G-Z7M266VQSkJZSHK2P_yfq6qC/view

Reflections for them:

  1. Reflection for the first in-class exercise. 

At the first in-class exercise, we were doing an exercise of shooting with angle, it is supposed to show character’s feelings, such as feeling alone, being stalked, and paranoid. We shoot a girl of a wide shot from afar, a high angle to show the girl in a large space but alone. It created a contrast of the large room and a small figure of a girl to highlight that the girl is alone. We also shoot a girl from behind and used the camera as a voyeur, the girl looked back for a few times, the camera “hides” away when the girl looks back, then ran away. Our original aim was to demonstrate what a  voyeur sees with the help of the camera. With the movement of the camera: from behind the wall to film the girl, we’ve successfully created a footage of a stalking, I believe that we’ve achieved what we wanted both in the shooting stage and the editing stage, I personally was quite satisfied with my overall work as well. The last scene was supposed to show the character’s being paranoid. We decided to take an extreme close up shot on the character’s hand, her fingers were tapping on the table, it showed that the character was somehow worried, or paranoid. It wasn’t the most successful one because we couldn’t think of any way to show the paranoia of the character. I think we might need to improve on things like that for future exercises. To come up with more interesting ideas on creating a character with shoot skills.

 

  1. Reflection for the second in-class exercise.

For the second in-class exercise, we did an exercise on the use of lighting, we used the smaller lighting kit to shoot with. First we used a light blocker to block the lighting other than the equipment’s lighting, then we asked the character to sit on a chair, we used the lighting to shine upon her face, then we used pink, blue and green colour gels in front the lighting equipment to add filters onto the character, the pink and blue colour gels were installed right in front of the light, and I waved the green colour gel in front of the lighting while the character put on her sunglasses to dd something into the footage. Our original aim was successfully achieved as the overall piece looks brilliant and cool, we learnt how to film with a lighting equipment as well, each exercise has made me a step closer to a professional film maker. Both the acting and the lighting skills were nice. What we might need to improve would be to use more than just one light and to create a better environment for shooting with the lightning equipments. Because with more lighting equipments, the lights and shadows will create different effects if used well.

Part D Outside of class exercise

https://drive.google.com/file/d/10go1VlfoWV0dB2jajPQLinPx1O_oZyF6/view?usp=sharing

Reflection on the exercise outside of class

For this exercise, I picked one scene from the Netflix show “Kidnapping Stella”, where the criminal  kidnaps the girl. I chose to film in an alleyway because it’d be quiet enough and dark enough to create this creepy feelings of kidnapping. I used many different angles and different shot, such as wide shot, high angle, close up shot. The storyline is: the criminal looks at pictures of the victims on his phone, and put on a mask and wait for the victim to show up. He waits for her on her way back home then kidnapped her. I followed the one-third rule throughout the film, and chose to lower the light to show the creepy environment. This was a non-speaking film, only actions were shown in the film. This will make each movement stand out more as well as the lighting’s effects on each character. This piece of work would be in the thriller genre of film as it contains criminal, kidnapping. The timing, location, character were all demonstrated in this one-minute film. It was late night, in an alleyway, a kidnapper and a victim. Me myself is quite satisfied with my piece of work, because the overall work was done all by myself, usually, there’d be a group filming for a short clip. I might improve on the equipment use and editing skills for my future exercises.

 

 

MEDIA 2 ASSIGNMENT 2

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Links to 2 in-class exercises

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1cNqnLEZMnLAf54bh7g4N8V-8stseo2Cn?ths=true 

(Green screen exercise)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VoliCPV-I7skmUdXXWsrSdmMFD42ckMY/view?usp=sharing

(Sound exercise)

Reflection for the green screen exercise:

For this exercise, I wasn’t present on the day when everybody did the shooting part, so I had to use others’ footages, and I used Lauryn’s. It was an exercise where people shoot two scenes and one with the green board, (I suppose), we are supposed to edit it using Premiere and put the footages of the other scene into the green board. It was actually my very first time using Premiere Pro to edit video with the green screen thing. It was sort of like how the photoshop works, to crop it and drag it in, etc. Because the footages was quite short so I couldn’t do much variation, also due to my lack of experience, the overall work was quite simple, but at least I knew how to edit film with green screen. My aim was to complete this green screen exercise flawlessly, it was successful, because I followed each steps by the teacher and my friend, I’ve successfully learnt to use the “ultra key” effect and apply it to this editing exercise; but on the other hand, it was too simple, not much variation was illustrated. I’ll put in more work next time and try to edit it more professionally and more creative. I’d also shoot bit more footages during the filming stage just so that when editing in Premiere, there’d be more materials to use.

 

Reflection for the sound exercise:

For this exercise, we were given a script to record sound and voice only, we were required to record the sound and voice to demonstrate the distance, mood, location or even characteristics. During the recording stage, we’ve record many times for the walking stairs part, because the script showed that the two character was walking on the stairs while one of them stoped walking. We had to record two actors walking the stairs then record one of them walking. It went quite successful in the end especially when I did the editing part, my aim of best demonstrating the script was achieved. Later on we had some trouble recording the door opening sound as well as the screaming, so I recorded the door opening sound at my house and it sounded so real and suits the creepy and scary atmosphere. Every process of this exercise was smooth, the partners for the shooting part were nice, the recordings were clear and easy to edit. Everything went well and I liked my work, I think it had illustrated the script well. For future exercises, I would need to improve on adjusting the volume on some parts of the film/recording to show certain mood or atmosphere.

 

(Links of part c and part d, the outside of class exercise and reflection of it will be uploaded by next week~)

The link to the outside of class film

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1cNqnLEZMnLAf54bh7g4N8V-8stseo2Cn

Reflection

We made a film within the genre of sci-fi, which it tells a story of a guy chose to walk the stairs instead of waiting for the lift as it was too slow; and he was out of patience to wait; but got trapped in a loop that never has an ending and stuck in level 4 of the stairs. Our aim was to illustrate the idea of time being an illusion, the consequences of being impatient and the misconceptions of reality.

We have the film shot basically in the staircase so just in one place and one character acting during the production stage. We’ve put different shots of close up for the sign of “LEVEL 4” to emphasis that the character was being trapped and adds tension.  We had the shots line up from actor walking up and coming up from below in the same place to show the “loop” and that this character was being stuck in the stairs.

During the pre-production stage, we’ve made a couple of storyboards to visualise each sequence for the shots, it helped a lot when we actually filmed it. However, we changed the location when filming and did not go as planned. Butt he overall work was pretty successful. During the editing stage, we were able to apply similar shots to show that the character could not escape from the stairs.

The production stage wasn’t that successful as the first majority of footages lost due to the SD card problem, so we did a re-film. Although it was quite frustrating losing all the work, the final work was successful and achieved what we wanted to created. For future works, I’ll try to be more cooperative and be up to date with the group members.

 

 

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