I remembered that when I read the Studio Prompt of at the beginning of this semester, the two sentences “you will develop your competency in production techniques” and “you will be viewing other’s work with shooting and editing small projects” were attracted me to choose this studio. At that time, I noticed that my goals of this studio were improving my editing skills and shooting skills. Looking back the exercises I did in this semester, I can confidently say that I have achieved my goals, not really outstanding, but I do have great improvements on my editing and shooting skills by doing the projects like Lenny Edit exercise and Make the Bed exercise. Also, I think this course is living up to my expectations, because I’m not only reach my goals which are improving my editing skills and shooting skills but also improve my other abilities, such as color grading skills. An exercise that most impressed me was Color Grading exercise, I remembered that when I read the outline of Color Grading in assignment 2, I was really confused, I didn’t understand how to make the picture looks different by using color grading. When I color graded the first scene, I spent more than 30 minutes on it. I kept trying and learning from the teaching videos, after that I can spend around 10 minutes on color grading on each scene. Besides, I used what I learn from color grading in the rest of my work. 

      In the process of making this final movie, I think I have great developments not only in production techniques, but also in other techniques, such as analytical skills, photography techniques and ideation. In the previous exercise, I’ve already made a film of this script — “Birthday”, I choose the same script of this final assignment is because I think there are lots of things to improve in my last job. Because I have got some experiences from my last work, I’m not in a hurry to mark up the script like angles in this work. This first thing I did was to rewatch my last film and analyzed in different aspects: shot structure, shot cut, color, music ……, I thought that would be easily to notice that what I can improve from the last film. 

   Develop my competency in production techniques — Color Grades

      By analyzing the last film that I made, I found that the tone of my last film was dark and yellow, that made the characters looked bad, and I think the color of yellow give audience a feeling of depress. In this filmmaking, there were also having the same conditions as the last filmmaking, the first solution I thought was to use color grade to fix these problems. The following two are the screenshots of before and after color grade. Before I color grade this scene, the tone was dark and yellow, that made my face looked yellow and ghastly pale. Also, because the background is messy and full of objects, I think it is hard to notice what character is doing in the dark tone. In premiere, I increased the exposure, that would made the scene looked more bright. Then, I decreased the contrast and increased the shadow, because the background was too messy, decreased the contrast could make the objects in the back less obvious and increased the shadow could high up the luminance of the whole scene. After I finish these settings, although the tone was brighter, the color of character’s face still have a bit yellow. I tried lots of ways, but it didn’t work. Then I just randomly adjust the temperature to ‘blue’, and that was work! The whole scene and my face turned white. That was the effect that I want! I think in this assignment, I have learned the most in color grading. Before I learned to use color grade, I would only reshoot the clips that I dissatisfied with, but after I learned color grade, I could use color grade to achieve my desired effect. Not only alleviated the trouble, but also learned a lot and develop my competency in production techniques.

   Develop my competency in production techniques — Sound effect & Shot cut

      When I was watching the movies in daily lives, I sometimes consider that why their audios could be so clear and how to make it? But in this filmmaking, I understand that. Because I didn’t have the equipment to record the audios, when I filming the film, I found that the sounds of the actors were unclear. It was easily to solve that, I just record the dialogue fo each characters and put them into premiere. But the problem was the audio were not perfectly match the video, evenI adjusted the speed of audios, it didn’t match. That gave me a hint that when I record the dialogue, the speed of character’s speaking and time range should match the video’s. Another discovery of sound effect in this filmmaking was in 1:09 of the film, when Maggie says “Woody, come out”. In the first edit, I just record this dialogue directly, but it felt like Maggie just stood beside Woody. I tried to change the audio on premiere directly, just like color grading, and also searched the ways to change sounds on internet, but I found that didn’t work. However, at the moment of my mom called me in her bedroom, I suddenly know that why I couldn’t record in the other room? And I just did that. Some findings of sound effect were not found in the process of filmmaking, but found in my daily lives, which I wasn’t notice before. And these findings gave me a great development of my competency in production techniques.

      Looking back to the projects that I did in this semester, one of the exercises that impressed me most was the First Film edit, which was shooting the film by following the script through Zoom as a group. Actually when I first heard this way of collaborating, I thought that was complicated. Because our group members were stayed in the different places, even different countries. The decorations of our home’s were totally different, it was hard to match up the background. But the most biggest problem was in the process of filming. We had to do all the shooting and acting alone, the camera angles of Zoom and phone were different, although I shared the screen to my group members in Zoom when I set up the phone, the effects were different to what we imaged, it would had some situations for example: the head was be “cut off” or that angles were not other members wanted, so we had to reshot the scene again and again. However, although working as a group online was complicated, it still have many advantages. It would have more ideas than people work alone. People can’t easily find out the problems of the work they do, we can share our opinions when we working, then we can fix it by following other’s suggestions. If I have a chance, I still like to work as a group.