Finishing our final task

     Hello! These past few days we have been working on finishing our final project, and today we finally did! Last weekend we finished adding sound, and this week we mostly focused on adding the titles, watching the film over and over again and fixing little things along the way, and having others review our final product. 

    To add our titles, I used the green filter effect on iMovie. I couple of years ago, one of my friends and I made a video for fun and edited it on iMovie, and we added text and images to it using this method, so I already knew how to do it and it was pretty easy. We first picked out our font. When we started planning out our film, we had picked one of the fonts that looked like handwriting but when we actually put it on the video, we realized it looked very childish and we wanted to use a different one. After going through a lot of fonts on PowerPoint, we couldn't find any we liked, so we started googling fonts and Harlow was able to find a font called "Zodiac Notes regular" that we all liked. It still looked like handwriting, which we wanted so it could look like the letter the mom wrote, but instead of looking childish, it looked scarier. 

    When we had finally picked out the font, I started putting the titles on the video. To do this, I used Powerpoint and set the background to green, so when I put it into iMovie I can select the blue/green screen option, and the green background will disappear while only the text and video remain. I downloaded the font, typed our titles on the slide and then took a screenshot of it so I could have the image and then I could put it on the film. When I put the titles over the video, we realized that some of them were very hard to read since they blended into the background, so we decided the best way to make them stand out would be to add a border to them. I made the letters black and added a white border around them so they would stand out. I had to redo a lot of the titles, but eventually, we got it done. After I was done, I downloaded the finished video and uploaded it onto google drive, since through google meets it was hard for Harlow and Jessica to fully see it. Because of the internet connection, the video through the call was very laggy, and we agreed I would send it to them so they could look through it. While looking through it, they would make notes of any issue they saw, and we could meet at a later date to make those changes. 

    We met the day after that and discussed the issues they found on the video. Harlow felt her acting at the end wasn't believable and neither was her mom's face while screaming, so she decided to refilm those parts of the film. She also wanted to refilm the part of the opening sequence when her mom is writing on the counter, so she did that too.  That day, We ended up fixing some other issues that mostly had to do with the sound like making the sting at the end come in more gradually and putting a muffled filter over the banging of the door so it would sound less sharp and farther away.  

    The next time we met, Harlow had refilmed the scenes we had planned to, so I was able to put them into the sequence. The new scene with the mother's scream looked a lot more believable than the one we had before, so we decided to keep the new one. Then I put in the new scene of the mom writing and turning her head, but we realized the scene right before that and in between, they were filmed on a different phone, so the quality and the tones/colors of the shot were very different so it looked odd. We decided to scratch the new shots and keep the old ones, as they looked fine.  Lastly, we put in the new videos of the last scene of the film, which is the girl in the kitchen. We refilmed this scene because when we were watching our video back, we realized it was hard to see that she was dropping the cracker since it was so small, so we decided to make her drop a whole container of crackers so it was easier to understand what is happening. After we put in the new clips of that scene, we all agreed it looked a lot better than the ones we had before, and we really liked them so we kept the new ones. The last shot that was refilmed was a close-up of the girl's face as she reads the note, and after seeing what the new one looked like in the film, we really liked it and decided to change it too. After finishing adding the clips, I once again downloaded and uploaded the updated version of our film to google drive so my teammates could watch it over, take notes, and we could meet again the next day to make changes. 

    That leads us to today. Today we met, and I thought we would have to make very very small changes since our film was practically done, but I was very wrong. I don't know how it happened but, half of our titles were gone. I think they got deleted when I replaced some of the clips for the new, refilmed ones. Because of this, I had to go back in and add the titles, which was annoying but not too bad. After that, we went through the video one more time and realized there were glitches in the video. The glitches were only on the parts where the clips were filmed by a Samsung instead of an iPhone however, so we think it might be an issue with the movie being compatible with android footage, but we are not sure. We went in and tried to fix the glitches, but it did not work, and we realized that the glitches weren't in the clip itself, as when we all watched it on different devices, the glitches appeared at different times, which was weird. So for example I could have a glitch at 40 seconds and Jessica would instead have a glitch at 50 seconds. Unfortunately, we could not solve this issue, but the glitches are very minor and we don't feel they have a great impact on the film. After we were done reviewing the video a couple more times, we were able to show it to many people, such as our parents and friends, and get critiques on it. We did not receive many critiques and only had to change a couple of things that had to do with the audio, but after that, we were done!!! 

    I'm so happy we finally finished this project after long weeks of filming and editing. I had a lot of fun and learned many things along the way. I think there are some things we could've done differently, but overall I really like the way our project turned out!