Jayden's Media Studies Blog

"GRWM" by Jayden Harris, Samantha Matheus, and Mikayla Parkins

Ever since we've finished the project, I feel empty. This project gave me something to look forward to doing after school with friends I've gotten closer to over the school year. We had to find something that worked for each of our schedules and use that time efficiently. We had also changed part of the story as we had filmed. Making small tweaks in the costuming or setting. The first day of filming was one of the hardest to get through, we had to figure out how the camera worked, how to achieve certain angles with limited tools, and figuring out what needed to be done so the future days of filming would go smoother.   We had a lot of fun filming and I wish we started earlier, we started filming just a week and a half before the deadline and we started editing at the start of this week. It has been tiring balancing other AICE, AP, and Honors classes while making sure that our film looked neat and that our blog posts were completed.

We used CapCut to change the brightness of the scenes and added audio for ambience. We added some text and effects to the scenes. We cut a few seconds off of the videos and put them in order. We hadn't done much but we are now ready to post the final project.

 While filming we tweaked the story to fit new ideas and fixed some plot holes. While editing we also cut out some chunks to make it shorter and fit the 2:00 minute deadline. Not much has changed but we did make it so there's an easier distinction between the on and off-screen scenes. We also added non dietetic sound, digital elements, and ambient music.

 When we filmed "GRWM", we used warm tone lighting because it looked the best on Mikayla (the Main Character) and changed the brightness depending on the scene. It took a lot of tries to figure out what would look the best on darker skin. Cool lighting washed her out and made her look pale on camera. The warm lighting looked the best and gave her a glow reminiscent of "golden hour".

 Our group consists of Jayden Harris, Mikayla Parkins, and Samantha Matheus. We are able to joke around and have fun but we can also get to work incredibly fast. I feel that we all have worked incredibly hard. Our hardest task was doubling filming while having extracurriculars, activities, challenging homework, and conflicting schedules. We've had an incredible time working together for the past few weeks, we all have assigned tasks to each other for filming: Acting : Jayden Harris, Mikayla Parkins , Samantha Matheus Directing : Samantha Matheus Lights : Jayden Harris, Samantha Matheus Editing : Jayden Harris

 We used a combination of both diegetic and non-diegetic sound. We used primarily CapCut and iMovie for editing. I added sound from "Uppbeat" a free song website that has no copyright claims. Mikayla used the CapCut sound library for music. Dialogue and some sound effects that were created during filming are some diegetic sound examples. Music from # Uppbeat  (free for Creators!): https:// uppbeat .io/t/jeff- kaale/aurora License code: 5CEHJIHFG7NLPVTJ

When we started editing we worked on the YouTube intro and the first scene. We used Fade Ins & Outs to keep it simple since we had not gotten into the details of our story. It was a struggle since one of our group members was having an issue accessing the editing space but we solved it by making it a collaborative space and resending the invite link.

 In "GRWM" we use a variety of colours to help portray different emotions: Blue: Calm & Safe (Intro to Opener) Orange: In Danger & Hurt but not the worst (Middle of Opener) Red: Intense Danger (End of the Opener)

Our title sequence was Alexandria's (Main Character) YouTube channel intro. We screen-recorded a Google search for her channel and clicked on a video so the intro would play. I took inspiration from the movie "Missing", that movie was mainly screen recorded and I thought that would be a nice look for the Title Sequence, especially because it is on theme with the opener.