World-Ending Genres

Hi guys it's me Santi,

Me and my team have decided to go for a disaster movie vibe but more grounded than the usual vibe of disaster movies, so our two genres that we'll analyze are Drama and Sci-Fi.

Drama films typically focus on realistic characters dealing with emotional themes and conflicts, something that will definitely be hard to pull off when trying to build our character for the opening (though we won't have to show much of the story since it's just an opening). Drama movies often explore complex relationships, personal struggles, and social issues, but what makes drama films special is their ability to make audiences connect deeply with the characters through raw, authentic performances and relatable situations. Examples like "Aftersun" or "The Whale" come to mind when I think of "grounded," the twist in our opening is that I want to go for this "grounded" vibe in a plot that's more fictional, which will require a lot of thinking.

Still from "Aftersun," I like the use of color here to "ground" the scene more.

On the other hand, Sci-Fi films allow for more creative freedom with the nature of their environment and vibe. While they often deal with advanced technology or futuristic concepts, I think that the best sci-fi movies use these elements to explore very human themes. Movies like "Arrival" show how sci-fi can also be used serious topics while keeping elements of fiction, and it also gives filmmakers the ability to create unique visual worlds and use special effects to enhance the storytelling rather than just for show. I think a great example of this are the visuals in "The Creator" which has one of the best environments in my opinion. 

Still from "The Creator"

Still from "The Creator"

The reason why I love "The Creator" so much is because they have a lot of sci-fi elements, like the floating ships or the giant structures, and yet it all feels so real, it feels as though this was something they actually built and not made with computer graphics (even though it was). It's a vibe that I haven't seen recreated in many other films (Side note watch "The Creator" it's a really good movie.)

Combining these genres could work really well for our film opening. The drama elements would help keep the story grounded near the beginning of the opening, while the sci-fi aspects could provide an interesting backdrop or cause for the disaster itself. Films like "Interstellar" have successfully balanced both genres, using sci-fi concepts to drive the plot while keeping the emotional drama at its core. Using these two genres would also help to hide the twist we're trying to go for (but more on that for a later post!)

Until next time, Santi :)

Moving to the big project! 🔥

 Hi guys it's me Santi,

This is a very exciting post because now for most of the rest of the year I'll be focusing on creating a film opening for my portofolio project! We learned a lot about how to get started, which was learning about how film openings are made in the first place! 

We went through a whole lecture about learning all the different types of film openings, and now we are making the project itself! From now on, this blog will mostly focus on production for the project, so I hope to share more fun news soon! I already have a vague idea of what I want to do, but I don't wanna spoil too much!
Stay tuned for a bunch of silly stuff coming soon!

-Santi

Music Marketing Project Recap Video!

Our project is finished! Here's a brief recap at how it was made from start to finish in just 40 seconds (narrated by yours truly)

Music Marketing Project: Research Time!!

Hi guys it's me Santi

My team and I are starting our Music Marketing Project! I'm very excited and I think it's a great opportunity to develop my knowledge of how the music industry works further.

Usually, I would say this is a fun project and a great chance for me to do some cool stuff, but my team and I want to kind of go crazy on this project since we all are really into television, so we have a big project, with not a lot of time to do the said project. Should be fun!

Researching Our Genre

Our assigned Genre for the project was "Alternative" which helped since a member of our team, Quinn was actually very into alternative music, and we're actually basing our artist on him! (More on that later.)

To further develop our research of different artists, we each focused on 2 record labels that specialize in Alternative Music and 5 alternative artists. My teammates all did different artists, and I did Mitski!
We analyzed how the artists developed their brand and how they marketed it to different audiences, which then helped us in the second part of our project, creating a whole new artist from scratch!

A look at a page from my research document into Mitski

New Artist Time!

Now that we had a better idea of what the genre looked like and what artists tend to do in the alternative genre, it came time for us to create a whole new artist entirely from scratch! After a bit of deliberation from the team, we named our artist "Ace Demitri," based in New York, releasing his first single "The Man."

(The song is actually by a band called "The Killers," but part of the project is to pretend like our artist made the song, and we need to promote the song as if he made it.)

We landed on a couple ideas for his vibe, the way he dresses, and other fun things to add to his theme, all pictured below.

An idea of what he would wear

What the album cover would look like

The idea for a shot of the music video

Planning all of this.

So now came the part where we had to actually make all of this real. We had about 2 weeks to finish our whole presentation, so, we decided to simplify the story of our music video so that it could all be filmed in one day, giving us another full day to edit what we needed to edit. We also gave ourselves extra time before the project is due to look over everything and make sure that we liked our presentation and that we were able to submit a fully cohesive and well-done project.

We're filming this weekend, on the 14th. Wish us luck!

Until next time, Santi :)

Why are Musicals Like That?

 Hi guys it's me Santi,
One thing you should know about me is that I love musicals. In musical films, the plot of the story progresses through songs performed by the characters in the movie. Songs can either give depth to a character or move the story along. It's a really creative and entertaining way to tell a story, and combines the best of two different styles of storytelling, films and stage musicals!

Musical movies definitely have a target audience, as there are many people who do not like musicals, the main critique being that the songs can pull people out of the story (This is a valid critique if the musical aspects of the movie are done incorrectly). The genre typically targets females and an age range of 18-40 years old, however many musicals can also target families, such as the musicals created by Disney, like "The Little Mermaid" and its remake, or "The Lion King" and its remake, or "Moana" and its upcoming remake! (That was quick). A third demographic that musical movies can target is theatre enthusiasts, those who want their favorite stage musical to be adapted into a movie. Many musical movie adaptations of stage musicals have been done throughout the past decade, such as "In the Heights," "West Side Story," or "Wicked."

Another critique of musical films is something that they all usually have in common: not being realistic. Usually, these movies follow a main character who wants something, who has a dream or an aspiration that they want to reach, and the big musical numbers are seen as part of normal life to the characters, so the inherent nature of a musical film is not realistic. The cast in these films also tends to be rather large, with characters showcasing many different performing abilities. The themes are also more classic, such as "follow your dreams."

Many animated musical movies tend to follow the same theme of wanting something.

When it comes to production techniques in musical films, there's specific things they need to do to make it work. The cinematography has to be done in a certain way to show both the quiet parts and the big dance numbers. They use wide shots during the dance sequences so you can see everything that's happening, which is done so that you want to see all the dancers and what they're doing, similar to how you would see a stage production. To enhance the effect, sometimes big cranes or drones are used to move around through a scene (An INCREDIBLE example of this is the opening number from "La La Land, which was also one really long master shot).

Still from "Another Day of Sun"

The sound design in musical movies is actually pretty complicated, even though people don't really think about it. Most of the songs aren't actually recorded while they're filming, instead, the actors record them in a studio first, and then they lip-sync to match their singing when they're filming, similar to karaoke. This might seem kind of fake (if done incorrectly), but they have to do it this way because getting good sound while people are dancing and moving around would otherwise be very difficult. Some directors try to do it differently though, like in "Wicked" where they had the actors actually sing while filming, which is done to make the actors feel "further connected to the words [they're] saying."

The way musicals look in terms of design and color grading is usually very specific too. The costumes and sets are usually bright and vibrant, both to capture attention and to give a "larger than life" feeling. If you look at movies like "Matilda (2022)," The dim and colorless scene then turns into a very bright and vibrant musical number during the musical number "Bruce." 

The lighting is important too and changes during songs to make different feelings happen. Again, in "Matilda (2022)," the lighting once Matilda heads outside becomes more colorful and unrealistic, similar to how Matilda is feeling while singing "Naughty."

Marketing these films is done in specific ways that are different from regular movies. The trailers always show parts of the biggest songs, because that's what they think will make people want to see it. Many movies even release trailers specifically meant to showcase the songs of the movie, such as in "Wicked," "Mean Girls," and "Matilda (2022),"  A lot of times they'll release the soundtrack before the movie even comes out, which can work really well as it can excite people if they like the songs. They also show a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff with the cast practicing dancing or recording songs, which makes sense since they want people to see how much work it took to make ("Wicked" has released various featurettes of this, but there are too many to embed here, so here's just one).

Musical movies usually come out during holiday seasons, and there's actually a reason for this. The studios know that's when families want to go see movies together, and musicals are usually good for that. These movies also tend to stay in theaters longer than regular movies because some people like to see them multiple times. Once they go on streaming, they also do pretty well, as those who enjoyed the soundtrack would want to rewatch the movie to sing along, or they might listen to the soundtrack on music platforms, which benefits the studio. 
To show how musical movies can sometimes vary in style, I chose to analyze "La La Land (2016)," and "Matilda (2022)."
Starting with La La Land, this movie is basically what you think of when someone says "modern musical" (even though it's trying really hard to feel like an old musical at the same time). The whole movie uses color in a really specific way, showing Emma Stone's character in a blue dress, surrounded by cool lighting, all throughout the first few scenes of her with her friends or after the party while she's walking down the streets, until eventually the film changes to warm tones as she enters the restaurant and meets Ryan Gosling's character.

The movie follows a lot of usual musical movie things, like having characters who want to be performers and showing how hard it is to make it in Hollywood, but it does something different with the ending that not everyone was expecting (Which I will not say here for spoiler reasons). They also were able to mix new-style music with old-style musical elements, which helped make it feel both modern and classic at the same time.

Matilda is a really different kind of musical movie (which is based on a stage musical that was based on the book that already had a non-musical movie). This movie is an example of a musical film trying to target families, but it's not your typical kids' musical.

The songs in this movie do a really good job of showing what the characters are thinking, especially Matilda's songs where she talks about all the stories she reads and how she feels about her life ("Naughty"). The movie has a dark but comedic feeling to it, which makes sense since it's about a little girl dealing with overly exaggerated mean adults, as a child would see them in their head.

Miss Trunchbull, the film's antagonist

The film was also stylized to look exaggerated and cartoonish (again, as a child would see it), while also keeping a sense of realism. The choreography is really creative too, especially in scenes like "Revolting Children" where they have all the kids do choreographed dance moves shown through wide shots, as talked about previously.
Other great movie musicals include "Tick, Tick... BOOM! (2021)," "Hairspray (2007)," "Wonka (2023)," and "Into the Woods (2015)." 

Until next time, Santi :)

Making a Soundscape! (Sound Project)

Hi guys it's me Santi,

I just completed my sound project, in which I had to create a convincing soundscape, about a minute in length, using various sounds found online and 4 sounds made using foley.

Before the sound project itself, we learned how foley was made in professional movies, with big studios filled with random items that foley artists can use to create sound effects. 

Me and my partner, Maiya, were then assigned to create a soundscape of our choosing using at least 4 sounds created using Foley. We could not have video of any form, just audio. And we could only have up to 7 words of dialogue in total.

Brainstorming

A section of our outline.

We thought of places or events that make a lot of sound, such as airports, races, fireworks shows, etc. But we eventually landed on a house flooding (Not the best timing since right after we submitted the project Hurricane Milton brought a lot of storms to our city 😅).

We split the story into four parts:

1. - Watching Television

2. - Flooding

3. - Escaping the Water

4. - Calling for Help

We designed each part to have a lot of sounds, such as the sound of incoherent news from the television, or footsteps and heavy breathing during the escape from the flooding water.

We submitted this idea and got to work on creating our soundscape.

Creating the Soundscape

The timeline of the soundscape in Adobe Audition

We used Adobe Audition to create this project. In total, we used 10 audio tracks to create our soundscape. Most sounds were brought from the platforms Epidemic Sound and Free Sound. For our Foley sounds, we decided to create sounds that resemble:

• A door closing
• A light switch being flicked on
• Chips crunching
  
• Small household objects rattling

We used creative objects to simulate these sounds. For example, for the sound of chips crunching, I used the sound of eggs cracking. To simulate the sound of a door closing, Maiya used a hanging shelf and tilted it so it makes two separate sounds.

Our biggest challenge was finding sounds that simulated the sound of water rushing in, which was hard to do because most sounds we found didn't sound like huge amounts of water going through the window of the house, but rather small streams of water. To fix this, we layered multiple sound effects of water running and mixed them with rainfall sounds. To mask the sound of water running further, we utilized the sound effect of wind howling throughout the soundscape.

We also used Audition's ability to "move" the loudness of a sound effect to either the right or left channels to make the soundscape more immersive. For example, the sound of the window breaking sounds louder from the left channel, and the water-rushing sound effect moves from the left to the right channel as it flows throughout the house.

While I think we did many things well, like the ones shown above, in the future I would create a more clear story, as I feel like to someone who's listening to the soundscape for the first time might need to listen to it again to understand what's actually going on.

Here's a look at the finalized project

Until next time, Santi :)

Creating My One Word Film 😶

Hi guys it's me Santi,

Me and my partner Oriana just created our One Word Film! For this project, we had to develop a 1:00-1:30 short film based on one word. And here's the catch: we must tell our story with absolutely no dialogue. Sounds fun!

Planning

The first page of our storyboard!

Our word was "Reminisce", so we had to base our film around the idea of reminiscing. We originally had a bit of trouble with this, as a very common way of showing reminiscing in film is to use montages, but the instructions were very clear on NOT using montages, so we had a lot of ideas that we had to scrap because we felt like they were too similar to a montage. In one of our ideas, we wanted to do a guy who was having an extremely happy day, only for it to be revealed that the guy was reminiscing about his happy day in a boring class. We scrapped the idea because in order to show a day passing we would've had to do the film in the style of a montage, but we liked the idea of revealing that the main character was reminiscing, so we worked on how we could adapt our story into a smaller setting, yet still keeping the "beats" of the idea. We decided to scale the story down and have our main character, a student who is having trouble writing their essay, get some help from another student, and watch how their essay grows rapidly, until the eventual reveal that the main character was reminiscing about a time when they had their friend to help them. We liked this story and drafted up a rough storyboard of our idea. Many of the shots in our storyboard were close-ups, with a couple of wide shots to break the tension. 

Shooting

Once we had our storyboard approved, we asked a friend if she could be our main character, and head out to the chorus room to record. We used the chorus room's lighting to our advantage, as the story is meant to be slow, and the dimly lit room helped the ambiance of the overall film. We took more shots than we had intended to, but most of them weren't used, as we only shot them in case our original shot list didn't work out. One thing I wish I would've done differently during shooting is to have brought a tripod with me, as many shots were rather shaky and therefore could not be used in the film.

Editing (YAY!)

Now that we had everything filmed, we got all the footage and threw it into Premiere Pro. I started with
a simple line edit to make sure the pacing of the film was right, and then I found some music that fit the vibe of the film I was trying to create. I found music I liked and edited it to match the story beats, such as the friend walking up to the main character, or the reveal of the main character reminiscing. Finding good music was important for this project since it was the only thing people would hear, as there was no dialogue and only the sound of the keyboard clacking.

After getting the music and line edit down, I began color-grading the footage. I used vignetting later in the film to visually show that what the viewer is watching is not happening in the present, and is more of a memory. I also added grain to resemble a more "filmic" look, aiding in the film feeling like a dream. In the future, I would like to represent these qualities through camera work more than through editing effects, as I believe they can better enhance the story. I used "Adobe Premiere Pro" to edit the film together, and I used "Magic Bullet by Red Giant" to color-grade the footage and add the desired effects.

In the end, I think we achieved a film that was able to successfully convey a story based on the word that we were assigned. While I think some aspects, specifically the cinematography, could've been done better, I am proud of the final result and I hope to make more projects like these in the future.

Here's the project: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ujk6SCL3o9nA_IRhy0vNfmKz_6EAvbIv/view?usp=sharing

Until next time, Santi.