CCR PODCAST

Movies By Maddy

Too Much Footage, Too Little Time

The biggest problem I had with this video was making my opening fit the 2 minute minimum. My film opening was originally 4 minutes before I was forced to trim half of it. I was heartbroken but it had to be down for the sake of my grade. When I filmed the footage I got all the shots I intended to but did some extras incase something didn't work or new ideas emerged. Unfortunately, too many new ideas did emerge and I guess I got too much extra footage. But that is much better than having too little footage. I felt I was cutting out a lot of important parts of the introduction though making it harder to introduce the character. I wanted my film opening to have a morning routine in it, starting off the day and introducing the characters.

Turning Ana into Maddy

It was easy for me to turn Ana into myself because I know how I dress and act. I wanted Ana to wear something vibrant so I asked her to bring me 3 outfits as options. I also wanted her routine to be very similar to mine. I don't do much in the morning I kinda just brush my teeth, get dressed, and go. So that is shown the same way in my film opening. These are the 3 films Ana let me choose from:

The first is a ripped pair of jeans and a Jimi Hendrix tee. A great choice Ana. I am a big fan of Jimi Hendrix but not enough color.

The second is a denim skort and a stripped crop top. Another great choice because I wear a denim skort maybe once a week but again, not enough color!!

The third outfit was the one. The colors were just enough for her to be the vibrant I feel Maddy is.

Lights! Camera! Action!

The most important aspect of our film was the lighting. We are high school students so we don't exactly have all the equipment and resources to make our film spectacular so sunlight had to do. That left us with limited time to film with Ana and I's busy work and school schedule. With spring break coming up it will be easier to film during the day. Since the film opening is a morning routine we need plenty of sunlight. We filmed our scenes after school while it was still light out and in the morning on weekends.

Unfortunately, Ana's sister was in a serious car accident causing us to have to start over and put a hold on filming. We began our filming again about a week after we found out about the accident and everything was okay! Her sister was home safe and Ana was ready to get back to filming. We used our weekends to finish up since we were running out of time. It was easy to film because we had no school during the day so we met up fridays and Saturday at 9:00 a.m. The filming overall wasn't too bad because I got to spend most of the time with my good friend. We even had some good laughs and made some great bloopers.

Preparing the Actress

The movie is to be shot at my house so Ana needs to be prepared with all of the things she will need to get filming down faster. I made her a to-do list seen below.

Introduction Music

Another obstacle was finding a quality song that was also a non copyright song. What I originally wanted was either a Wes Anderson like introduction with dramatic music and simple unique shots. An example of this would be The Royal Tenenbaums.

The song I was planning to use was "The Canyon Wants to Hear C Sharp" by Andrew Bird. But it was too difficult getting permission to use it in my video. I attempted to find similar songs on a non copyrighted music website www.bensound.com but none of them played the part.

Since my first idea didn't work out I wanted my introduction to be similar to Juno. I wanted indie folk music in the background to make things a little more quirky and cute.

I found some songs similar to "All I Want Is You" in the film opening of Juno but I didn't like any of them enough. So I decided to go with a funky song. I was inspired to do so when watching the title sequence of Superbad with my friends.