Danniella Miller AICE Media Studies

 Today I filmed my music video. I had spoken with my neighbor about having her be the main actress in the video, but she kept blowing me off. I decided to do it with myself as the actress. I could take a couple shots with the help of a tripod, but for the majority of the shots I had to ask my mom for help holding the camera. This was hard because I would have to explain to her each shot so she could hold the camera the way I wanted her to. Many of my shots were done in a few takes. They weren't that complicated, but there were a couple shots that gave me quite a bit of trouble. Most notably, the dance scene. For this scene, I went on YouTube for point of view shots of people dancing together. It just felt like no matter what i did, the shot looked so unnatural. Eventually, I was able to get it down and look more natural, but I do still think this is my weakest shot in terms of realism. The skating shot was a lot of fun to make. I filmed it over and over again in circles around my n...

First Scene: In this scene, the actor appears to have just woken up. The camera will be perpendicular to the actor, doing a bit of a pan. This will be in order to show the state of the room the actor is in, which will be messy and unarranged.  Second Scene: Here, the actor will be in a bathroom. The camera will be facing a mirror, which will help me do a transition. This transition is to show the actor getting ready but still looking quite sad. Third Scene: Here, the actor is sitting outside a door, watching the cars and people pass by. This is to show life passing the actor by. Fourth Scene: In this shot and the following ones, the camera will be pointing at the actor in order to create the point of view of another person. The camera's point of view will go to up the actor and lure them in, trying to improve the actor's mood and life. Fifth Scene: Here, the actor and the camera's point of view are playing and smiling. This shot will be a handheld shot to show someone runni...

 Here we go for planning. I really like this part, as it helps me flesh out my ideas even more before I get started storyboarding. Props: As the scenes will mostly be outside, I don't plan on having many props. The big prop I have will be a bike, which will give the video a more carefree and naive feeling. I will also have a mirror, which will create a twist in the video I hope can be enjoyed. Costumes: I want the actors to wear flowy, ethereal clothing. The kind of bright but pastel colors that remind one of spring and flowers blooming, akin to the feeling of love. Something so bright and innocent you can't help but want to do what you can to enjoy it, but feeling so fleeting it might leave at any minute. This picture almost perfectly shows the kind of look I want the actor to wear. Location list: I plan to mostly film outside, so my front yard will play a big role. There is also a big tree in my backyard I hope to be a central place to shoot. Another area I am looking at is t...

Song: Tu by maye Genre: This song is categorized as latin pop. What that means is a song or artist that has significant Latin influences while still being significantly popular, combining aspects of Latin music with American pop music. Most Latin pop songs are in the languages of Spanish, Portuguese, English, or a mix of the three. Another thing that is widely found in Latin pop is a basic song structure or repeated choruses. Genre video examples: When looking at videos in the Latin pop genre, I noticed a lot of black and white imagery, giving the videos an antique and vintage feel. Another common occurrence was the use of empty stages with a plain color background. These allowed to singers and actors' clothes and actions to truly shine through without the distraction of a busy background. In maye's own video for Tu, there was a love story between the two main characters, which is also quite common to see. Relationships and love are a very popular and nearly universal feeling, ...

 Hi everyone! Today will be the start of my new project, making a minute-long music video. Before anything else, I needed to choose my group. We could have up to four people in a group, but they all had to be people we could see on a regular basis. Due to the COVID-19, I felt incredibly unsafe trying to do that with anyone I didn't know beforehand and was close to them and their family and knew the precautions they were taking. Of my friend group, which is the aforementioned people I feel comfortable seeing on a regular basis (even though we always take precautions, some of them are high-risk and just because we're in a low-risk age group doesn't mean our parents and teachers are!) only one person is taking AICE Media. I didn't choose to do this project with him because we had very different ideas about what we wanted to do. We also agreed that even though we could see each other regularly, the risks were far too prominent to ignore. And due to all that, I have ended up...

  So here is the final project. As it was incredibly rainy and COVID-19 cases were still pretty bad, I had to recreate my ideas from the comfort and safety of my own home. I am grateful for this, however. I feel that if I had gone with my original plan, my commercial would've been entirely too long and I wouldn't have been able to convey any kind of message with it. My story was to have someone writing, their pen smudges, they go to get a different pen (it being Pentel) and using it next to the previous pen. This allowed for a comparison between other pens and a Pentel pen, which I'm very happy with how it came out on camera. The filming process was the most difficult part of this whole process. I've never had to direct others before, but with the help and patience of my actor, I was able to convey my ideas pretty well. Another thing during filming that was hard was the many ideas I had but the inability to execute them as I wanted. I had to rethink my ideas over and ov...

Here we are, the final step before my commercial is complete. I'm currently using Adobe Premiere Pro to edit. My only issue with this program is the fact that I'm still quite unfamiliar with it. I spend a long time editing in Final Cut Pro and Adobe is definitely much different. Adobe is making things easier for me, but I still have to take pauses in order to look up how to do a specific action or add in a different effect. I feel like if I was more comfortable with Adobe, I certainly could've finished editing much faster. Another thing I noticed was that the thirty-second time limit of the commercial made me seriously think about which shots I wanted in my final project. I had a lot of time spend making cuts or rearranging the order of clips and watching them play out. I did this to do my best to see what the final project would look like, and how the pacing would look like. I wanted to get my story across in my commercial, but I had a lot of trouble balancing each clip so...

 Today was the filming day of my commercial. My actor came over and we had to get right to work as we had limited time. There were a few circumstantial issues, such as the fact we were filming in the living room and we had to make sure none of my family members messed up the shot. Another issue was the lighting, as there wasn't sufficient lighting due to the constant raining and generally cloudy weather. We fixed this by taking longer shots and multiple takes, so if someone was in the background doing something that we could see we would take another shot until we got the perfect one. As for the lighting, we had to improvise by adding some lamps around the shot without breaking anything. When we got to filming we had originally planned to do a tracking shot as the actor walked up to look through some pens, but we realized it wouldn't be feasible with our current equipment. The filming process did end up being much faster than I had originally thought. This is the first time I...