Tuesday, March 1, 2022

Week Four: Narration (sound) Research and Adding Clips to Project

Hello all!! Today we are going to look at some research that I did that will help us get a clear picture of what we are going to say/how we are going to say it in the narration part of our film opening scene. 

As we said a few blogs ago, the first section of our film opening video where Claire is shown as a 7-year old girl, will have narration in the background to narrate what is going on and introduce the film. When there is an age change, the narration stops to bring the viewer more into the film, by including sound elements that increase the severity of Claire's house situation. During the narration, the script is timed so that there are several sound elements that are heard. For example, when Claire walks in her house, she sees her parents fighting. The narration will be timed so that it stops slightly and viewers can hear the loud noise of the parents' fighting, and the slam of the door as Claire enters her bedroom and the sound is then muffled, and the narration continues. Now, the question is who will be the voice of the narrator? Will it be a narrator, a supporting character, or Claire's voice? We tackled this question by looking at the plot of our film. We realized how the whole movie is about the internal conflict that Claire has built up because of her childhood experiences, and how these inner challenges have caused her to do bad things in the world. Therefore, we concluded that the voice of the narration in the beginning of the film should be Claire's voice, because it helps to bring the viewer into her perspective on life, revealing that the conflict is within herself. For example, in the film titled, "American Beauty," is about a father who becomes disillusioned with life and searches for excitement. The main conflict in this film is character vs self, as the father is going through kind of a mid-life crisis. The film opening video from this film involves a short narration portion through the voice of the father. Similarly, we think that our film will work similarly, producing a similar effect in viewers as American Beauty does. 

Ok, so now that we have a good clear picture about who is going to narrate, let's talk about what Claire will actually say in this short narration portion of the video. We don't know the exact script as of right now, but we have an idea of what we want her to evoke. At this point in the video, Claire is young and innocent but shows some signs of frustration as she slams the door when she enters her bedroom. Therefore, we want the narration to show future tense (18-year old Claire) voice as she talks about how this was her when she was younger, frustrated and miserable at times yet hopeful for the future. Our script will be arranged to evoke this feeling of hope that she had as a child, and how her attitude now is the opposite. 

Now that we got that covered, let's talk about the editor we will be using and stuff we did on it so far. 

We had two main editor apps we were debating upon, iMovie and DaVinchi. However, we picked DaVinchi because of past experiences, where their is more variety on DaVinchi than iMovie (ex. more transitions, title background, etc.). Most of the work done on this app will be more in Weeks 7-8, when we focus on our post-production process. However, some work like adding the clips to the video on this app will be done as we obtain the clips because this will let us know how long our video is and if we need to make any adjustments. 

Here is an image of how long our video is so far (after this first portion filming):


That's all for today folks, join me next time where I will be diving into our lighting, props, set design, and costume design for our second portion of our video, as well as our shot list for our second portion of our video! Can't wait!!

As always, 

Natalia Ballinas

Research Links (American Beauty):

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169547/plotsummary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMqwSTe5rvo

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Film Opening Video

Get Ready.  It's time. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dcF2RGBX0Gozu1MrusZh8dxGkpvUMCcp/view?usp=sharing