Final Blog

So, I thought it was necessary to do one final blog post for the semester.

Last night was kind-of crazy. I was really worried that we wouldn't be able to finish in time, but we did! I wanted to write up a summary of all the work we did these last couple of weeks, but a lot of it is a blur right now.

For us, the budget was perfect (No pun intended. I swear, I can never say that word again without cringing). It was enough that we were able to still go out and film some last minute emergency footage. Although, had we not needed the extra b roll we probably would have been much more under budget.

Working with Meg and Jess was amazing. Jess is extremely organized, which was really helpful for Meg and me. She kept track of everything for the project and was honestly just a really fun person to be around. Meg is one of my closest friends, so of course I'm gonna love working with her. It was helpful that we live together, so we could discuss and work on the project whenever.

This is the project I think I am most proud of out of everything I've written or made since coming to IC. It was a challenging, sometimes infuriating, but ultimately amazing experience.

Life, right now.

 

Woo new blog post

Worked on the rough cut some more this past weekend. Our schedules were all over the place, so we just kinda had a revolving door thing going on. Someone would leave and someone would come back to work on it. We were originally going to mix music for the rough but decided against it because we were worried we'd be told to move things around and would just have to re-mix everything anyways. 

I think we were a little confused also about how the rough cut process was going to go. We thought we were viewing the trailers as a class, but after that turned out not to be the case we figured we'd be doing the same thing with the roughs. That's the reason we didn't export it or kill ourselves as much as we did when we tried to get out trailer done in time for a class viewing.

Today, Meg and I took out the camera and got more shots or Erin and the counseling center. Meg took the camera back up to the house and got shots of Red Bull and pills. 

Tomorrow, Meg and I are planning to edit and hopefully get most of it completed. 

Some updates

Over break Meg and I split the documentary in half to work on the rough cut. Meg ended up finishing the whole thing, so we just decided to use hers as it was already in one file. I've been using the half that I did as reference when editing.

Jess started the trailer over break, and we finished it when we got back. I played with mixing music in Soundtrack Pro, which was fun at first but definitely a bit of a challenge. I definitely don't see scoring films in my future.

The three of us got together on Friday to work on the rough cut some more, and I think Meg and I are going to work on it more together tonight. 

Monday Meeting

I feel really good about our documentary. Meg, Jess and I just had an awesome meeting. We went though and outlined most of our project: we decided how we wanted to order the doc and the "plot" of it. Over Thanksgiving, I'm going to work on half of the rough cut and Meg's gonna do the other half. Jess is going to go through the b roll and choosing all the best parts. We're meeting next Monday to put together the trailer. So yeah, I'm pretty excited by how well this is going.

Saturday

Sorry for my last blog. There were a couple deaths this past week, and it was taking a toll. That's also why I stayed home from class that Thursday.

Saturday was a bit of an... adventure. I would like to preface this by saying that people make mistakes. Shit happens.

So here's basic story of what happened on Saturday. Meg, Jess and I were driving to Auburn from Ithaca to re-shoot Zach's interview. When we got to Auburn Meg realized the SD cards were missing. We were kind of freaking out because we had nothing to save our footage on to. Meg went out and bought new cards, but they wouldn't work because they were class 4. We tried basically every other place in Auburn that might have class 6 SD cards, but nobody did. So, we all trooped back to Ithaca (luckily Zach was nice about it, and came along) where we shot the interview and got some b roll.

It was a long day, yes. I feel bad because I think Meg thought I was mad at her. But I really wasn't. I was just kinda carsick from all the driving, so I might have been acting a little weird from that. And honestly, Meg is always on top of her stuff. If she didn't mess up every once in awhile I'd start getting worried she was some robot coming to take over the human race (I still have that fear every once in a while). I know she was really worried that Jess and I were mad at her, but we weren't. There honestly wasn't a moment when I felt even a little angry. Mostly, I just felt really bad that Meg also had a Newswatch package to worry about and had to figure out time to grab stuff from her house to renew her license. So Meg, if you're reading this, don't worry! Just be happy that we are done with interviews. Done. DONE. OMG WE ARE FINALLY DONE.

 

Now, we've just got all that pesky editing to do...

Title

Meg and Jess interviewed and got b-roll of our Mr. Anon. Unfortunately, the times he was available that worked best for Meg and Jess were times I have class. But his interview was awesome, and has some great quotes.

I helped shoot b-roll a bit today also, but had to run to class. Meg and Jess interviewed the psychiatrist, but I was in class yet again. Stupid class getting in the way of everything, you'd think I was going to school or something.

We're all set to go to Auburn on Saturday to reshoot Zach. Meg went down last Friday to shoot him, but the footage came out funky. I was supposed to go down with her, but the world decided to hate me and give me a stomach virus. So instead I stayed in the health center until 8pm. I feel really bad that she had to go down alone. Luckily, this time we'll all be there.

Sorry if I seem a bit blah in this, it's been a rough couple of weeks.

I hate coming up with blog titles

I am so excited! Meg found this article from the Cornell Daily Sun about students using Adderall. So I emailed the writers and they put me into contact with a student there who is perfect for our piece. I spoke with him today, and he seems really nice and very open. We're going to set up a filming date soon. We're currently trying to decide on different measures of hiding his identity. Should we disguise his voice? Just blur out his face? What kind of blur? Do that black shadow thing ABCNews loves?

I finished up most of the coding for the website. But then of course the internet went down. Luckily, I had everything backed up.

Other than that, the only other interview we have to get is Zach. We may get a local psychiatrist, but I really don't see the point. LeBron pretty much covered everything really well.

And we still need to do some b roll of Erin and Zach, a little of LeBron. Not sure what kind of b roll we'd get for anonymous though. We could probably stage something.

There are way too many baked goods in this house.

Wow, is it seriously October already? I feel like this semester is going both really fast and really slow at the same time... I didn't even realize that was possible.

We got our first (usable) shoot done. It went really well, Erin was great. I think in a lot of ways she portrays the "healthy" overachiever. She's stressed and taking on a lot, but she also has a great support system to back her up. I think her interview shows why it's important to be able to talk about emotions and mental health. Erin is in one of my classes, and the professor is awesome and is allowing us to film a bit while she gives a presentation on monarchies (it's a European politics class).

Meg and I should be traveling to Auburn this upcoming Friday to interview Zach, which will be a great addition. We're still waiting to hear from Lebron on when a good time to reshoot will be.

As for other b roll, we'll need stuff of everyone we interview. I've made a list of some more "generic" shots we can get too.

We were hoping to see if one of the composition students in Whalen would want to score our piece. If we get it done soon enough, we should be good. I think having that will be a nice touch to the piece.


To Do:

Re-interview Lebron + b-roll

Interview Zach in Auburn + b-roll

Jayson from Cornell (President of Minds Matter) + b-roll

One of the students from Cornell + b-roll

B-Roll of Erin – in class, doing Newswatch

Finish graphics for website 

Translate current coding to work on Tumblr

Some quick updates

I began working on the website mockup this week in photoshop, and I'm testing out different color schemes now. I always forget how much I hate Internet Explorer. Every time I code something it will look perfect in Firefox, Safari, and Flock, but something will always show up wrong in IE. It never fails.

My hatred of web browsers aside, this weekend wasn't as productive as we had hoped. The student we were going to interview in Auburn got sick, so we had to cancel the shoot. Meg and I will be going next weekend though, if everything goes as planned at least.

I just contacted ITS about getting set up on the IC server to host our website. And yes there is, but it's just the web profile manager. It's at http://ithaca.edu/wpm and then you just log in with your normal Ithaca username and password. I might just set up an account with Freewebs or Tumblr though, that way we can still be creative when it comes to coding and design versus using IC's generic profile account.

Stupid Sunshine, Stop Raining on My Parade

I did my first shoot for the documentary with Jess on Wednesday. We met with Lebron Rankins from the Counseling Center at Ithaca College. He was a fantastic speaker and talked about a lot of issues we hope to cover. The only issue was lighting. The sun+the Park Lounge=a very sad day. It wasn't horrible, it's just that the sun was setting and was slowly creeping up on him. We moved him a couple of times to try and circumvent the whole situation. 

We met this morning, went over the camera, and planned a bit for future meetings and shoots.

Getting Started

I'm working with Meg and Jess on a documentary focusing on the effects of "perfectionist culture" on college students. We're trying to discover the different ways students try to deal with the stress of thinking they'll never be good enough. 
So far I've put up a Craigslist casting call. I've only gotten one response since, and a bunch of spam, but I'm hoping as we go along it'll be a helpful tool for finding people. I've been putting the word out among friends, who will hopefully spread my email around to persepctive interviewees.
I'm excited to see where this documentary will go. I think it's an interesting topic, especially with the globalized economy the way it is. Graduates aren't just competing against other students from their country, they're competing with graduates from China, the UK, etc.