This week, we are at our final stage of shooting and starting editing. I am thankful that I had a detailed shot list, so we saved lots of time when we selected the right clip for editing. It was easy to compare the clips when we had the slate showing the shot details at the very beginning of the scene. At the beginning of the shot, I asked a member to hold up the slate to the front to show the shot details. It is fascinating to see that the director’s cut and the editor’s cut are slightly different. When I made the shot list, I imagined the shot from my vision as an editor. However, when you work in a group, it opens new thresholds for ideas that you might not have seen before. For example, when I was making the storyboard for the TikTok dance, I did not think about how it would look because TikTok was not my proficiency. When we came to the scene, the girls suggested trying the wobble camera movement to look exotic. In the end, the edit cut was different to what I imagined before. We expect to finalize the rough cut by the end of this week. I would like to thank these people for giving me helpful tips to fix audio problems. I saw other groups using boom mic to capture the audio. Since I was in charge of equipment loan, I wanted to use the lightest mic pack that could transfer the audio smoothly without the need for a boom mic holder. However, we had to do a lot of sound mixing because the sound from the audio channels clipped with the sound from the camera’s internal mic. Furthermore, I would also like to thank Bradley for answering questions about the the Location Safety Checklist and Report. As you mentioned, it is great to have a look at what is feasible to do in terms of our permitted capability before shooting, including the authorized guarantee of location.

(Edit: I do not have the original footage since they are in Zoe’s hard drive. But I am happy to share with you our final results of audio mixing when we finish. Best regards)

This week, we started the shooting process of the short film. As the main supervisor of location scouting, equipment, and shot list making, it is my first time handling multiple jobs at the same time. Therefore, it is unavoidable to encounter logistics problems. When I was organizing the shot list, I did not consider the timing of the scenes. Mainly, when we had a group discussion of the script, we did not mention the scene timing. Therefore, the shooting order did not suit our intention. For example, last Sunday, we managed to shoot the scenes when Agent Whyte was teleported to 2024 in daylight: the city montage. After that, we finished those scenes when Whyte was looking for Wollie’s clues. All scenes happened to be done by 5 p.m., and we expected to shoot the fighting scenes between them. However, the winter afternoon soon got to dawn and the sky turned black quickly. I was running into camera issues so the shot has to be delayed to next Monday. Therefore, either we wait until late Monday to get the fighting shot or try to find a way around to shoot it regardless of the condition. Nevertheless, I was able to grow professionally by managing these roles in our project. After our first shooting on Wednesday, I learned that it is more useful to have a good direction visual and a more organized shot list. My first shot list was not that great for delivering instructions to actors. However, I still managed to include other useful information: scene order, location, camera, lens width, and shot types. Therefore, it helped cut down time on the set. For the second shooting on Sunday, I tried to break down each scene into smaller parts. That way, it will not get the actors confused by too many directions. I used the Shot Design app to convey my idealistic shot visual in 2D. Especially during our working on set, I realized that it’s better not to be too adamant about the shots you want to make. My teammates are natural performers and they know how to take advantage of the shooting location to express their characters. That’s why I added a comments section next to each shot to ensure that I kept track of any visual changes. It helps me communicate with my actors more easily since they understand my expectations and give immediate feedback on whether the shot might be good or not.

Link to my shot list: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JaB4bkNaVk-isVFPDZSGO6bPif5TqNSoiyQBWOwB64w/edit?usp=sharing

This week, we aim to accelerate our writing process to finish the script before Friday. We appreciate Brendan for the helpful tips and sincere insight into our writing drafts. He advises us on which idea might be off the hook and not standing out at the punchline. He also emphasizes the importance of setting up the premise before the jokes so as not to get the jokes slightly off. Moreover, he also suggests revising the satirical elements. We also ask if our attempt is a parody of spy movies as we poke fun at the spy figures with Agent Wyte’s character. Once again, thanks for your clarification, Brendan. As long as we do not imitate the look of any specific movie totally, we can get away with inspiration. We solve the satirical problems by inserting Whyte’s appearance on the street and how she gets dozed off with the satirical problems in modernity: the tram, the vape, the protest, and TikTok. Once again, it presents a challenge: Does all the scenes make sense when they are grouped? Each one of us had written separate establishing scenes for the modern world. Yet, once we finished them, we would correct them one more time to make sure they matched the bigger events in the story. Moreover, we are confronted with the timeline challenge of dividing the scenes’ length appropriately into 10 minutes. One relevant problem with the script is that sometimes we dedicate more lines to unnecessary scenes but leave the important scenes unresolved. In the script briefing, we spend time skimming through the skip once again and looking at lines we need to discard.

This week, we settled on the main storyline that we aim to do for the project. We aspire to remake the look of agent intelligence films that focus on the chase between the cop and the criminal. Classic examples we took reference to were the Kingsman and Men in Black. However, we aim not to focus only on the comedy genre. Rather, we visualize it to be a hybridization of satire and comedy. Even though we have not decided on the main satirical objects, we want to bring the daily life momentum to the scene. What we feel about social activities will be transformed into satirical material. We also talk about the character’s profiles. Based on Brendan’s advice, we agree that getting established with the description of characters advances us faster in crafting the vomit draft. Therefore, it can avoid illogical sensibility which conflicts with events in the story.  For example, we looked back at the main events that we wanted to use for the storyline, for example: time-traveling to different eras, and started asking equivalent 5W questions (Who, What, Where, Why, How). ‘What is the motive of our boss for time-traveling? Why was the agency in 1964?’ is such an example. After that, we have a direction in our minds in which we want our characters to fit into the scenarios. For the main character, Agent Whyte, we imagined her to be a little quirky and childish, with a strong desire to prove her capability to the boss. After we jotted down the points, we started developing the secondary scenes and tried to match them with personalities to speak of the characters. 

Here is the attachment of the vomit draft that we prepared:

Link to our brainstorm:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y0NnMkirLmtHHr-7WOivLypRsy-Iz5CU3rQoVeeiO3s/edit?usp=sharing

Link to our vomit draft:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iLxB55NTcyW4NO35FrW3QIaEPhvd6edcFEKgsobiFyo/edit?usp=sharing

Here is the link to our group agreement document:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ucnxGGarOvfoQYnYCucXUVxiS4CybhDQrI4luwMJ5gQ/edit?usp=sharing

Here is my individual comedy mood board:

We propose creating a genre hybridization sketch that centers around a main comedic character and his/her different behaviors toward the surroundings. We take inspiration from similar themes as Mr.Bean and Johny Englishman (one protagonist) and the time-traveling of Stranger Things. We discuss whether we want to assemble two contrasting look eras – black and white from the 50s and the modern time of the 21st century. In my research for the same aesthetic media, I came across Wanda Vision’s Marvel series. It has a lot to discuss – how they set up the black-and-white theme and acted similarly to conventional media of that timeline. Some occurrences of crisp switch to the modern setting make me question if we can handle such a complex project in terms of logistics and planning, not including the essential research into media of different timelines yet. That’s why I suggested some questions that illustrate the conflict of the time-traveling theme to ask my members the following week. Therefore, it is open for discussion within the group to keep the idea or not. In the meantime, we will focus on identifying the character profile, and lock down on what period, main storyline, and characters we want to focus on. In the first week, we decided to let each member brainstorm random ideas that they might like and we will link the favorable ideas later – that’s how our ideation method works currently.