Portfolio Project: Final Reflection

The past 8 weeks have been leading up to this moment. I have fully completed my portfolio project, which I have been working on for about 2 months. I am proud of how it turned out, and to be honest, it's better than I expected.

I learned a lot about different genres, especially thriller, and researched about its conventions. This project helped me learn how suspense is created in film openings.

Considering the fact that I had no knowledge or previous experience with media production, I think this project helped me improve those skills a lot. If you asked me to make the same thing at the beginning of the year, I could not have been able to do it. 

Now I know my project is not the best, but I think that I did the best that I possibly could with the skills that I have. 

When I was first assigned this project, I didn't know what to do; I was lost. I started researching genres and seeing which ones I liked and I was in between social realism and thriller. I ended up picking thriller because I thought it would be more fun to produce and it would be easier to form a structured idea. The problem with social realism was that I didn't really know much about it and I hadn't watched any movies about it that I could name off the top of my head. So that's why I ended up picking thriller.

While I was planning for this project, I developed the idea for the opening and made a full script with all the shots and dialogue for it. Planning all the shots in advance helped me have a more clear idea of what I wanted to do and how I wanted it to look like. It made the filming process much more smooth and efficient.

In the production stage, I filmed all the shots with an iPhone camera because neither me or my partner had any more advanced equipment. We didn't need a tripod or any outside stabilizers because iPhone has a built-in feature that makes your videos look more still. Because of this, all our shots ended up looking smooth without any outside help. My goal while filming this was to give the impression that the main character, Xander, was just a normal teenager that got put in this situation, and that it can happen to anyone.

In the editing stage, I used Clipchamp to edit my opening. With it I was able to cut clips, add and remove sounds, add transitions, etc. Clipchamp played a huge role in my project because it's what made the opening flow and made it understandable. For example, I was able to add sounds like the police siren sound or add overlays such as the texting animation.

One of the most important things I learned in this project was how different technologies can work together to make a piece of media. Hardware such as the filming equipment, software such as Clipchamp, and online tools used for research and sound effects all played a huge role in my project. If it weren't for any of these, it would not have been possible to make it so smooth.

One thing I would change if I could go back would be to experiment more with lighting to make the shots more dramatic and movie-like. When I was filming, I didn't really pay much attention to the lighting as I was more focused on making my setting feel more natural, but now that I look back, I realize that the lighting may have been too light so it made it feel less tense. Maybe if I would have used darker lighting my shots would have looked more suspenseful and cinematic.

Overall, this project really helped me in developing skills like planning, filming, editing, and researching media. It also helped me understand how professional media films are created and the techniques that make it more appealing to the audience. One last thing is that I am usually a huge procrastinator with most of my work so I end up rushing everything, but this project was different. I did not procrastinate at all because I knew the weight of it and it helped me get rid of the bad habit of leaving everything to the last minute.