The best advice we can get

Our AICE teacher, Mrs. Stoklosa, announced today that we would be gifted an additional six days before deadlines for this project. That takes it from the 12th to the 18th. Gianna and I came to the conclusion that this was due to the fact that an unfortunately high amount of students were not only behind on editing and finalizing their projects, but filming in the first place. We heard this information during breakout room discussions were we had little group talks, highlighting how everyone's projects were going along so far. By default, we were expected to film during last week, spring break. Not many people were prepared to take that initiative however and hadn't started shooting. 

Yikes.

We spoke to her earlier this week discussing critiques of our first video draft and what alterations we should make. She complimented our work for being high-quality and impressive. But besides that, she made plenty of notable points throughout the video. Here are some of my bullets.

• The opening wide two shot of the guitarist and bassist was ugly.
• More frequent cuts and fun edits needed to be done.
• More footage included of the band's solo performances, such as guitar and drums.
• Toss the end credits and keep it only as copyright info.
• Alter the opening credits to look less cinematic, and more like a traditional MTV style list of the band, song, director, and publishing group.
• The edit was dynamic and fun,  first shot made it boring.
• More diversity and use of content.

There's this phenomena called the Dunning-Kruger effect. The people who understand a field more are less likely to see themselves at their true value or intellect, and the more ignorant and flamboyant people, when it comes to their understanding of a topic field, know very little. They're the kids who think they ace a test, yet perform the worst. The opposite is also true, the kids who know the industry or topic under-credit themselves. 

Where are we on that scale? Somewhere, at any given time we have different magnitudes of this issue. To combat this, and to encourage growth and application of my education, I look for criticism from teachers when I can. What me and Gianna had created was great, but theres always room for better! 

I definitely learned a good lesson here. Gianna and I decided that due to the theme of the song, the pacing, length, and editing we have going on already, it is unwise to add additional cinematography to cut into the current timeline. It just doesn't pan out the way we want to, and would feel incredibly awkward.

Tomorrow we'll make some more posts and finalize the edit! We're taking this opportunity to really polish it out and get some feedback, and let the video evolve. I added some saturation to make it look less washed out too.

Night, Dean. 

Twitter is up!

Feast your eyes! We're adding a teaser clip on the Twitter feed soon.

Saving Herald's Twitter Account

Chaos Control (Editing) + Story Rethinking

 We have around a dozen layers of content to work with. Two shots for each full take of the song, both were successful. Footage of Kenzie on her drums, Madisyn singing, Nic and Maxx together, and more of just Nic on his solo. It was a great amount of video to make a compelling and interesting performance cut of the Saving Herald group. This has definitely been the largest scale project I've had the opportunity of working on, and the amount of footage is insane!

Given that the song is only four minutes, and after hyper analyzing the song for the last three consecutive days, I've come to the conclusion that while we don't have the sufficient duration to blend in a fully flushed short story like I did with Jay Moon, it'll mean some super eye-candy cinematography to throw into the middle parts of the video. 

I determined that the appropriate time segments were 1:03-1:20, 1:35-1:40, and 1:56-2:10.

Here's a rough draft of the video so far! I've made further edits to the video since this upload. I've saturated the footage more which provided a more pleasant and organic look, and I also altered the opening and closing credit sequences to make more sense. I'm super excited for what shots we'll come up with, and I'm hoping to use some creative techniques in the pool water (iPhone with water bag) to make something spicy.

Gianna's opening a twitter account and has begun to post teasers and announcements for the production! I'll link it in a new blog post once I get my hands on it, as it's still being worked on. 

Filming on Set (Success!)

Oh. My. God. What a day. The 24th was so much amazing work that I quite literally couldn't stay up to type. I slept like a brick, and here we are.

The frequency in which all members of the Saving Herald were responding improved Tuesday night and even further Wednesday morning. They may have been rocky before, but this was going to happen. Gianna and I went to go fix ourselves some Einstein Bros breakfast for the day, then went to go pick up Angelo and Rodrigo, both TV buddies of mine who live in the Ridges. We were in business. We dropped by my house to migrate the equipment I had set up ready to go by the front door, the duck tape, string, and all the balloons we just inflated, all in the minivan. Angelo brought his Pocket 4K camera and we made sure we had everything on our checklist working and packed. They were pretty hungry too, and we also knew we needed more gas and bottles of water just in case (also Florida weather gets toasty at 1pm...) The McDonalds (at their request, I can't eat that stuff) took an unprecedented eternality to get things going, and their drive-thru line was as long as Chick-fil-A's, which if you live in Weston, is a bold claim. Saving Herald showed up with their vehicles right on time and were therefore waiting for us. We snatched the food and bailed out of there.

We arrived, and they were wearing black costumes of sorts that thankfully fit the theme, and had a truck load (literally) of musical instruments waiting to be brought in. Perfect. Gianna got to see a really cute Praying Mantis when we walked in, and they had an adorable relationship. They were petting it for a while, good stuff. 

After finally getting two cars worth of gear into the abandoned house, the next goal was to figure out how the scene would look. Our original position of choice was ideal except for the back that the wall in the background now had a huge penis spray painted by some unknown assailant sometime in the last week. Dang it. After roaming the house for space, we figured that if we wanted the same good lighting, the best honest idea was to just flip it. 

I knew alternative rock could be loud, but that was so deafening that I'm sure we annoyed all the bugs, cows, and neighbors within a half mile radius. Good thing Maxx brought his larger Bluetooth speaker in contrast to mine, as it was able to help them better sync with the song during recording. Otherwise it really wouldn't have worked. 

We took two takes of the whole band performing, each take having two shots. One camera had wide spherical glass, while the other did more dynamic moving shots with tighter anamorphic lenses. The power system I had purchased worked flawlessly, and worked with the cameras without a fuss. At the end of the four hour shoot, it had 80% left. Incredible.

Once the main song was recorded, each member wanted to get a personal scene done, each of them in a random unique room of choice to capture their performance. This was done to have more content to work with while we had our shot at capturing them. Luckily after all the noise no cops were called and no hornets stung us (there was a nest problem in the very back side of the home). Here's some highlighting pictures! And a sample of our edit so far.

After we had finished and begin to move things back to the cars, the cows were curious about the noise and inched their way all the way to the fence right outside the building, and were watching us like hawks. However, we figured out they were more afraid of us, and they weren't going to harass or harm us in any way. Such silly, smart, adorable creatures. 

Printing and a Set Schedule

Ok, after sleeping on the album art for a while, I took a look and revisited it. It needed a couple tweaks, and that was ok! After cleaning it up in Photoshop today to get that more mature look, I threw it on a flash drive today and drove over to the local Office Depot to get my prints made. Oddly that took around two hours of patience, but I got two 12.373in squared copies made, laminated. This way we can have a spare without having an emergency panic trying to get another.

Got some tape and a little bit of glue to finish it on top of some old vinyl that we had grabbed from Goodwill, and we pieced together our print! Had to take it outside to bath it in a nice exposure to highlight it's success. I think it looks pretty dang solid. Does a vinyl even make sense for a single song album? No. Does it still look dope? You bet. 

Not too shabby, aye?

I did end up hearing all from of my select crew and Saving Herald by the end of today. After Gianna was on the phone with their friend Ezra and then Maxx, a great idea was compiled! Long story short, we are using some recently purchased, letter shaped non-floating balloons for the set. They have a collection of colored balloons of all sorts of variations at the Party City near Sawgrass Mall, so we ran by today before they closed! This was great and we got what we needed. Since these don't apply any helium, we're going to suspend them from the ceiling using a good ol' ladder, duck tape, and string. With this utility, the word "Breathe" will be in the set background. Fancy.

Party City Supply

Right now I'm prepping gear with Gianna, making sure everything is NASA-level ready for launch! Instead of a big ass rocket, it's just my minivan doing what minivans are built for. Comfort and transport.

I'm nervous, and more confident that the group won't flake on us, as Gianna has said they are quite excited too. Tomorrow will be the beginning of our promo period on social media and our produciton!

Cheers, Dean Milan. 

 This is a short one just to make the final reach out to them. It's Monday, and we still haven't really heard much. Max of the group got sick but it's been confirmed that is indeed not COVID-19, so we should still be green light technically. This is what I said. If I get a response, I'll add an update at the bottom of this text. 

UPDATE - Monday, 8:56 PM

Finally got a response from most people, but not yet everyone, for filming on Wednesday. Looks like we're in business, so hope all goes well. Maxx on the phone suggested we include balloons somehow, so that was a nice touch! Production details will come later this week. 

Concepts for Performance Recording / Planning Day Before

 When we set up the recording's within the abandoned building, we hope to get a large surface area to safely set up equipment and recording gear in one stationary area. 

This means most likely setting up within the main living room of the area. Their equipment will go towards the back, and we rig up the cameras on tripods to the live power setup I've described before. Of course, Gianna runs the photo camera, I'll use wide Rokinon glass, and Angelo will shoot with anamorphic. Tuesday we prep this gear, and then execute Wednesday at 1pm. Gianna lives with me now, so we'll just go grab Angelo and make the ride just over the highway to the location.

Still deciding between these two spots - lighting will probably be the best deal breaker for our choice. 

Living Room

Kitchen Area

The living room is great as far as lighting goes, as you can see the ambient light coming from the front of the house at the bottom left of the image. For the kitchen area, it's more artsy but visually much dimmer. If that's the case, how do we orient our set up in a way that looks good? We'll experiment on Wednesday, again if they even show up.