Hindsight

In hindsight, this was one of the longest, most frustrating, and enjoyable projects I've ever worked on.  And it's helped me a lot with how I view life too surprisingly. So let's start at the very beginning of our adventure. 

I remember that day when I asked Vivek to come to join me in doing some location scouting; both of us were quite bored and it was a really enjoyable experience. We got to find out about a lot of quieter or even completely empty roads to film this project in. And the last scene where the actors close the trunk was actually Vivek's idea which he dropped in for me just as I dropped him at his house. From there I started developing an idea of what I wanted, but I still couldn't figure out exactly what my story was going to be for the final product. We had our group discussions in class one day and when I started receiving constructive criticism on how the scene where the actor is being interrogated, that's what really sparked my attention towards reworking the story. So once I planned out my entire story I realized that I had a much better grasp and clarity on exactly how to plan the opening. 

Eventually, I had to redo the storyboard and I created a script so that the actors could follow easily. I added my actors to a group chat about a week prior so that they would have enough time to read everything and understand their roles especially since some of them had other responsibilities as well like drone operation. Unfortunately, I sent the script a bit late so that caused a little bit of delay during our shoot. And speaking of the shoot . . . CORONAVIRUS. If I had delayed by just a few extra days this entire project would have come out extremely different because I would lose access to all my actors, the location, and Saurav's drone. However, I did lose out on the opportunity on a reshoot which is why you might notice some continuity errors in the final product.

Editing was hell. I was using a free version of Filmora so I had to go through various methods to circumvent the watermark that it automatically adds, which was not a fun process. I did have other free options available to me like Davinci Resolve and kdenlive. But I couldn't trust those apps since they've crashed plenty of times in the past due to my underpowered computer. I simply could not risk losing all my work from my computer crashing.

Filmora loves to make you try to pay for the pro version so they make life difficult for its free users. From everything to impossible to find basic text editors to limited audio and video tracks, I ran into many unnecessary delays. The app is also missing a link feature so synchronizing the audio with the video after all those J and L cuts took at least a few hours when accounting for all the lag in the software. Yes, I am aware that wevideo exists. But wevideo sucks. Anyways, before I proceeded with all the intensive editing I mentioned above, I had to color grade the clips -- which was actually quite a fun process. It was almost magical how with some adjustments the clips transformed into something that could pass for Hollywood content, at least in my eyes. Unfortunately, I didn't have the time to learn about vectorscopes and waveform monitors so I stuck with 3 basic nodes for color grading. One where I adjusted the highlights, mid tones, and shadows. One where I adjusted the saturation and contrast. And finally, one where I adjusted the colors of the highlights and mid-tones, going for a red-orange for the highlights and a teal tint for the shadows. Oh and by the way, all of this was done on Davinci Resolve which is free! It doesn't crash for color grading so that was my exception for editing on Resolve. Unfortunately, I had to render the video a few times because I used the wrong codec for rendering (DNxHR instead of h.264).

After the main editing, I took a little bit of a break as I focused on other school work. I did however come across this video which showed how to optimize Resolve for lower-end machines. After following the directions I found that I got very smooth playback even with HD footage. So I decided that I would use Resolve for adding the titles and credits. I also had to spend an hour learning GIMP so that I could create the production logo you see in the beginning of the film. And I also used a feature called blanking to add the black bars onto the video, to simulate a more cinematic aspect ratio

Although, there were some emotional struggles throughout this film which I thought might limit my potential, I realized that all these setbacks only improved the final quality of my product. And to be honest, I'm very proud of what I've produced :) And now all I have to worry about is finding a way to return that tripod and mic to that person's dad . . . #ifykyk