Reflection, reflection, reflection..... Week 9 pt2

Today I want to reflect on my development through this portfolio and the ultimate completion of the project. I first started this project in February of this year, a completely different person than I am now. When you compare the original visions, ideas, and thoughts that I had for this project to the ones that I ultimately ended up with, the changes and development are major. I think the biggest change was the fact that I ended up working with a partner. When I first decided that I was going to work alone on this portfolio, it was very early on in the school year And I really didn't know much about media and all got filming and entails. We were still learning at that moment and I really thought that the best route for me was to work alone. I thought working and partners meant complicating things and having to deal with your partner maybe not liking your ideas and the project not coming out how you wanted it to come out. However months later when we finally got to start the project Week 1 of the project I knew that I was weighing over my head and I was very scared that I actually might not be able to do the project. It was when our teacher told us that we could change our groups that I realized that working with a partner wasn't going to complicate things, it was going to make them easier. I was scared that working with a partner I wasn't going to be able to fully create my vision, but I realized that the whole point of working with someone was for them to challenge your ideas and add more to them. Working with a partner was going to allow my creativity to grow as they gave their ideas and their visions. This is when me and my partner Isabella decided to come together and work as a group on this project. From here on creating the actual concept of our film opening was actually very easy for us. We are very much alike, we really enjoy the same type of movies and we really like the same things, so for us, we got the concept of our movie almost immediately after sitting down. I remember the day that we decided to work together, we got up and told the teacher that we were going to work together, sat back down and probably 20 minutes later we had a very vague concept for our movie. This was very exciting for me because it proved that working with a partner doesn't hold you back, rather it flourishes your creativity and makes for a much better idea. I remember when I wrote the blog about me and Isabella deciding to work together it was the first blog of the second week. By the third blog of the second week, we were already having auditions for our characters and creating a costume design concept. Things started to move very quickly for us as the excitement grew and things started to look concrete on paper. However as you may know from my previous blogs the whole process of creating this portfolio project was very much a roller coaster. When we had our good moments we felt like we were on top of the world and we would just go up and up, but just like a rollercoaster, that drop would hit us out of nowhere and very unexpectedly and all of a sudden things would start to go wrong on left and right. I think that I have focused a lot of my blogs to talk about everything that went wrong and all the changes that we have to make, therefore I really do not want to focus this blog on the stop backs, rather just on our development. I think the best moment for us was when I wrote the script and took it back to Isabella to show her what I had created. This was a great moment for us because we had had a lot of things go wrong and we were feeling very unmotivated so, to have this very important piece of the project be done was really great for us. Once we finalized our script things started to look up again. With the finalization of our script came the story board and with that we were able to start filming. To be honest, for me filming time took a lot longer than I thought it would. Because we had everything so planned out and we had every single shot written down, I really thought that we would be able to go in there and get all the filming done in maybe three to four days. Obviously this did not happen. It was nobody's fault, there were just a lot of things going on in our lives where we had to halt production and because our filming location was inIsabella’s house with and the actors being her family, there was really no way that I could do anything to help with the filming in this given situation.Once we were able to deal with everything else that was going on and we could purely focus on this project, we were able to get filming and editing done within the span of a week and a half. As soon as we got done with filming, the world got hit with COVID-19. As devastating as this whole situation is, having to be quarantined didn't really affect our production that much. Yes, it was very inconvenient because it is one thing to text or call your partner so that you can discuss the project but it is another to actually be able to sit down with them in real life and show them physically the changes and improvements that you want to make. For us, that was the main problem of not being able to sit down next to one another so that we can edit the film in a way that we were both happy with. What we ended up doing was just sending the edited film back and forth to each other. Isabella would send me the edited version of the film and then I would text her with any changes or adjustments that I wanted to make and then she would send me the film again re-edited and so on and so on. This did put us further behind in our schedule, but with this whole situation we were told that Cambridge would extend our deadline, so it worked out in the end. To recap, once Isabella and I got a concrete idea of the storyline that we wanted for our film we didn't really make any changes. Throughout this whole process the storyline, concept, and plot of the movie always remain the same. The only changes that we had to make, dealt with the technical aspects of the production for example, we had to find another song that worked with our film because we didn't get permission from the record company that owned the original song so we weren't able to use it. There were very little things that we're going wrong but once when you added them all up, it became frustrating and emotional so that's where I think the feeling of being unmotivated and not happy with the whole situation started. All in all, I will always say that this project definitely changed me. It made me grow and taught me that I am capable of a lot more than I ever thought I would be. I am proud of what we were able to produce and can't wait to show the world.