The Hope of it All

I am so excited to finally share our movie opening with you all. Hannah, Tori, Melanie, and I worked so hard on this project and we are extremity happy and proud of our achievements. With no further ado, here is The Hope of it All! I hope you enjoy!

 

Creative Critical Reflection

Reflecting on our Finished Opening

 Wow, I cannot believe we are finished! It has been a crazy adventure, but a rewarding one as well. Some things have come easier than others, but I have to say it was all worth it.

This all started with an idea months ago. This was before the project was even assigned. Hannah and I had a crazy idea to make our opening on a teenage love triangle, the highs and lows of young love, and the ultimate betrayal. We wanted to explore the life of this innocent, good girl, Betty, and navigate her feeling after being cheated on. We also wanted to dive into the life of James, a confused boy who hurt the girl he loves the most for a moment of temporary bliss. Finally, the most interesting in my opinion, is August, a teenage girl who pretends be tough and perfect, but deep inside, she cares and wants to experience true love as well. 

Then, once the project was assigned, we joined forces with Melanie and Tori and got to work. We fit hours of ideas into a two minute opening that would explain the direction of the whole story. Characters, like Inez, were cut from the opening, and ideas were bounced back and forth. There was even a point in which Melanie suggested cutting August from the opening. I was heavily against this notion because I thought August was extremely important to the story and a dynamic character in her own right. So, there was a lot of touch and go, but we eventually reached a general screenplay that we could all agree on.

Next, was filming. This was probably the hardest part of this entire adventure. What I mean is that finding a day and time when we were all available to film was extremely difficult, especially due to the pandemic. I have mentioned before that were actually had to push back filming an entire week due to everything being too last minute. While planning the filming date and location was rather difficult, the process of actually being there and shooting everything was probably the best part of this experience. We had such a blast going around my neighborhood and finding good spots to film. It was so funny to watch our friends pretend to be someone else and act. We finished the filming pretty quickly and sent all our material to Melanie.

Melanie presided over the next part of this adventure. It was during this time that we had to brainstorm and decide for sure what music, fonts, cuts, and effects we wanted in our film. Melanie then compiled all our decisions into her editing and combined all the shots to make an amazing opening. I truly was surprised at how good it came out while I was watching it for the first time. She did such an amazing job and I loved it!

This has truly been such a rewarding experience and I am so happy to have done it with such a great group of people. I have learned a lot about filming, editing, and the entire movie industry. It isn't always as easy as it looks and I really respect filmmakers a lot more now! I hope I get the chance to this again one day because it was such a blast! The following is a sneak peak into our opening. It shows James walking in the neighborhood and being approached by August.