Many changes...

Hey everyone!We have been on a wild ride. When we first were assigned the project, I thought Andrea and I would make a film opening that was a "character driven" story. We could not think of any ideas that we would want to pursue concerning that topic so we decided to come up with something else. That's how we ended up doing a story about a girl that can talk to a tree. I'm glad we ended up going this route. Our film opening is unique and very cute if I do say so myself.


At first, we thought that a girl named Eva was going to play the role of Alice, but she backed out. Andrea could have played the role(she has lots of acting experience after all) of Alice, but her foot was broken at the time...so I had to step in. I was a bit nervous at first, but I soon came to accept the idea that I was going to be the star. We also had difficulty finding time to meet up and shoot. Andrea had to go on a drama field trip and I was drowned in homework. We thought that maybe we would never shoot our film opening. But luckily, during spring break, we were able to finally shoot.

Andrea and I also encountered some difficulties when trying to find song for our film. The song that we use on our film, “English Country Garden” from the YouTube Audio Library ,at first was too short. It was only about a minute and a half. At first we were disheartened that we were not going to be able to use it in our film, but then Andrea came up with a brilliant idea to edit the song to make it longer. I have no idea what she did, but she increased the length by 30 seconds.

We also encountered difficulties with the voice of Winola. Winola is voices by Andrea’s friend Caitlin Turner. She sent us Winola’s audio by using the voice memos app and then sending it to Andrea via text. We really liked the pitch and emphasis on the words, but the clip was too fast. Thus, we used an app that was able to slow down the tempo but not the pitch. That was honestly such a lifesaver.

Lastly, I was showing my unfinished film to one of my friends named Liz so that she could critique it.   She helped me figure out how to incorporate the voice over of Winola in the least cheesy way possible. At first, the music was playing in the background when Winola utters her line. But we determined that it would be best if the music faded out. This made the Winola's voice more dramatic and abrupt.

Reflecting on my project makes me proud because I now realize how much work that I put into this project. Blood, Sweat, and many many tears.