Lip Reading (Post-Production Day #6)

Earlier, Jake and I started the editing of what we guess is the most complex scene in the film. What I mean by guess is that, in theory, the park should have been a quick edit; however, it’s been the most painstaking micro-editing yet. So this bay comparison is expected to be harder, THAT MUCH HARDER. Why you may ask? Because every single recoding in from this entire day has NO SOUND. Why is that? Well, because I forgot to turn on the camera’s microphone. Funny right? Ha! And they say God doesn’t have a sense of humor. 

Thankfully, we decided to record with external audio as well; otherwise, we would be S-C-R-E-W-E-D. But because there is no sound in any of the clips, this scene makes Jake’s job a little tougher, because he has to lip read the videos and try his best to piece the scene together with the audio like that. And of course, if Jake’s job becomes harder than naturally so does mine because it means I have to be more detailed and more precise when tightening editing and checking his edits. 

After waiting a good chunk of time for Jake to be done with the first draft, I went in to check it and fix it up. After watching the draft time and time again, I started catching little mistakes

and flaws to fix. As I did that I realized something that would make my editing not only harder but slower. A great majority of the audio clips Jake put the videos with did not actually correspond to those takes. The actors delivered a very consistent performance, so I don’t blame Jake for not noticing, but looking at it under a magnetizing glass, it is crystal clear. And the more I noticed it, the more obvious it became. 

And so I began editing, constantly having to run the scene time and time again until it felt like torture to find the exact frame where a character’s lip moved to produce a certain time and try my very best to match it with the right audio. All of the external audio is in a voice memo program on my phone so sometimes I have to try to match them while seeing the video on my computer and listening to the audio with headphones to prevent losing time with the wrong audio file. I’m trying to lip read and trot my memory to remember what that specific take sounded like.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the original unedited video to show you, and I’m just simply too far into the editing process like to show you key progress as it would give away too much of the scene. On the other hand, my editing is coming great so far! So far I have focused on just paring audio and with the videos and that has come with some basic frame-by-frame editing of the scene but nothing too extreme or drastic just yet. I’ll keep doing this for the next day or two until I’m ready to move on to audio mixing and leveling.

Signing off, 

Are they still making walkmans? (Post-Production Day #5)

The answer is, unfortunately, no, they have not been manufactured since 2010. Why start this blog post with a question about walkmans? Well, because they revolutionized what this post is about...MUSIC.

Over the weekend Jake and I worked on fixing my awful music choice. When Jake and I were going over the fixed I’d made to the audio, he questioned how late at night it was when I chose the music track for the scene. As you may remember from briefly listening to it, the score for the park scene bared a very close resemblance to the theme song from Pirates Of The Caribbean. Listen, it was around 3 am when I chose the song, at the time my sleep-deprived coffee-driven self thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Looking back at it now, I wonder where my head was at. 

Listen for yourself:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gE5In0YXi7KDVsjRAybXc2Mur5QVUQ-h/view?usp=sharing 

It was clear that the song had to be replaced, but neither of us knew with what song. We searched far and wide for a song that would fit the mood we were hoping to establish for this particular part of the competition. Jake and I use two different sites to find our music, Jake usually uses Youtube Library and I tend to use Universal Production Music (formerly Killer Tracks). 

I suggested a really fast rock song for the race as well! Cool right? Yeah! But after hearing it alongside our video, it made the visuals look somewhat underwhelming. This song screams GREAT HOLLYWOOD ADVENTURE and it doesn’t necessarily fit what Jake and I had in mind. So, having failed a second time, I gave the music finding responsibilities to Jake who started to dig through Youtube’s Audio Library and Doug up some cool choices. 

1) “The Coldest Shoulder”

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MQCcfEXAhtSPviHvsfR7aiKgliU4lB1D/view?usp=sharing

The moment I heard this one, I knew that it wouldn't fit the race but it doesn’t mean it was a bad choice, as a matter of fact, it makes for a good competitor for the ending tittle score. It’s simply too slow and too country to be a racing song, and it definitely didn’t fit the pacing. Still, it’s always good to have choices for later music decisions. 

2) “Don’t change a thing”
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wOENHwI-VDOuxEJD69IFInBs3J1MhMDb/view?usp=sharing 

This was a really cool score! Its low pounding base with electronic arrangements gave it an interesting tech vibe. We actually planned on using this score, I adjusted the volumes to fit the scene and everything. It seemed like our problem had been resolved and that we could move on; however, something sounded off to me. I told Jake that I definitely liked that one better than the rest for it still wasn’t the right pic. Something about it wasn’t sitting right. So naturally, Jake and I hopped on a FaceTime call to try to figure it out. 

While we were reviewing the scene, Jake agreed with me and started to search for a replacement. We hung up and in a matter of minutes, we were back on listening to “Sports_Action” which sounded absolutely perfect. And it was perfect! The visuals matched great with the track! 

3) “Sports_Action”
https://drive.google.com/file/d/16xjJHauE5oh8BUqXNzfP9jC5FRDsXdDC/view?usp=sharing

With the audio and soundtrack mixed, the nightmare of the park scene seemed far behind us. Jake will start piecing together the beach scene soon and then I’ll go micro-edit that one!

Signing off,

This scene will give me grey hair (Post-Production Day #4)

I mentioned earlier that editing scene two might be a pain because of the pacing, boy was I wrong! Editing scene two isn’t a pain, its the VEIN OF MY EXISTENCE!! The pace in this scene is somewhat odd and what’s even worst and more complex to get right with this one if the audio leveling. This is a micro editing nightmare!!

When we were shooting this scene we were outdoors on a somewhat windy day meaning all of our audio sounds heavily muffled. That combined with the distance we sometimes had between the actors and us while filming makes for some pretty tricky audio to work with. I have gone back and revisited this scene multiple times at multiple times of day to try to figure out what to do with it; how to fix it. I’ve gone in at 2pm to do it, I’ve gone in at 2 am and it seems no matter what I do it never feels right.

What I realized is that I should probably concentrate on fixing the pace by trying to choose a score to match it to. Unfortunately, I did that at 2am so my brain thought it was a good idea to match it to music inspired by the Pirates Of The Caribbean movies. I think you know where this is going. You don’t? Oh great because I didn’t know what I was doing either! In retrospect that wasn’t the best music choice. But it was what I was working with to fix the pace. Jake had done the macro editing so I knew that the scenes matched up well together and that there was a general flow, my job was to tighten it up to make it smooth. After I’d done a tolerable job (yeah maybe I’m being a bit harsh on my self but there’s little room for mistakes on this one) I decided to attack the sound issue.


Take a look at this exert:

This is an exert of scene 2 before any micro editing was done. This is the raw material I’m working with, the pacing might feel off but that’s mostly due to the lack of an accompanying music score which could really help tighten the editing and fix the odd pace feeling. Primary notice how the muffled the audio is, it’s hard to hear and there are hard cuts. This exert on the bottom is with a few fixes to the sound:

I remembered we had a boom mic all along and that all we had to do for more crisp audio was to
match it correctly to each video! I used a mix of the actual audio from the camera and the boom to help achieve better audio quality. There’s still a lot of work to be done with this scene. The music has to change, the pacing has to be adapted, the editing has to be tighter, and the sound has to be leveled. But at least for now, I’m confident knowing I found a possible fix for our audio problem, we just have to be super detailed about the way we go about matching them to our visuals. I’m going to keep working on this scene for some time, it could really use the extra hours of attention!

Here is the exert with the corrections with some music:

Signing off,

Forgetting to reply to emails (Post-Production Day #3)

Editing #2 (Meeting With Tina to show her the progress) [Wednesday]


1:54pm 
“We have taken the difficult decision not to run our international examinations for the May/June 2020 series in any country”
“What now”

1:57pm
“Thank God”
“OMG OMG”

1:58pm
“What kind of BULLSHIT IS THIS SHIT RIGHT HERE?”
“what abt aice diplomas??? Can I like no longer get mine what does this mean”
“I want the exam so I get credit for college”

1:59pm
“i assume stoklosa will send us an email about it soon”
“yeah”

Those were ACTUAL text messages from our AICE Media Group chat. This news blew us out of the water. Some felt relieved, others stressed (ME). Whatever we were each feeling, uncertainty dominated our thoughts. That’s why Tina called a class meeting the next day, to help us cam down and help us stay focused on finishing our portfolio projects. 

During the meeting, we talked about the examinations and what it meant but mostly about how to adapt our projects to the uncertainty of the situation we faced. Everyone who needed/wanted to get another couple of brains to help them think of ideas to adopt their projects took the floor. Thankfully, Jake and I were already in the editing phase because we acted so quickly to try to finish shooting even in quarantine when we heard of the school closures up to April 15th. 

After the meeting, I emailed Tina to schedule a private meeting with her to show her the progress we’d done in editing. We agreed on meeting today, except we actually didn’t because I never ACTUALLY reply to the time she sent me to confirm. I thought I did, but I
didn’t. So 30m pass the meeting time, Jake and I were on FaceTime waiting for Tina (who didn’t know we were doing that). So I sent her an email to follow up and quickly realized that I had messed up. Thankfully, Tina was available and hoped onto Microsoft Teams to meet! 

We showed her the pice that we had already edited and after viewing it she gave us some really valuable input! I mentioned how our audio was really annoying to work with and she stressed that it was the most difficult part to control from the A level project because we’re not recording with professional equipment. So, it's understandable that not all of our audio will be amazing, but we should do our best to level it. 

I was concerned about what Tina would say about the pacing of the scene but was pleasantly surprised to find she liked it! Overall, she enjoyed the piece and we were super excited because of that! We also spoke briefly about music and how to use it throughout the piece to reinforce the tone of each scene (or the whole simulation v.s. reality). 

I’m a bit scared for the next scene because I think the pacing will be really weird to get right, but I’m up for a challenge! 

PS: Yes, it’s done! I now bleed blue and orange 🐊 

Signing off, 

Put that on a T-shirt! : Making our production's logo (Post-Production Day #2)

Fellow night owls know that 1am-3am is prime working hours! Being awake during this time I decided to go onto canva.com (A great online digital design tool) and work on the logo for our film. I took about 1.5 hours to make about 11 different logo combinations, as one does, and then I put them onto a google drive presentation for Jake and me to review them in the morning. 

Jake and I had agreed on the title “Valedictorian” a while ago, so I decided that the logo should emulate the feeling of the title. My first few designs included a graduation cap, for obvious reasons, and even though they looked pretty good, I wanted to also imply that this title was a competition (obviously alluding to the fact that IT IS a competition in the film). So I decided to experiment with different symbols that portrayed that competition element. 

For example, in this logo prototype, the olive branches encapsulate the name and portray a sense of elegance and noble competition. Similar to those used in ancient Roman art to accompany power symbols or gladiator competitions. 

I also made two different types of cup symbols because I wasn’t sure of the one in color. The human eye is immediately drawn to the bright yellow instead of the letters, meaning it distracts from the main center of attention which should be the actual title. 

Finally, I texted Jake with a “surprise” and told him to go onto our Google Drive. To his surprise, there were 11 logo variations from which we could mix and match symbols and fonts! So we started to talk through each logo. We discussed what we liked about each one and what didn’t work. 

We both agreed that the color cup was distracting and way too much, it felt as if it was overpowering the title. Being between the two remaining symbols and lots of fonts, we started to mix and match. We actually created up to 15 different logos before deciding on the one. Finally, we decided on the font, we both agreed that the very first font was what we were looking for. It was futuristic but modern and bold but condensed. 

I then went back onto canvas and put the olive branches around it. After making them just a slightly bit bigger at Jake’s request, we had it! Now that the logo was done, I made some quick variations in color. 

While on a FaceTime call, I went onto our WeVideo project and added the new logo! We watched it over and it looked great on the screen! I also went ahead and added it to our website and (Oh! I need to post an update about that. Yeah, there’s been a few changes!) sent it into our cast group chat! 

With the logo done this is starting to come together really well! The logo looks amazing and it captures exactly what we were going for! It would even look good on some T-shirts 👀 

Signing off, 

Marco & Micro. Editing not economics. (Post-Production Day #1)

I can’t believe I’m finally saying this, but now that we’ve wrapped up filming, we have to start post-production (mostly editing). Since we’re about a week behind schedule from our original plans, Jake and I have decided to waste no time and jump right in! Today we talked about setting up a schedule to virtually collaborate in the editing process. 

We first decided on what part to start editing, we both agreed that we would both be more comfortable starting well, at the beginning! Neither of us or our family is sick and we’re comfortable being around each other’s environments, but we still want to follow a certain degree of social distancing in line with recommendations from the CDC, our school, and local government. To edit online we’re using the online editing platform WeVideo. Though we have more than enough time to teach ourselves a different more capable platform, WeVideo allows us both to share the editing process by giving us both access to editing and sharing files via the cloud. We’re also both very comfortable with the interface so we are confident we can work efficiently. 

I suggested we broke down the editing process into editing sessions, Jake found that by doing so we could also break it down by scene. So that’s what we did, we broke down the editing process by scene. Longer scenes like 1 or 5 will take more time to edit and thus, we’ve scheduled two editing sessions for them instead of 1. 

Since Jake and I have worked with each other’s in the past before, we know each other’s editing style and strengths. Our styles are what I describe as Micro and Marco editing. Jake Marco edits meaning he is good at piecing together the scenes and setting up the flow. I Micro edit, meaning I tweak the details and go frame-by-frame if need be to figure out the pacing and make the scene’s flow smooth. Thankfully, our editing styles are complementary! Having and knowing how complementary our skills are helped us set up our sessions in blocks. Jake would go in and edit the macro for an hour and then I would go in and edit the micro for an hour (which is just me lying to myself because I’m sure I’ll take more time).

Just to make sure the quality of the piece is what we both want and we both have the ability to discuss the artistic choices in the editing, we’ve decided to set up two meetings to polish up the piece. We put our schedule on our shared Google calendar and we’re ready to get started! 

Signing off for tonight!

Student Life (Website Update #2)

As I continued to build the website, I challenged Jake and myself to think of the story we have created and the world in which it takes place on a deeper level. I find the most immersive experiences which provide the most amount of details forest story are often the best way of both promoting & coming up with a creative marketing campaign and hoping the audience -and to an extent, ourselves- truly understand the world that we are creating to tell the story. I am also extremely extra.

The first way through with we could develop and convey our message was through the text on the website that is meant to seem as if it was written by the school. It was evident that the tone, word choice, and topic of the school’s writing would have a huge impact on the way that site visitors both understood the film and perceived the school. So I was careful when writing to make sure I was conveying an elitist sense of professionalism and present information in a way that would certainly be distressing to hear as a student so that visitors could understand the pressure put on students by the school system represented by Stok High. 

The second way we thought we could develop our story at a greater level of detail was by presenting student life at Stok High. As a student, the person is involved in usually says a lot about them, so I thought it would be a really cool idea to make bios for the competitors so that viewers had the opportunity to get to know them at a “deeper” level; however, I stripped their bios from their humanity I only presenting statistics and a resume-style text. As awful as this may sound, it's often done an in the real world, it's been done to me; students are more than just a list of extracurriculars and numbers, but we're often reduced to that and I wanted to make sure I conveyed that in our website because it fits perfectly into our story. And making bios meant we could have some fun coming up with the clubs and activities that our characters would be involved in! Back when I introduce the characters I mention a lot of theoretical clubs I came up with while I was writing those bios, well I took to canvas.com and may designs for all of those clubs anymore, making obvious parities of real clubs and making up new clubs. This is also an incredible opportunity to include fun easter eggs for fellow High school students to find! Here are some of the logos I made:

I decided to make a page specifically for the by the Valedictory competition as I figured this would be a very big event in the school year, so the school would likely allocate entire page this beloved tradition; I would go one step further and argue that is clearly showing how glorified the idea of winning this competition is by having an entire page just for it. On the page, I included a description of all of the challenges found in the film and place the bios for all the characters. Inspired by my own school's TV program, I decided to include a "live steam" quote of the competition. I created a mock-up video on WeVideo that would give the impression of a live stream next to the announcement, The watch button would take site visitors to some sort of explanation of the film or maybe the actual film itself. 

The website has really come together, and I'm extremely proud of how it looks! I know that my familiarity with the software has been really helpful in increasing my productivity and the quality of the site, and I'm very glad that I got to utilize those skills for this project. I've been fixing and perfecting the site for a while now, I started the day I had the idea for the site’s concept and I'm going to continue to spend a little more time perfecting it, and developing it so that it presents itself as much more than just a façade for the fake school but rather as a valuable immersive, interactive, and creative marketing product. 


Go Mighty Mantis Shrimp!

Signing off,

"That's a Warp!" (Production Day #5)

I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR TODAY FOR A VERY LONG TIME. 

Today Jake and I finally got to yell at the top of our lungs “That’s a wrap!” Of course, it was a bit different than I originally thought it was going to be; we yelled it to an empty grass field and with two of our nine actors, but it gave me the same feeling of thrill I get when I’m done riding a roller coaster! Finally, months of work and planning had paid off; we are down filming. This is how our day went:

I woke up and got a call from Jake while I was still in bed, without wasting any daylight, we started going over the plan for today. Jake had woken up earlier (like most days) and wrote the script for the scene we shot today. On the call, we red-though the script and after I gave some feedback we made some small changes and corrections to the dialogue. In this scene, we imply future character development and we really prompt the audience to think about the premise of the short; thus communicating our message. It was crucial that we got it right, so we took the time we needed to make sure that happened. 

When we finished, we briefly discussed the game plan. I jumped in the shower and organized all the equipment to make sure I was ready for Jake to pick me up. On our way to the shooting location, we picked up Jakoob and Dani. This scene was originally meant to be filmed at our school, then at a local public park, but in the end, it was filmed at the community park of a neighborhood (The Ridges). This wasn’t necessarily our decision, it was just were Dani’s (Isabella) mom allowed her to film at, but it turned out to be great!


When we got to the location we found there was a perfect set up to construct the illusion of a big campus. The pool’s clubhouse was used as an administrative building, a vast grass field as a courtyard, and we even found a short exterior hallway. The building was closed at first so we couldn’t record Jakoob (Bryce) coming out of it after the scene we recorded yesterday. 

Suddenly I hear Dani go “There’s a man in there”. I suggested approaching the man, to which Jakoob responded: “I don’t know, he looks like he wouldn’t want to be bothered.” 

“Nonsense, I’ll talk to him,” I said, confident in the communication skills I have… or at least think I have. Effectively, I spoke to the man who was very nice and unlocked the building for us to film at! 

Following the recommendations of our local government and the CDC, we took extra precautions including distributing hand sanitizer at least twice during our shooting session. 

The first sequence we had to shoot was Jakoob having a bit of a meltdown. For this, I asked him to play it up a bit so that the audience gets the idea. As someone who has witnessed many panic or anxiety attacks, sometimes it can be hard to distinguish them depending on the person; you just get better at dressing them and spotting them with time. So I asked him to follow typical media conventions of such to make it easier on the audience in the limited time we have. In addition, I actually performed the actions first so that he could get an idea of what I meant. After he did it I figured it would be a good idea for him to exit the frame when Isa is watching him. We tried it a few times but Jakoob just sort of stood up and walked out and Bryce would theoretically still be very visually startled by the panic attack and seeing Isa. So, without thinking much about my word choice, my bilingual (and a half) brain said: “jerk out of frame”… Yup, those words came out of my mouth.

Of course, being teenagers, we all thought this was the most hilarious thing ever (well, more like they thought it was). There was a couple doing exercise near us and they probably thought Dani was some sort of stand up comedian because the girl just laughed and laughed hearing the comments she -Dani- was making. In my defense, a “jerk” is the right word for the body motion I was looking for and “out of frame” is the direction he had to perform that motion towards, so ethnically I’m not necessarily wrong. After they are up a little, we finally got on with filming. 

The rest of the filming went great! We had a lot of fun joking around and getting stuff done! And just like that, we finished filming! We’re still missing one picture of Zack but filming-wise, we’re done! On the car ride home, we planned to meet up with Zack for the picture. We did it. We wrapped in-spite of a global health pandemic, in-spite of scheduling and equipment conflicts. Now on to our next challenge; editing. Bring it on!

Signing off, 

🎥Garage Band (Production Day #4)

Yup, you read that right! We filmed for our project today in the middle of a global health pandemic. Now that’s a quote for the history books! How did we do it? Let me share the recipe with you…

1 Box of Global Health Crisis Mix (COIVD-19 works best)
2 Best Friends
1/2 Cup of optimism 
1 1/2 Cups of determination
3/4 of a car garage 
3-4 Actors (We used the “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Broadway” brand but any brand should work as long as they aren’t in quarantine). 
1  Teaspoon of hand sanitizer (We used store-bought but apparently you can also make your own).

Combine all ingredients and mix. Let them sit for about 1.5 hours in 86° heat with light humidity and serve! 

Tina LIVE! 
On Monday we were all sitting around bagging our heads against a wall when from the heavens came a gift, Tina (Our lovely Cambridge instructor) sent us an invitation to join an online meeting of our media class! That’s right, not even a global meltdown can stop our little media nerd cult from assembling!

A few students and I joined the online meeting at 3:30pm. Tina talked about how we should learn to adapt our production to the circumstances we were being presented. As my classmates about their production struggles which varied from not being able to get equipment to having equipment but being unable to film anywhere or with anyone, I realized how lucky Jake and I were that we worked efficiently and I became really thankful for what we had. It was then when I realized that it was BECAUSE we had gone so far that we couldn’t stop, we owed it to ourselves, our cast, and to our story to finish it all despite the adjustments we had to make. 

So when the online meeting was over, Jake and I decided that we would go on full speed ahead, taking into account the delays that we already had. We knew that we couldn’t film at any of our locations because our school was closed, so we set out to create our own environment, and that’s when things got interesting… 

The Filming Day
Have you ever looked at your garage and thought…“This place has potential”? Well, most AICE media students have! I took one good look at my garage and knew exactly what to do to make things work. So I told Jake yesterday that we would record in my garage today. Of course, when I did that, I was hoping Jake would bring this backdrop, which would have made it infinitely easier to make up a set; however, he didn’t bring it. And thank gosh he didn’t! Because what we did was even better!

When Jake got to my house with Sebastian (Andrew), Jake suggested we build an L shaped backdrop so that we had some freedom in the kind of angles we could use. He remembered that I had done something similar for my project last year and that I had created the illusion of full room by having the object in the middle turn instead of the camera. Here’s a graph to help visualize what I mean (this is from last year, but same idea-ish):

I began to build the L off of black plastic tablecloths while Jake went out to pick up Jakoob (Bryce). There were a couple of holes in the plastic so I had to patch them up and paint over the tape we used to hold it up in case it accidentally came into the frame while filming. Once I was done I decided to test the composition with the camera (this time we were using Jake’s blogging camera since we had to turn in the old camera and Sebastian had let his friend borrow his DLSR). I noticed that everything I hadn't covered was clearly shown, so I had to use a very rough-looking plastic tablecloth to cover it up. Jake’s sister Kailey (Miranda) arrived just in time to help me! 

When Jake got back, we set the camera up and began to film! We set up a wide arrange of lights of different colors including blue, pink, red, and black light to get a really cool color light effect on the actors’ faces. Our light set up was AWESOME and it made the room look extremely futuristic, perfect for a VR simulation room! We recorded some shots of Sebastian and Kailey so that we could use it in the new ending we made earlier (You can read about it HERE). As usual, Jakoob broke character the moment the camera made the starring to record sound or whenever I said action. I don’t know what’s that funny about me saying action, but he finds it hilarious apparently. After we got through a few trials of him just laughing and one time he accidentally fell in the chair and kicked the camera, we finally got all the footage we needed. 

At the end of today, we took pictures in the cool light set up and Jake and I even took the chance to record a bit for our CCRs. Today showed us that we could adapt to even the craziest circumstances. Of course, we took all the necessary health precautions like handing out hand sanitizer multiple times during the session. I’m excited, tomorrow is the last day of filming!

 If I had a dollar for every time I’ve said that…

Signing off, 

A Wix Commercial you can't press "SKIP" on

When it came time to start building our website I turn to my trusted friend wix.com, an online site-building platform that I’ve been using and improving at for the last 5 years (I'm starting to sound like a Wix commercial only here you can't skip like on Youtube). On Wix you can choose whether you would like to build a website from scratch or whether you want to use a template; usually, I don't like using templates because I feel like it takes away from the authenticity of the website, however, building website from scratch can take months and an insane amount of hours of work. We don't have that type of time, so I decided to do what I most commonly do which is to borrow various elements from multiple templates to create a unique and original template to base the website and building off of. So I went on Wix and I searched for school templates, I didn't really like the template I found but some of them did have elements that are common things to see on school websites, so I decided to use some of their layouts and design patterns. 

The template I decided to use as the main base was actually the template of a church, I

liked the aesthetic layout, it was much closer to what I imagined in my head our website would look like. After combining some of the other school elements from the other templates I had a pretty cool school template on my hands! The first thing I did was change the site colors to our brand colors, precisely down to the hex code because I want to ensure consistent branding throughout everything created for this project. 

Once the color combinations were right, I started to work on the site’s homepage. Are use the pictures we took from the photoshoot to fill the website's homepage, as another form of an Easter egg Jake and I had already decided that we were going to make stock high and mighty mantis shrimp, so I figure the first picture that people would see when they came into the website was a picture of the student body president welcome them to the website and greeting the mighty mantis shrimp. From there I went to our own school’s website to see what sort of announcements, news, and other things were posted under the main running banner and tried to replicate those concepts. 


I also made a school near the section where Jake and I could have fun creating more Easter Eggs to put in the text, I thought it be fun if the school newspaper created the section so I

made a quick logo for the "New Stok Times”. This is one example of the many clever references, easter eggs, and inside jokes that we packed into our website because it's important to have fun when doing what you love! When writing the text for the website, I also make sure to emulate the exact thing that we wanted to stok high to embody. 

I also started to build the about us page, for which I decided to make a small informative video that uses incredibly vague language to describe the education practice is at stok high, something curiously found in many private, charter, and even some public schools’ websites. Thankfully from the second day of shooting and from the photo should we were able to obtain lots of content to help create media for the website so I jumped on WeVideo and created this quick video:

Neither of the pages is fully finished, and there is a lot of stuff to still go over, but they’re coming along great! I'm really excited to see how this website turns out! I like what I build so far and I'm doing it at a very good pace so I’m confident the end product will be something with quality and an incredible level of detail that I am proud to put my best friend’s name and my name on. 

Signing off, 

Its corona time! 🍻

Fuck.

[Cue “It's the End of the World as We Know It” by R.E.M.]

Well, its official, Covid-19 has closed borders, shut down cities, and most recently closed Broward County Public Schools. Just when I thought we were finally going to recover from our daylight savings incident, Murphy's law slapped me in the face.

For those unaware of what Murphy's law is, it's commonly expressed as “everything that can go wrong will go wrong”. And boy did Murphy really hit the bullseye on this one. Jake and I had to shoot the rest of the scenes at school; now that it’s closed, we’re not sure we're going to be able to film in it anymore. It’s not only our project, the AICE Media Studies A group chat BLEW UP; we’re all losing our minds over this. 

Because the close was so abrupt, Jake and I hopped on a call to discuss the future of our production. Nothing is going to stop us from finishing this, we’re far too deep into it. We both love this story and this class way too much like to give up on it or delay it. So we’re going ahead with filming, we have no idea how we’ll do it yet (that’s for another blog post), but we’ll figure it out. 

In the meantime, here's some PSAs about Covid-19 and staying safe and healthy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_066dEkycr4

Singing off for this weekend!