WE ARE DONE

     We are finally done with the portfolio project. It has genuinely felt like a journey. I remember when this project was first introduced, I was so intimidated. All of the projects that our teacher showed us looked so good and I had no idea how I could match something like that. 

But, I am happy to say that in the end...

The Blog

    I think my least favorite part of this project was the research blog posts, which I mentioned in my CCR. This is because they took SO LONG to do. I would often spend 2-3 hours on each one of them because I had to research, cite, and concisely describe each concept that I was posting about. Now I might just be a slow worker, but it took consistently that long for each blog in the beginning research phase. Add that and the fact that we needed to do four per week, and you get exhaustion.

    Once that part was done and we moved on to actual production, the blogs ended up being more fun to do. I used to be a blog hater, but recently I have learned to love them. They got so much easier during production, and the time it took to do each one was significantly reduced. I think now that I was used to doing them and didn't have to cite anything, I could just say what comes to mind and let the words spill out. This made the overall blogging experience more enjoyable, and it got even better when I realized I could make jokes and let my personality shine in them.

The Opening

    I had a great group. It was the same one from the music marketing project, and we all worked very well together. We worked efficiently, beating each deadline and making constant progress. I guess you could say we had synergy. See? I learn things in this class.

    The pre-production process was generally efficient, once we made up our minds on what we wanted to do. There was some discourse over the way the time loop actually worked, but once we figured that out it was smooth sailing. Scriptwriting and storyboarding went by quickly, and I think we finished those in the timespan of two class periods. Everyone had their own roles in the process which made everyone else's roles easier. I guess you could say we had syner- oh yeah I already made that reference.

    The production for the opening was truly beautiful. We had everything planned out and finished it all in a matter of a few hours. It was fun on set, and I don't really think there is anything else to say that I haven't already said about it in my previous blog posts.

    Post-production was a bit more annoying. I had the role of editing the credits, and me being my ambitious self, made it more difficult than it already needed to be. I really wanted to achieve that credit effect from the opening of GTA IV (2008), because I thought it would be more interesting than normal credits. Wow, that process took so much longer than I expected. You know how in my last post-production post, it was on a hopeful note? Yeah well, that hope turned into dread when I realized I needed to keyframe everything manually. The method that I had studied only worked on still frames, and there were barely any still frames in our project. There is nothing more arduous than manually keyframing a credit to the same spot for nearly every frame of a shot. Then on top of that, I needed to do masking for a couple of them, which meant I needed to manually mask for EVERY FRAME of the scenes I needed to do so in. I think it ended up looking pretty good in the end, so I guess you could say it was worth it.

The CCR

    The CCR. I think I both hated and loved this part of the project the most. It was a rollercoaster of emotions. When originally coming up with the idea for it, I was having so much fun. When I was writing the script for it, I literally started giggling to myself out loud, which now that I type that out I realize is really embarrassing to admit. However, I think with the idea I had, the CCR took more work than the actual opening. The issue with that was that I only had two weeks to do it rather than two months.

    Enter the most stressed out I have ever been in my entire school career. This last week of the third quarter was actually the final boss of school. I had so much work, with this project and my other classes as well. When I got home from each day of school this past week, I would work extra shifts just doing homework. For example, on Tuesday, right after getting home from school, I spent seven and a half hours doing a project for English. This wasn't a result of procrastination, since I utilized every class period we had to work on it, and it STILL took that long. Then on Wednesday, yet again right after school, I spent TEN hours filming the entire CCR. Then I spent pretty much all weekend editing, and here we are now. I didn't really have any free time this week to do anything else than work.

    I already explained the entire process for the CCR in the last few blog postings, so I just kind of wanted to vent about how crazy this past week has been. But now, WE ARE DONE.

How I feel to finally be done with the portfolio project: