22/9/10 - Reflection

Todays film class was cut down to 20 minutes due to the mid autumn festival assembly. We didn't expect such an abrupt change of schedule, so we did our best to finish our film. For the first 10 minutes, we continued and completed trimming the clips and assembling them together, having a basic structure for our film. We also had a little bit of time left to add in a punching sound effect, but that was it. After the assembly, we corrected the volume of the sound effect and added a few video filters, such as blurring, transitions and fades. We didn't have enough time to color correct the film or reduce the background noise. I think if we had a few more minutes, the film would really be completed to the best of our ability. However, with the time we had, I was still quite pleased about how our film turned out.

I thought I was a thinker today as I had improvised with the short time we had instead of a whole 80 minute period and was still finished with the film.

16/9/10 - Reflection

We spent this film class concluding our filming and editing the footage. I was disappointed that we did not finish editing our film today but still thought this was a productive lesson.

We spent the first 30 minutes of class completing our filming. We could have eliminated this by managing our time better last lesson and used the 30 minutes on editing our film. That way, we might even have been able to produce the completed film by the end of the lesson. Even so, I thought the time we spent today was productive as we didn't waste anytime filming and got right to the point. After we captured all our footage, we headed back to the classroom to start editing.

Quite a bit of our time was wasted due to importing the footage from the camera. After about 20 minutes, we got all our footage into the computer and was ready to start cutting and compiling the clips together. This took about the remainder of the lesson and we ran out of time to color correct and add effects to the film. We plan to do this at the very start of the next lesson.

Overall, I thought I was quite a reflective IB learner today as I had gone over what we had done after the class and thought about how we could improve by managing our time better or working more collaboratively as a group.

What Does Visual Impairment Mean To Me?

Visual Impairment is something that is obviously considered to be negative. I would think losing your ability to see is an extremely difficult thing to overcome and is very difficult to adapt to your surroundings. I myself have tried to simulate blindness by closing my eyes and could not last longer than a couple of minutes. Instead of looking down on visually impaired people, we should look up to them and see them as our role models as they do not give up in times of loss and have a great attitude towards life.

14/9/10 - Reflection

In today's film class, we had a slight change of lesson plan. Instead of spending the lesson shooting the remains of our film and beginning with the editing, we had a member of the Hong Kong Society of the Blind come and give us a talk about blindness and equality. The name of the speaker is Billy and he is a victim of blindness. Having lost the ability to see at the young age of two, he has learnt to adapt to the environment using his other functioning senses. The purpose of this talk was to raise awareness of how blind people were being treated. Not only that, but we were asked to enter an online film competition, in which we would create a film relating to blindness and equality.

The IB learner i thought i was today is an inquirer. This is because i was curious in how a visually impaired person could do things normal people do. One of the many things i found fascinating was how they could know time. The solution to this was that they had a watch which the cover would flip open and the user could feel the hour and minute hand with his fingers. This was, he would know the time like anyone else. Another thing that i found interesting was how he was able to walk without bumping into anything. He then went on to explain that he uses a walking stick to navigate his way around the environment. He then gave a demonstration on how the walking stick is used.

All in all, i found the talk today very inspirational and i believe our group would make a great film on this subject. This has been a very influential experience and i enjoyed it a lot.

8/9/10 - Reflection

In today's film class, we started with the shooting of the film. Since we had completed all of our storyboards last time, we were ready to shoot it with a camera. However, things did not turn out as how we thought it would be. Even though we did a good job of preparing costumes and props, there were still a few things we had to work out before we could shoot the footage successfully. Such as how we forgot to draw up a poster, which we had to waste time an do it during the time we were meant to be filming. We also had to work and experiment with the camera and how we could frame a cut so everything would be in the frame. One of the most difficult parts was the opening scene, where the camera pans across the setting and stopping at Rahul, the drug dealer in our film. To get everything in our frame, we had to get up onto a higher level, which we did by going up a floor and filming over the balcony. We also had to take into account to be careful not to get the railing in the shot. The acting was not much of a problem as we didn't have an especially large amount of dialogue.

I thought we had a good session of filming today as we had more than half of our whole film shot with more than 2 takes for each shot. However, we would improve on our time management and planning beforehand as so not to waste any precious filming time. Something to keep in mind for the next time we go and film.

One of the shots in our scene. Here, we are using an over the shoulder shot to signify conversation between the two characters.

Some of the props we prepared beforehand.

Setting up the camera and filming equipment.

Last minute prop preparation. As we had not thought about the poster, we had to do it during the time we had planned to film. Something to keep in mind next time we shoot a film.

6/9/10 - Reflection

In today's film class, our group continued to work on our storyboard and prepare and plan ourselves for the shooting of the scene. I thought it was important for us to spend more time on the planning as it would result in less time wasted when doing the actual shooting. We would then be prepared for what we have to do and not spent time over discussing how to film a shot. We didn't get to filming today as we weren't prepared in term of props, costumes and completing our storyboard.

One of the obstacles we encountered today was that we each had a lot of ideas we would like to share with the group and it was difficult for us to share our ideas all at once. We resolved this problem by going one at a time and combining the ideas together to form one that we all agreed on. The storyboarding went quite well and we finished it before class ended with time to spare to go outside and check out the locations in which we would be filming.

I thought the time we spent in film class today was constructive. Even though we weren't prepared to start filming, we spent the time completing and perfecting our storyboard. I think this is much more important than to jump right in and start filming as we would have a very clear understanding of what we are gong to do and not get off track.