AICE Media Studies

1 . How does your product use or challenge conventions AND how does it represent social groups or issues?     A Spike of Luck uses modern clothing, music, and dialogue to represent teens today. More specifically athletes, as both characters are volleyball players.  The premise of the project revolves around two black teenage boys. As a result, their motives in the movie should be considered through that lens. In the project, we see MJ, played by Randy Sweeting, primarily on his own. Unless he is training with Ryan, played by Joshua Newell, he drives alone and greets no one when he gets home. It is implied that he does not necessarily have anyone looking out for him, seeing as he only interacts with Ryan to train and he ends up being late to tryouts at the end of the film. This provides a possible motive to why he is so motivated to join the team and is representative of how many teens join sports for comradery.      The primary convention of the sports genre that was utilized in the pr

 After our final filming day was complete, I wasted no time finishing up the editing process. Because the last scenes were shot mainly using tracking shots, I didn't really have to do much in terms of cutting them and adding transitions. The clips flowed together well because there were physical transitions to them. The final scene with the phone was a little more difficult. Because I was unable to help my other members film the final scenes of the film, I called them and helped them film scenes that way. This meant creating mock-ups for them to follow that demonstrated what angles to use and how to pace the camera. This actually worked way better than I thought it would. Most scenes came out great, but the only issue was that the team had a hard time filming the final scene which required a phone as a prop. Luckily, I had a phone I could record that looked similar to Randy's. I changed the wallpaper of the phone at my house and took off the case so it was less noticeable. I th

 Though our journey to complete the project was not without its obstacles, I am proud to say that this is our final project Spike of Luck. I feel it is a major improvement from our past films and hope you enjoy watching it.

       The current weather has presented a major obstacle in our filming process. Because the entirety of the work is set outdoors at a sunny volleyball field, the constant rain has made it impossible to get new footage. To work in these conditions, we may have to scrap the entire draft we currently have so that all the scenes match. Alternatively, we would have to rewrite the ending to provide an explanation for the setting. Seeing as half the project is already completely edited, I'm much more inclined to choose the second option. The entire situation is extremely disappointing considering that this project is arguably one of our better works.  Regardless of the obstacles we're currently facing, we will take any opportunity we can to film today.      The footage that we currently have was not easy to edit. Without any cuts, it was already too close to the required time. After some cutting and arrangement, the opening and training montage sat at one minute and 25 seconds. Afte

 Since our last filming day, we haven’t been able to record. It’s a very frustrating situation because we couldn’t do anything about it. The weather has been awful, so the scenes we would shoot would look nothing like the material we already have. The outdoor scenes we have require sunny weather. It has been raining constantly, so we could not film at the park we filmed at previously. Essentially, time is being wasted due to poor conditions. For now, we have been working on the draft of our project. I sent my mockup to Aidan, my fellow editor, to look over. He had some interesting feedback to give me. He re-edited some portions of the montage. Additionally, he changed the music for the project entirely. I feel that this made a vast improvement to what we had already. Even though the beginning is nearly complete, we still have to film the later portion of the project. The entire ending needs to be shot. This will require more actors outside of the group. We have all talked to our friend

       With more footage in our possession, I started the process of weeding out what we do and don't want. Because the last filming day was so fun, we got a lot of footage we don't necessarily need. However, the clips we did get felt very authentic and natural. This was very important to the direction I wanted to take in the film. I wanted to ensure that the characters felt like real people. Thankfully, the actors were able to deliver that with ease. I started with a mock-up of the opening that I had made previously. Using that as a base, I compiled the clips that were reshot and replaced the previous takes that weren't up to par. After this was done, I continued trying different methods to add the titles and names. I have a general idea of what I want, but I'm still open to changes. Because I haven't heard back from anyone I emailed for music, I searched for royalty-free music that could be implemented into the project. I primarily used Youtube for this. When all