reflection

For my project I decided to create an Action/drama based film opening called “Champion”. It was created with the help of my partners Jonathan Casaverde, Rafael Sanchez, and Tomas Quilaqueo.

The film opening shows a very experienced boxer named Vincent Montoya played by Rafael, fighting against his rival, named Booker Cannon. As the fight begins we see Vincent starting off strong, however, he then gets knocked out by Booker which then causes Vincent to endure severe injuries that leads him into a coma for multiple months. We then see Vincent in the hospital after a few months have gone by and he is currently still in a coma. The news turns on in the background and we hear the reporter speaking about the events that took place the night of the boxing match. As the reporter is talking about if Vincent will ever return, he open his eyes and finally wakes from his coma. The last scene in the hospital really gives off a climatic feel that will have people wondering what will happen next. So I believe that this film opening as a whole will really keep the viewers engaged. Even though we stuck with the traditional idea of boxing and used males instead of females, our film opening does represent a minority. Both Vincent Montoya and Booker Cannon are Hispanics coming from a low income society. They are both fighting for money so they can live a better life. Since we see Vincent waking up from his coma months later, viewers can infer that the story line of the movie will be based upon the hardships Vincent will have to face to be able to take back his title of a professional boxer.This challenges conventions as it motivates people to fight for their dreams no matter how hard it may seem to reach. The story line of this film can potentially be very inspiring and relatable to viewers, since it’ll represent the idea of fighting for what you want and reaching your goals.Our film opening will connect with audiences emotionally. Since Vincent gets brutally knocked out, our viewers will be worried and hoping he will recover so he can come back and try to win his next boxing match. This will also engage with audiences who are between the ages of teens to adults and who are very into action based films. Distribution for our film might not be so easy for us. We would most likely only be able to show our work to small amounts of people since we aren’t very familiar with people in the film industry. We would be able to enter our film into film festivals or tv production competitions. Student television network is a competition which I have attended to myself and it’s a good platform if you’d want to get your films more known. However, it is a very competitive competition so we could just enter our work into local film festivals.

My production skills developed greatly throughout this project and so did my partners. Tomas, Rafa, and Jonathan became very good at coming up with the story line and creating a script. Tomas worked very well with the camera and Rafa experienced how to get into character and act. I also experienced working with work lights since we were filming during the night and needed to make sure we had good lighting.I also learned how to keep a production going even when things get difficult.At one point it started to rain heavily and we were all multi tasking, having one person filming with the dslr camera, the other holding an umbrella over the camera, and someone else setting up the lights for our subjects. Through this production process I learned that we had to manage our time very wisely and plan what would be taking place on our filming day. If we had called all of our actors in without a plan and just improvised, we wouldn’t have gotten anything done. Even though we faced many obstacles the day we filmed, we got everything done that night. Tomas and I both did the editing. Tomas put everything together on adobe premiere pro and I used after effects to create graphics for our title card and credits. We are both already very familiar with editing so I don’t think that process was too difficult for us, however even though I am very comfortable with using after effects I had never created more of a complex kind of graphics before so I did teach myself how to make those graphics for our titles by watching tutorials on you tube.The making of the graphics wasn’t difficult for me at all, It was more of something fun and new for me to do. I really enjoyed creating cool graphics for my film opening. I know it’s something not a lot of other people have experience in and I really hope the graphics will pull the viewer in. Even though we were focusing a lot on the cinematic aspects of our film opening, sound was also vital for our project.The sound in films is also what tells the story, so we made sure to incorporate sound effects in our film opening. We did use downloaded sound effects and foley in our project. We used the sound of crowds cheering and the sound of car engines in our title sequences to establish the setting of our film opening. We had downloaded an audio effect for it to sound like people cheering and for the car engines we recorded all of that in the school parking lot using tomas’s car. So right from the start the viewer knows we are outside with a crowd of people and cars surrounding them. Since punching sound effects from a website don’t sound so great we decided to use foley for our punch noises by wrapping a text book with bubble wrap and punching that. The making of this film opening was a really great experience that taught me a lot about the production of a film and how to collaborate with others. I truly learned how to think outside the box more and I became more knowledgeable about the process of creating a film.