Day twenty-what-now?

Ok. I checked. It's 

DAY 28: Project Reflection.

Looking back at where I started... wow, it's been a longgg run

I remember starting this project. It was a mix of emotions. I thought "Ok! Fun! should I do it alone? in a group? Ok my teacher called me and I have no group so I'll do it by myself." That was my downfall. Nah I'm kidding, but I do really like working in a group and throughout the project I wondered how it would have been if I had gone with a group. However, I liked working alone on this. It made me brainstorm by myself which is MUCH harder than brainstorming with other people. Now, I don't know if you could tell, but I am a slow worker. Especially when it comes to creating stuff. Anyways, it doesn't usually take me as long as it did for this project to come up with ideas. 
I had my first idea, which I really liked. I told it to my friends in the class and they looked at me like: 

And I was like "pff. whatever. they don't know anything", all defensive:

And then I told my teacher and she was like "No." And I was like "but you didn't even let me explaiinnnnn":

But then I got over it.

as I struggled to come up with an idea, I talked to my teacher and she told me to do it about a social issue I cared for because all my favorite movies happen to be about something around that. I decided to do it on LGBTQ+ issues, as you may have noticed. 

Then one day, I was walking through the Wynwood Walls and I saw this big wall. Its background had a lot of colors and it said in big white letters "+ AMOR" which means "more love". And that's when I was like OMG!!! I have it! I developed the idea: a boy paints and protests through art about an issue he cares about.

I loved that wall so much and I decided to pretend this wall was painted by my main character, and that's how the film is going to start, with some spray paint cans and him looking at it proudly (obviously I was gonna cite that the wall wasn't actually painted by us).

But then I realized we had to do it all by ourselves, we couldn't use somebody else's work let alone an entire wall. So I emailed the Wynwood Walls if I could have a small part of a wall to paint for a project, they said that unfortunately I couldn't and they gave me someone else to talk to but by then I had started to develop my back-up idea and I went with that one. 

So this is the second part I struggled with. After thinking and thinking and thinking and watching other film openings from films I liked, I got the idea for my opening. 

Then, when I finished struggling with that, I got started with struggling for what my painting was going to be. I wanted it to be symbolic. That's all I knew. I saw a youtube video on how to make symbolic art, the guy did a face with all these random animals and stuff around it and then he explained them. That gave me the idea to look up "symbolic things". I looked at examples "symbolic art" "art that is symbolic" "art for protests" "art social issues" "abstract art". Then I came up with the idea of doing a face, after all, my main character loves people. I watched lots of youtube videos and saw a lot of step-by-step drawings on how to do an okay-looking face. I couldn't. So I went for a it's-bad-enaugh-that-you-know-I-didn't-mean-to-make-it-look-perfect look. I liked it though, but I know I'm not an artist! Then I looked at the "symbolic things" page and got the idea for the message. 

After that, I looked at what colors represented what feelings and went for purple (power), red (love, passion, strength) and blue (truth). 

Quarantine happened, but my idea didn't require anything from the outside world so I was good, the only thing is I had to change my actor. My brother did the honors.

Something I learned from this project and this class is how much work goes into it. I knew that a lot of work went into movies. But I feel it's just one of those things where you never really know what it takes until you try it. Everything you hear and see in a movie was thought out by someone. Nothing is 'just there'. I find that amazing. So, everything I shot I shot for a reason.

Filming was easy, except for the whole filming in front of a mirror thing. There's this problem I have that when I start filming I can't stop until I get everything from 10 different angles. Let's just say it was a long filming day. And then re-filming, also from a lot of different angles but this time I told myself to stop. 

Editing: ugh. I don't like editing. Only because it takes me such a long time to edit things! Because, once again, I edit, I think, I look up "how to do [...] in Premiere Pro", I do it, I mess up, I have to delete everything or it just deletes by itself because I messed up, I start over, I export, I change things, I export, I send it to people, I delete the message, I re-edit, I export, I re-edit again but this time I just correct a mistake, I export, I sen it to people. And there are always things that can be done better. It's a never-ending process!

In conclusion(I hate this transition word but I don't know what else to say), we can say that I struggled the most with creativity. It's not that I don't consider myself to be a creative person, I just have more bursts of creativity than constant amazing ideas. From knowing what my film was going to be about to what my painting was gonna be to what shots to use. Everything took thought and analysis. It was a struggle. A long, but fun struggle.