Re-Shooting and Re-Editing: Script Fixes and Filter Fun

Today was our final time meeting up to film! Today, we are fixing our mistakes and creating a more coherent and sound production. 

    First, we tackled the comment on the busyness of the park scene. I wasn’t familiar with Marissa and Mackena’s neighborhood, as the start of this whole project was my first time being there. Marissa offered a good idea of going to their public community pool just down the street, and since it was cold outside, no one would be there to see Mackena and Riley in their toddler costumes again.  

    For the pool scene, this was our easiest scene to film yet. We had them sit across the pool on the chairs to make it seem like the viewer was watching them from afar. At first Marissa had them sit on the direct opposite side of the pool, but as I started to film, I saw they were a bit further from the camera than I wanted. Almost to the point where it was difficult to see the two on their chairs. To fix this, I had them sit diagonally across the corner of the pool, so it was still a wide shot from across the pool, but they were still visible. This scene took one try and we were off walking back to the house.  

    Marissa then brought about a good idea to replace the swings scene in scene six with a scene of them drawing with chalk in the street. I took this as a good time to employ a birds-eye-view shot and circulate around them for some much-needed camera movement. As I was helping Marissa get the chalk out from under this huge cardboard box, she came across these two “Slow, Children at Play” signs that made for perfect props. It turns out we needed these signs for a little more than just props too. Cars kept barreling down the street and we had to have the two move out of the street in the middle of quite a few shots since we set up on the corner of the road. Probably not the best idea. This reminded me of a time in my past where the first time I brought my new dog home, she loved to run, and one day she bolted right outside the front door and into the street, and around the corner came a car that was barreling down the road. Surprisingly, my dog was fine and actually broke the fender of the car with her head, but still, ever since then I have been pretty anxious around roads, for dogs and humans alike.  

    To add to the chaos and disruptions, boys from a few different houses came outside to play basketball in their driveways, and they kept losing their basketball. Their basketball kept bouncing into our shots and I had to strategically time when I would begin filming when the boys weren't shooting the basketball. 

    We then tackled our next problem, which was the clarity of the relationship between Marissa and Mackena. We realized that it was really only obvious to the four of us that Marissa and Mackena were siblings. This was an easy fix, we added Marissa calling Mackena “my sister” in her line but kept everything else the exact same. Here, we still attempted to fix the echo, but nothing was working. I went through the same filming process as I did for the original clip, and we moved right along. 

    Next, we moved on to the final critique, that being the filters. I had already added a filter on the flashback before, but I guess it was not enough to make it seem too different from the rest of the clips. For this, I went into Capcut and navigated to the filters section where I scrolled through a vast list of preset filters and color options. I found a filter called Leak 1, which is a different placement of orange orbs than the original “Leak II” that I had applied. I added the Leak II overtop the Leak 1 filter and turned down the intensity a bit. I then went to adjustments and turned the color down so it was vaguely in black and white, but not too olden days.  

    I replayed the entirety of the film a few times and decided it was good to go. The final sendoff is now upon us!