AICE Media Studies Blog

 Unlike my previous two projects, this time I'm working alone. For my last two projects I worked with my best friend Sofia who was in my class. We worked well together and always produced something unique that I was proud to be a part of. However, in light of her switching schools, I've elected to go solo. It's true that I could simply team up with another member or group from my class to lighten the load, but I have a few reasons for refraining. The first is familiarity with my class. One of the main reasons I worked well with Sofia was because we were friends for a long time before entering the class. Our high level of familiarity contributed to understanding, comfortability, and easy outsourcing. Grouping with someone I don't know, or know very little about, for such an important project will lack all of these essential aspects. It would be harder to bounce ideas around with people when I don't know how they think. Bringing up personal obstacles or situations wit...

 My name is Naliah Nettles, a 17 year old junior at Fort Lauderdale High, and I welcome you to the beginning of what guarantees to be a graceful roller coaster ride from hell. To tell you a little bit about myself, I'm a libra, I have two bearded dragons and one Chihuahua, and my favorite color is hot pink. I write poetry, mostly as a hobby, but I do participate in competitions (one of which I won) and open mic events. I dabble in short stories too, although I'm not as good at finishing those. Another past time of mine is video games. Video games have a lot of stereo types such as being for boys or being very violent. I can personally attest that I am a girl who loves all kinds of video games, most non-violent. Shooting games tend to turn me off, the bland army style and colors being too dull for me and the sharp sounds of bullets and bombs being too sudden for me. Getting closer to Media Studies, I am an amateur photographer. I've shot photos for my middle school and high ...

 This is my CCR Google Slides presentation. CCR

 This project was extremely fun, start to finish, in planning, production, and editing. Compared to our previous commercial, this was much better, in quality and concept. When I chose to have Sofia as my partner again I had a couple doubts about how this project might turn out. With each rescheduling I had thought that those doubts were becoming reality, but despite everything we pulled through. This is why I stick with Sofia through thick and thin. While rescheduling and complications may happen, she still has tons of great ideas and input. Most of all, she always come through, last minute sometimes, but it is guaranteed. I can count on her to get things done when I'm unavailable or need help. On another note, we still ran into many last minute issues with production. I hope to avoid this in the future by having a stricter schedule and being more insistent about earlier film times.

 I had hoped the rescheduling and complications had ended, but it seems this project is as cursed as the Victim starring in it. After the photograph mix-up, my partner helped me buy new Polaroid film so as to follow the original plan. With the camera restocked, I set out with my friend to take the necessary photos. There were many ideas thrown around, and a budget of 20 pictures, but I quickly found that our environment wasn't ideal for Polaroids. The setting sun and cloudy sky made the photos much too dark, which was only discovered after around the sixth photo was taken. I showed my group to many different locations around my apartment complex but the darkness remained. When most of the pictures were taken, with little success, I pointed out a road miraculously still fairly bright that may provide a proper shooting environment. This hypothesis was proven false after the first photo, but it was slightly better. I also suggested a photo through my kitchen window, but that came out ...

 Today was originally scheduled to be a filming day, but the filming location, Sofia's house, became too loud and active to properly film without interruption. To remain active today and avoid another push-back, this became an editing day and tomorrow was designated for filming. Since my partner has all of our footage and the editing software I lack, she is doing all the heavy lifting while I provide advice and support. However, before the editing started, I discussed our materials with my partner. The plan was to have multiple Polaroids of the Victim for the final scenes in the Stalker's house, but the Polaroid camera I had planned to use didn't have an film left. I tried to find any existing photos I had, but the ones I had weren't something that would be taken by a stalker. So, I decided to use my recent school ID photo. It was also planned to have a variety of pictures of people in the Stalker's box. This wasn't achievable because of the lack of Polaroids as...

 Despite all odds, we had to push back the first filming day once more because of an unexpected rainstorm. However, in spite of the odds stacked against us, filming itself went surprisingly well. I invited my aunt Sarah to assist with filming because she has a lot of filming equipment, such as cameras and tripods, and filming experience since she is in film school herself. Once everyone arrived, we gathered our supplies and went to the first filming location: a collection of picnic tables in from of a lake. Here we filmed our first scenes, in which I did most of the acting. Since we were filming a long shot, I struggled with communication with the camera team, Sarah and Sofia. I found trouble in the scene where the Victim was meant to drop her lipstick because it was difficult to drop it naturally and on command. Although we pushed through with Sarah's suggestion of keeping the lipstick in the fold of my shorts. Following the scenes at the picnic benches, we filmed the Victim enter...