CCR Question #1

    Hello everyone! My research today is about the first ccr question. The question is: How does your product use or challenge media conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues. I really like this questions because it deals a lot with representation, which I could talk about forever.

    In my particular product, we use many genre conventions rather than challenging them. One of these is the use of technology as a main plot point in many films. Our film is no different from these, our plot could not work without the use of technology. Our story also revolves around a futuristic world, while it is true the viewer does not get to see this world at the beginning of our film, it is set in a somewhat distant future. 

    

    For the second part of the question, our film represents a very specific social group, which is woman in STEM. Even though it is true our first character was a guy, due to some unexpected issues we had to change to woman. The idea of our main character being a woman is way better than what we originally thought, this allows us to represent an incredible group of people. She is an aspiring scientist, who is not heard by the higher ups and has to do something about this. We tackled one issue, fear of the death paired with mental instability. When we were coming up with Owen we wanted her to have a motive, something that drove her forward, we came up with the idea of her not having a stable life ever, so that's why she's doing everything in her power to get some stability. When she sees her death, she realizes all her effort will have gone in vain, and slowly loses her mental health.

References

Clute, J., Langford, D., Sleight, G., & Nicholls, P. (Eds.). (2025). The encyclopedia of science fiction (4th ed.). https://sf-encyclopedia.com/

Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association. (2026). Writing resources. https://www.sfwa.org/other-resources/

Science Fiction Research Association. (2025). SFRA resources. https://sfra.org/resources/

TV Tropes. (n.d.). Science fiction. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScienceFiction

Starting to Edit

    Hey guys! Since post-production is the main focus for us this week, I really put in my best foot forward and practiced the whole day my editing skills. Today I did not go to school, so from early morning to the evening I edited a small project to really polish my editing skills.

    For context a few months ago I learned about something called Machinemas, which is basically making a video using a video game. When I remembered this I decided to use it to practice my editing skills, I also used one of my favorite songs to make a short story for me to follow and edit. I knew this was the best way for me to practice because in any other way, I would've died of boredom, and this way kept me entertained while I still improved. After hours of practicing I dedcided that it was good enough and started editing the project. I actually got so much better with DaVinci Resolve too, I feel comfortable using it and its pretty easy.

Moribund 

    

    While I had to edit and record both, they were very differently, one of them allowed me to follow a song, while the other I had to make sure was perfect with no help. After practicing, I can say that I find editing somewhat enjoyable, it is a long and annoying task, but its fun if you REALLY look underneath the surface. I will continue to update on the progress of the editing for the project

Practice Project

Production

    After finally finishing filming I feel so relieved and at ease since it was one of the parts that worries me the most. Even though I keep thinking back and realizing ways to make it better, I still think we did a good job. When it comes to the improvements we will probably do them this week since there are some scenes that need to be improved. 

    Filming took us about 3 hours, from 6 to 9 which is shorter than I anticipated. We started chronologically, with the scenes that happen first and so on. Now comes the editing part, and for that I originally thought to use Canva, but when I first started using it, I realized that it can not do text animations. To my luck, I had previously downloaded an editing software called DaVinci Resolve, this program looks hard, but after practing with it a couple of times, I realize if I use only the parts that are absolutely necessary for me, it pretty usable. In it I started playing around getting familiar and started testing out everything, and came up with a font for our title card.

    Of course this is it in the purest form, we will have it against the our video and hopefully will have a good animation while putting it, I'm still in the testing rounds to get everything correct for the actual animation. I really like this font because DaVinci has such a huge variety for fonts and it allows for insane amounts of costumization. 

This picture is me testing everything (some old clips)

    Looking at the layout of DaVince Resolve is almost like seeing into a pilot's cockpit, but if you focus on the important parts that you know you will use, it becomes way more maneagable. 

Group Meeting #2

    Today we had our second group meeting and I feel like it was actually so rewarding, I got really good feedback about my Portfolio Project. I now know what to do for my CCR and I really like the ideas that me and my group members came up with. I really loved all of my classmates ideas and hopefully I'll be able to see what they come up with, I truly feel like this was such a rewarding experience and I'm happy we got to do it again, their ideas were:

Carolina- (Mystery) A girl murders another girl using a marker, we are seeing this mostly as a flashback. She ends up going insane and getting arrested.

Andrea- (Dystopian) A girl tries to escape in this track looking for food in the suitcases, she opens this suitcase she finds this necklace and food. We then go back to the past to where the girl is taking 

Jp- (Thriller) A guy is getting bullied by another guy, then the one getting bullied runs up behind their back and kills the bully. 

Sebastian- (Thriller) A regular teenage guy on his car all bloodied up, freaking out. It cuts back to a few hours before the first scene, then he goes to the mailbox and finds something that freaks him out.

Mia- (Coming of Age) Two best friends who always hang out at this park, as they’re leaving one day on one of the girls get run over and ends up passing away. 

Idea for CCR- doing a sort of Bill Nye segment where I talk about my questions like Bill Nye does. 

Idea for CCR- making a mad scientist write on a whiteboard the questions and then answering.

Filming

    It is official, we have wrapped filming for our Portfolio Project, Moribund, it is such a relief knowing that one of the most challening things that come with the project is finally done. It took around 3 hours to finish filming, and it was so fun but also so tiring. 

Filming

    Filming took place at my house, and thank God for that. We started filming at around 6:30 which allowed us to get the main shooting place ready, my room. The most challenging parts to film were definetly the desk scenes, since my room is not the biggest we had to make due with what we had, which meant moving my desk forward and squeezing into the little gap to film.

The desk was cleaned up, and thats the tiny gap.

    After many shots where my sister could not contain her laugh we managed to get all of them. The lighting was a huge part of the filming process too, I had one of my mom's huge light that gave off too much light, so we decided to tape two sheets of paper in front to dim it a bit. Then in the other side I had my small lamp which I got at 5 below that gave this purple-ish light. 

    We had two over head shots in the film opening, and they were scary to film. I had to borrow a stool so I could get high enough to film and I'm not the greatest with heights. The rest of the filming tho was pretty fun, me and Lydia (my partner) were able to finish everything, and we had tons of fun doing it. We shot many different angles of all the scene, which allows us to have a little more freedom when it comes to editing. Editing, the most daunting part, at least for me. I really hate editing, I don't understand it and I feel like I suck at it, so my goal is to practice so much editing I'm basically a natural at it by the time we finish the project. That's my biggest worry but also my biggest goal, I will update on that on later blog posts. 

Camera Equipment

    Hello Everyone! Today I'll be taking about our camera equipment, to be honest we will be using our phones but I want to talk about some of the struggles we have found during filming and how we have over come them. We had only had two problems when it came to our camera equipment, but thanks to our problem solving skills we have managed to fix them.

    My phone is the iPhone 16 Pro, which from what I've gathered is good when it comes to filming anything. Now when it came to the troubles they were two, the first one being how unstabilized the camera felt, and not having enough storage to film.

My phone for refernce

Unstabilized Camera

    This might not seem like a very pressing matter for most people, but for me this was horrible. When I first took the shots I realized when I moved the camera even in the slightest you could see it on the video, this almost made me freak out. After doing some quick google searches I found out that my phone had something called Enhanced Stabilization, I quickly looked it up on my phone and turned it on. After fixing this the shots looked way better, which eased my worries a lot.

The button I had to click

Full Storage

    This worried me way more than the previous problem, if I didn't fix this soon I would have to post-pone most of the shooting. The solution to this problem was super obvious, I had to delete so much stuff from my phone, luckily for me I was checking this a few days before we started shooting so I was able to fix it before. I spent at least 30 minutes deleting pictures, videos, and apps from my phone. At the end I think this is enough but we'll probably will have to check after fully shooting everything.

The little space I managed to free

Extra

    Fixing this issues really eased my worries when it came to shooting, since I really struggle with having a variety of shots, and capturing them is not easy for me either, I feel a tiny bit more confident now. I will run some tests with my phone to shoot some stuff to see if they turn out well, I really want to improve my shooting skills so I pray this will help.

Company Logo

 Hello everyone! Today's topic is super fun, at least for me. I'm going to be showing you the progress of making our company logo. For our logo we went with something a little more simple after seeing some of the actual film studios logos. At the end I really like what we ended with.

    For our first "draft" of the logo we decided to go with a common aspect that we found among many other studio companies, which was a huge circle with the text underneath. I really like that we went with this idea since it already started to look like an original film studio.

    Since our portfolio project deals a lot with the mind, we decided to add a head made the most sense. I also really like how it fits the the vibe of the company.

    Then we decided that only having black and white was extremely boring, so we decided to add a color that is very prominent during our portfolio project. We chose this kind of dark blue because while it is beatuiful it is also serious.

    Finally at the end we landed on a name! We obviously chose Headspace Studios since our literal logo is someones mind. The font we used also fits kind of the movies they would make. Lastly making the word blue Headspace emphasized how important it is when it comes to the brand's identity.    

Making the Prop

 Hi guyss! In our portfolio project we really wanted to develop our character. The way we landed on was, making this sort of board that holds all the notes thar Owen has. This board took a good amount of time to make, especially when it came to writing down the sticky notes and writing stuff that sounded sciency enough. This board is like a peek into her mind and how she works on the thing that will guarantee her success. 

    For reference this is the early stage of the board:

    And this is the final product:

   

     If anyone is interested in making one of these you're gonna need a LOT of different colored sticky notes. For example, I tried to make each color something different, red was intimate and not that related to science, while green and blue where. This is basically just a vision board but it's a way for the audience to really get to know the character by just reading the short simple sticky notes. 

    You will also need a frame of any kind, I used the Spider-man one because I had it in my room, but you can honestly use any kind of frame. Where and how you position your pictures is also important, for me I tried making it as messy as possible, since our character has a sort of scattered mind. It really just depends on how the prop will be used, and in our case it is to dive into her mind in a quick and creative way.

Portfolio Project: Sound

 Hey everyone! Today we’ll talk about sound in my portfolio project. This is something really important for me, since in every movie I have watched music and sound are what makes the feeling portrayed in the screen heightened. I also really like what music does in a film, in an action film, for example, you feel the rush of blood everywhere while the superhero fights the villain, with their iconic theme song playing in the background. This can be the opposite when it comes to a drama film and one of the group members just passed. The options are truly endless when it comes to sound.

        Superman (2025) Spoilers ahead, the fight scene I was referencing.

Music

    In my film opening I really want to use music, but since there are several limitations to that I landed on making my own music for the project. While it is true I would love to make it and play it all on my own, I don’t have a musical bone in my body, but in the other hand, my twin sister can play nearly every instrument if she sets her mind to it. So I asked for her help making the song for the film and she has been so helpful, right now we’re almost done, we’re just making some adjustments. 

    I was also thinking to maybe use two songs for the film opening, each one depending on what the character is seeing. Maybe use a song that gets the audience on edge when the visions are being seen, and another one for when she’s assembling it. I’ll take about it more with my partner and come to a decision soon.

Every Other Type of Sound

    When it comes to sound I really want to focus on every single type. I would love to do all of them by foley but I know that would take way too long. I will however try my best to do those kind of weird sounds myself. The list seems to be pretty endless, with some sounds not even being real, but thats the real fun part of it, I get to be creative making the sounds that come with everything sci-fi in my project. Here is a list of the sounds I will probably need:

1. Papers shuffling
2. Footsteps
3. Vision sounds (kind of windy)
4. Tech sounds, like booting up something

Among more, but this are the few I can name without having the whole thing completely to reference.

Examples of Music and Sound in Films to Reference

    Now comes the really fun part, showing videos!!! Here are some: 

      Interstellar (2014) Not an actual part of the film but has some clips of it

A Quiet Place (2018)
Rather than using sound they use the absence of it to build tension.

Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014). *EXTREME TRIGGER WARNING* Great example but very graphic.

                   Superman (2025). A repeat, but another great example

Mis-en-scene: Set

 Hey guys! Welcome to part two of mis-en-scene, today rather than doing research I'm going to tell you, and show you, what has been going on to prepare the set (my room) into the Owen's! Since today was Valentines and just got home recently I tried to get ahead on the set design. I already printed some pictures of female scientists Owen would looks up to and among other stuff.

Designing the Room

    For a little context, Owen is flat broke, she can barely sustain herself and is living in one of the older houses in the US (which in our time would just be a normal house). She relies mostly on paper to do her notes for the glasses because its cheaper. She also doesn't hate using paper for her notes but she would rather use something more high tech that goes better with the times. When it comes to her room it is basically the only place where she can test her experiments. 

    I also have 2 Spider-Man posters that I'm filling up with pictures of the human brain and stuff she uses during her research. Fun fact, taping the pictures onto the frame made me feel like a detective in one of those mystery movies. I also have a super huge collection of books in my nightstand which I think makes so much sense for Owen's room, since she can't afford digital books that are the standard in those days.

   

It is very important to say I'm not done with either poster

This will be cleaned up

    In my desk I will have the typical bottles scientists have where they mix fluids, I'm probably going to use those by making Owen put a little drop as a lubricant for the lenses. There will be notes scattered around the desk since Owen does not have much space to put stuff in, the notes will contain stuff she needs to remember and also some random formulas that I looked up on Google that looked sciency enough for our project.

Mis-en-scene: Lighting

 Hi guys! Since we’re starting the filming of our project very soon, I think talking about lighting would make the most sense. Since we’re doing sci-fi we want to keep some of that futuristic feel, and some of the ways I found while researching were really interesting. Before going into that I wanna talk about how I really want to use different colored lights to make our film opening look interesting.

Using Colored Fill Lighting

    I found this very interesting and honestly super fun, it basically means rather than using white light to fill in the shadows in the face, to use any colored light to make it seem more interesting. I actually love this idea and will probably be using it during our project. I feel like it would look super interesting and would probably be used during the dead body flashfoward (I don’t think that’s an actual word, but fits perfectly). We will probably also use it during the little scenes that aren’t flashbacks but with contrasting colors to show off something different.

Using a Colored Rim Light

    It may look like I’m going the list of all the lights in a scene but I’m actually not I promise. This idea is pretty similar to the last one. This would mean to use a light of any color behind the person, this would give an aura of light from behind the person. This idea I’m going to 100% use when it comes to the shot of our character when the glasses are on and malfunction because it will make the scene all the more interesting.

Light Sources

    I really want to use this lighting techniques but I have been struggling thinking how I’m supposed to show the sources of this light in the film. I would not need a source for the rim light scene, but when it comes to every other scene that involves lighting I pretty much need to come up with a creative way to make the color lighting make sense. Probably the screen Owen is using to run the prototype could be a source of the light.

References

Adorama. (2023, April 14). The psychology of color in filmmaking and photography. Adorama Learning Center. https://www.adorama.com/alc/psychology-of-color-in-filmmaking/

Hellerman, J. (2021, August 1). How to use color in film: 50+ examples of movie color palettes. StudioBinder. https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/how-to-use-color-in-film-color-theory/

Bucknell University. (n.d.). Lighting lesson 4: Color theory. https://www.bucknell.edu/academics/college-arts-sciences/academic-departments/film-media-studies/production-resources/lighting-lessons

Hurbut, S. (2022, November 15). RGB LED lighting: Creative uses for photos and videos. Videomaker. https://www.videomaker.com/how-to/lighting/lighting-color-theory/rgb-led-lighting-creative-uses/

Character Development

    Hello guys! Today is a very exciting day, I will indulge in the beauty of my main character. Due to some unexpected changes our character is now a woman, but I feel like it may be for the better. For her name we chose Owen, which means noble born which comes from the Welsh name Owain. 

    Our character was born around 2019 and she is a insanely smart person, our story is very character driven so we came up with reasons why Owen might be making this glasses, the reason we landed on is that she wants to be rich, she's motivated by greed since she lost her parents when she was very young and has never had a stable day in her life. The questions that arise with that is how can we show that in the beginning of the film, I thougth maybe having some graduations pictures of Owen alone would suffice but I'm still debating on it. 

    I really want to reflect my characters personality through her room so I'm going to do my best trying to do my best with that aswell. For reference we also did a mood board so we could have some visual input when it comes to mis-en-scene elements, the moodboard is right here:

StoryBoard

    Hey guys!! Today I'm going to show the beautiful storyboard me and Lydia made for our project. It is true I'm not the most artistic person out there I hope it makes some sense. I really like making storyboards because they give me a list to follow and I feel like it keeps me way more organized than I would be without it. We also got a name for our project!! The name we landed on Moribund, and we really like it, I hope it fits well with our story. Without further ado, here is our story board:

Media Theory for My Project

    We have made very good progress with our project within the last week, with that progress comes choosing a Media theory we would like to use for our project. The theory I chose is... Hermeneutic or Enigma Code, this theory basically is when a narrative keeps a piece of information hidden to drive the mystery of the plot. This theory fits our project like a glove, the whole premise of the beggining of our film is the fact that we're withholding a huge piece of information, which is how our main character got killed. 

    This theory is basically what drives our whole story, without this theory we would not have our project, the next big question is how we can incorporate it. After much thought I realized the answer is way more easy than I was making it to be, we basically alreay incorporate it without us even realizing it. Not telling the viewer how the glasses work, not telling them how the main character dies, and by keeping this futuristic world a mystery we're basically making one huge example of this theory. All this is how we will make our project contain the theory we chose.

Some Examples of Movies Using This Theory:

Knives Out (2019)

Memento (2000)

Inception (2010)

References

Carringer, R. L. (1996). The making of Citizen Kane. University of California Press.

Gargett, A. (2002). Nolan’s Memento, memory, and recognition. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 4(3). https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1163

Lestari, D., & Prasetyo, H. (2021). Deceptive utterances captured in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out. JoLLA: Journal of Language, Literature, and Arts, 1(9), 1232–1244. https://doi.org/10.17977/um064v1i92021p1232-1244

Saputra, A., & Rahayu, F. E. S. (2025). Dreams, depths, and dual meanings: A semiotic analysis of symbols in Inception (2010) film. Jurnal Bahasa, Sastra, Seni, dan Budaya, 9(1). https://e-journals.unmul.ac.id/index.php/JBSSB/article/view/14352

Sembiring, B. (2020). Semiotic codes in selected horror short stories and films. English Teaching and Linguistics Journal, 1(2), 64–72. https://doi.org/10.30596/etlij.v1i2.5250

Project Description

    Today I’m finally going to explain the idea we landed on for our project! So we have been working on the idea for the past week since our first ideas were not that manageable. After all we landed on a pretty solid idea that we are pretty excited about, and I’m pretty excited to share it for the first time.

    So our genre is science fiction but we also have a little bit of thriller added as well since most of our inspiration came from sci-fi movies blended with thriller. So our idea consists of this scientist who’s making this pair of glasses that allows him to see into the future, but when he puts them on for the first time they malfunction and only sees short visions of the future, where he realizes he will die in less than a week. This is our current idea, it is probable it will change throughout the duration we work on it but it will probably stay more or less the same.

Coherence (2013)

Major Inspiration

    For our project we really took a lot of inspiration from sci-fi movies that had a lot of thrillers entangled with it, and the one movie that stood out among the rest was Coherence. Our idea for the film is very different from this movie but we took part of the aspects this movie brings like how creative it is when it comes to the integration of science fiction elements. We specifically chose this film as it contained most of the elements we wanted to incorporate into our own portfolio project.

    Some of the elements that I would really like to take inspiration from:

• Using sci-fi in a way that does not involve crazy CGI effects
• Creating a unique atmosphere for the movie
• Keeping the audience wondering from the beginning
• Using characters as the main focus of the film

References

IMDb. (n.d.). Coherence (2013). https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2866360/

Group Meeting #1

 Today was our first group meetings, I was a little nervous when I first heard this but I realized it was for us to improve our projects slowly. Even though I didn’t talk as much as I would like to I received amazing feedback on my project. I also got to have an insight on my classmate’s projects and realized how good their ideas were even though some of them were unfinished. The names of my specific group were Cristina, Benjamin, Noah, Sebastian, Clara. I really liked talking to them and since they really had great ideas, but I struggled with talking, something to note for our next group meetings.

    The feedback I received has really made me realize how much I need to take into consideration when it comes to the editing aspect of it. The feedback that I received was:

• Showing the character putting glasses on and then his deceased body
• To pay attention to editing
• Using hospital noises to transition from one place to the other.

Those were one of the few, next its the ideas each one of my group members had:

(Cristina) Coming-of age: a guy wants to become more famous as a DJ.

(Benjamin) Thriller: there’s a phone on the bench of a park.

(Noah) Drama: a kid struggling as he grows up in a bad environment. 

(Sebastian) Drama: the feeling of being lost as a growing boy.

(Emily) Thriller: a couple is driving and the guy keeps getting phone calls, the girls keep asking who’s calling her, then he passes a note to her and she realizes something.

(Clara) Action: a guy is tied up in the garage and he is having flashbacks of fight scenes that had happened before hand.

Title Card - Research

     I’ve been really thinking about our title card, while it is true we don’t have a name yet for our film I still think having the correct title card will make the whole difference. Since we’re doing sci-fi I want to be able to incorporate that into our title card aswell.

    A few days ago i finished watching a show called His and Hers (2025), while the show as lackluster at best I really liked their title card, especially the part where the letters moved to fit on the screen. If we do go this route for our title card the big question would be how can we incoporate genre conventions that make it feel more sci-fi/thriller. I brainstormed a few ideas that several other movie franchises did and this are some that I came up with:

    You can kind of see the title card at the end but it does not have the effect that it has on the show. Trigger warning for blood and overall just very graphic.

Font

    Font seems to be the common component of sci-fi title cards thatset them apart from other genres, for example the Tron title card has such a unique font that makes it truly stand out way above the rest. I really like this idea but if we were to reference the title card from His and Hers we would be very limited when it comes to it, but that does not mean we will have to completely give up on the idea of having a creative font.

Color of Letters/Background

    Another really common characteristic that I found in the title cards I researched were the colors of the letters and the background effects. I really like this for our title card because we can really get creative with this, especially when it deals with the background effects. I was maybe thinking of having like this light shining far from the text, if that makes any sense.

Effects Added During the Title Card

    I sort of talked about this in the last section but this refers to any addition to the letters and anything of the sort. I really like adding a something extra to the title like some lines or anything that will make it stand out. I'm thinking of having a dark color scheme when it comes to the whole film but that will really depend on what we end up deciding on. Hopefully I’m able to use all three of these so I can make something worthwhile and everything to look at even when it comes to the title.