Reflecting

     As my work on my film opening and CCR finally come to a close, I thought I'd take a moment to reflect on my experience.

     I've switched around clips of my opening more times than I can even process, and I think I'm going to have the over dramatic sounds of my parents reciting their lines engraved in my brain forever.  That being said, I really did enjoy completing this project and going through the film making process.

     One thing this project taught me is how nice it is to not procrastinate.  While I'm certainly not the worst procrastinator I know, I do tend to put things off, so the fact that I was able to stay organized and on track for this project was a good step for me.  I ended up preparing everything I needed for filming very early on, and filmed a lot earlier than most people.  This eventually had a much bigger pay off than I could've imagined, thanks to COVID-19.  Although quarantine kept me from being able to reshoot anything for my film, a lot of people had to rethink their entire film ideas, which I didn't have to deal with.  Being that I filmed early, I had ample think to rework my clips in a way that worked for me, and was able to work around the fact that I couldn't reshoot without restarting.

     As for putting my video together, editing helped me to learn a lot.  I'd done a little bit of editing in the past, but this project really improved my skills; it also showed me how much of a perfectionist I am.  Since I transformed my video several times to follow a different flow, I spent an extremely long time altering my opening.  At this point I for sure have a love-hate relationship with editing; every time I'd sit down for a few minutes to work on editing, I'd end up sitting there forever trying to make different changes and improvements.  Even when I wasn't in the mood to keep editing, I couldn't stop myself from sitting there and making alterations.  The positive of this is that I learned a lot about editing and especially about using Premiere.  I had very little prior experience with Premiere, so my journey included a lot of YouTube tutorials and article explanations.  This definitely paid off in the end, since now I have a much better grasp of the program and how to use all of the different functions.

     Overall, although it was frustrating and stressful at times, this project was enjoyable and taught me a lot.  I've always been pretty artsy and even though I'm not looking for a career in the film industry, this project did appeal to my interests and was really fun to do.  I definitely still have a lot of room for improvement, but this process allowed me to greatly improve upon my production and editing skills.  Thanks for coming along on this journey with me, and enjoy my opening!