For this project, my group decided to use Cade Watkins script, The Ebony Codex. This script was a prequel to the feature film we are creating this year in my video class during second semester. In our film, it showed the story of a women photographer who finds an old book in the woods. After she finds the book, it slowly begins to haunt her and she tries to figure out what to do with it. 

The first step in this project was assigning production roles. For this project, I was the cinematographer and I was responsible for creating the shot lists and the storyboards. Once we had production roles we began casting actors for our film. We decided to have my sister as the lead girl and we were going to use my dog in the first scene. We also chose to have Marco act in the opening scene. After we had the characters casted, we planned days to film. My group was really busy and we could only film on the weekends. We first attempted to film one Saturday, but we ended up having to re-film on Sunday and editing it that Monday morning.  On set, we finished the scenes fairly quickly and we began editing that night once everything was filmed. Ryan was the editor and I worked with him in post production to find sound effects and music for the film. 

My role in this process was the cinematographer and I really got to learn the artistic style of horror films that we can take into our feature film. Horror movies are generally shot at night and I was worried initially that it would be too dark to film. However, my group spent a long time setting up lights and shooting with a 50mm lens to make the shots look good. Technically for this film I generally just learned more about camera equipment. I haven't shot a lot of scenes at night so it was interesting to see how we could make night shots look interesting. 

For this project, I got to use the e-Comm guarantees in collaboration and project management. For this project I worked with a group of all juniors on set and we had to film the project fairly quickly in one day. Because my group had members I had never worked with before, I had to get to know what production roles they were passionate about and figure out ways to work around everyones busy schedule to ensure the film gets finished. This video also required a lot of project managment specifically on set. My group had to finish the entire video on one Sunday so we had to make sure we were working efficently.

If I were to do this project again, I would definetly spend more time on the edit. My group was really rushed in getting the edit finished and I stayed up tell 3am facetiming our editor to try to get a rough cut done. My group should have planned better on Saturday to not have had an actor issue that forced us to push filming into Sunday.

I would definetly keep my group the same if I were to do this project again. My group worked really well together and everyone was able to play a fundamental role in the production process which is something that doesn't always happen in the production groups. 

I believe my experiences in this film can greatly be taken into the feature film. This short film was kind of a test run in the way I want our feature film to look. Overall, I learned that filming night scenes will be do able for our film but we will need to allow more time on set to arrange good lighting. This film also taught me how important it will be to have somebody compose our film. Horror movies need to have sombody who understands music to add in sound effects that enhance our scene and I believe we will need to spend a lot of time in our feature film editing process to make sure that gets done.

Overall, I really enjoyed getting to work with my production group for this film. My group worked really well together and I am excited to extend this idea to a feature film.