#Mood: Mood board for 10 things I hate about you

 Hi! This week I worked on a mood board for the movie I recently analyzed, "10 Things I Hate About You". The purpose of this mood board is to capture the theme and feelings the movie portrayed visually. Let's get into my mood board and what it's meant to represent

In my mood board, I attempted to portray the themes of the movie while also placing visuals as to how the characters dress, act, the color of the movie, and more. To begin with, we're going to look at the board in sections.

     Starting with the left corner, numerous pictures display what appears to be a couple. This represents the main character, Kat, and her love interest in the movie and how they build as a couple. In the beginning, Kat is more reserved and tries to push herself away from others shown through the pictures of the women walking away from the man, but Patrick constantly pushes his way into her company and presence. Additionally in that corner, you see a man wearing a dark colored outfit with blah blah, this is similar to the syle of Patrick within the movie as he's portrayed to be somewhat grunge with country elements to his style. More towards the middle of the top, there's picture of people at a prom which plays a large role in the plot as the motivation for the whole thing is for Bianca to go to prom (but she needs her sister to go in order to). This relates to Patrick as his goal is to take her to prom, but it also moves us to the next theme of sisterhood. 

    This is evident in the right top corner as we see pictures of 2 similar-looking girls next to each other. The use of the girls being back to back emphasizes how they both are looking forward in their own lives but are still connected. The girls looking towards each other represents the sisters finally seeing each other, relating to Bianca and Kat's original distanced relationship (due to Kat guarding herself from others) and there change in closeness as the plot progresses. You also see two different images of outfits similar to the style Kat and Bianca have. In the lower-mid right side there's a picture of a dad and his daughters connecting the theme of sisterhood to the third theme of a father letting his kids grow up.

In the middle bottom, there are pictures of a dad holding two little girls representing how their dad sees them and him not wanting to let them go. This goes along with the whole "If Kat does it, then Bianca can" rule he implements as he assumes Kat won't do anything he sees as "grown". There's also a picture of one little girl and one older to represent the change in the daughter's ages. This section also connects to a photo of butterflies being released from a jar representing the theme of release which is the overall message of the story. 

The dad has to learn how to let go of his daughters youth and accept them growing up, Kat has to learn how to let go of her past pain and form relationships with others, Bianca has to let go of her view of her sister as a "prude" and see her as a person with experiences, and Patrick has to learn how to let go of his pride and fight for a relationship he wants genuinely.

2 Girls and a Sound Story

    Welcome to Just A Girl! This week, I received a sound project in class in which we were tasked with making a 1-2 minute story, only using sound. It was overall a super fun and creative project to film and edit, and it gave me great insight into how sound mixing affects everything. For this blog, we're going to discuss the process of filming, editing, scripting, and creation of this project. Since I did this project in a group with my best friend, PeanutButterAndNellySandwich, I will be speaking on the process of both working with a group and my contributions.  

Let's start from the beginning

The Script

    The first thing we did was come up with the story we wanted to create and then brainstormed on sounds and effects necessary to let the story progress. We came up with the idea of a woman getting kidnapped for the plot, and then created a base script including basic sounds like "Women screaming", " Man walking", etc. We began to find sounds to layer and as time progressed, so did the description of the story. The script was somewhat easy to create as the sounds we used were pretty plain in words, but when put together made sense in sound.  

 Editing

    To edit I used, iMovie and my computer's editing software. I first used IMovie which I personally disliked as I was limited in how I could edit the video. For example, I couldn't layer sounds over videos, which was one of the requirements for the project. On the bright side, I was able to access another editing software on my computer, Microsoft Clipchamp. This app allowed me to do everything I needed from merging the audio to adding sound effects for free. Due to my previous experience on the app because of another class, finding and using the program was easy for me. Editing itself was a long process as I had to go back and attempt to listen to the audio unbiased (since I knew what was supposed to be happening). It even went as far as me having to film new sounds because the previous ones didn't match right.

Foley stages

    Filming the audio was a fun task as it forced me to think about everything relating to audio. In some scenes, I had to figure out how to utilize uncontrollable sounds in the project while making sure it didn't sound out of place with the other audio clips. I filmed the car opening and closing, the trunk opening, knocking, the footsteps, and some of the screaming. Though my scenes were relatively easy, making sure there was no heavy breathing, or unnecessary sounds was difficult and resulted in me filming multiple times. Also, for certain sounds to give the mood we desired to create, I had to be creative with how I created the sounds. For example, for the footsteps, I had to put paper on top of grass and walk so you could hear the texture. My partner filmed about 5 scenes as well. 

What I learned

    From this project, I gained more editing experience, practiced working with one of my partners for the final, learned the importance of specific sound mixing and recording, and practiced bringing a script to life. It was a great project to work on overall and reminded me why I wanted to take media studies in the first place. This also makes me watch movies differently and pay close attention to how specific everything is. Even with sound that appears to be single system, I now consider how it could be made at home with separate materials.

Thank you for reading!!