Mary Melo-Severino

10 May 2019
Capstone Reflection

Coming into this class I knew nothing about filmmaking. Despite the excitement, I was
terrified of the idea of making my own film since I did not know the process or techniques that
were involved in making a film. Throughout this class, as I developed my idea and learned the
techniques and organizational tools that would help me efficiently create my film, the
fear/nervousness turned into excitement and I couldn't wait till my February flight to Dominican
Republic. Filming in D.R proved to be very difficult for many reasons. Not only was I very scared
to loose the camera in a foreign country, but I was also alone in DR without a tripod, so I had to
film (and maintain stability) as I also managed the zoom and sound levels. I had to problem
solve and educate friends and family on how to operate a camera and sometimes, when noone
was there to help me, I used books and tables and chairs to hold up the camera while I held the
zoom. Even though I faced a challenge with working both the zoom and camera I think that I
was able to get great shots for my film.
As I layed out all my rough footage I was very overwhelmed with how much content I
was able to film, and this created another problem for me, but this time during the editing
process. The day I came back to school and imputed my footage I stared at the computer for
the whole one-hour block. I had no idea what to do, therefore, after I layed out my interviews, I
toyed with many different “starts” to my capstone till I eventually fell upon my final and best
choice. Not only do I love the voice over start transitioning to a montage but the montage
allowed me to use more of the footage I captured. From then on I was playing a jigsaw puzzle
with my capstone, determining which clips fit where and which parts of the interviews were best
to use.
When I started making rough cuts it was very difficult to get an in depth critique from my
classmates so I can better my capstone because of the language barrier, at this moment I had
not yet gotten to my captions. Luckily, we focused on imagery and sound levels, which was
important for me because I wanted my visuals to truly stand out. Although not having captions
was a problem, critique without the captions truly helped me focus on the images and sounds of
my film, which is equally as important as the content of my film.
The last touch to my film was the captions, which became a struggle when I exported the
file. At first I used ITT captions and I didn't know this then, but ITT captions don’t transfer with
your film when you export so I had to manually change all the captions I had done to CEA-608.
When I exported my film with the new captions, it did not look like the same captions that
appeared on final cut pro. Even though the captions didn’t turn out how I would've liked, I love
how profession it looks. If I were to do something differently I would like to keep the same styling
of captions that appear on final cut pro before exporting the file.
As this process is coming to an end, I am extremely proud in all that I have
accomplished and I’m very grateful that I was able to include my family in one of my final senior
projects.