Finishing the Postcard and Editing the Short! (part 1)

     After the unfortunate events I spoke about on my last blog that shall not be named again, Nico and I knew we had to make up for the lost time. Two days ago, Nicolas came over and we started the process. Since all of the clips and Premiere Pro is only on Nico's computer, we came up with a strategy to be most effective. As Nicolas started editing the short, I started editing the postcard. All we had so far was the front of the postcard and Oriana's scene. The front of the postcard was visually pleasing, simple, and exactly what we wanted. As for Oriana's scene, it was 'eh.' Knowing we had a ton of work ahead of us, we sat down and started working at 2pm.
     Let's focus on the postcard first. It took so. incredibly. long. We started with an image of the notebook. We wanted to make the back an image that allowed us to add the information next to it or somewhere that it was easy to read and see. However, the notebook picture that I took was only the notebook placed on the gravel floor of a playground. It looked great, but did not allow us to add the information. In order to fix this, I added the same image over and over again on the right of the postcard by cropping only the gravel floor. This way, it looked like the notebook was on the left and the rest of the image was the ground. It let me place the information on the right side of the postcard while the notebook made it look better being on the left.
     It started off great, but then everything went wrong. The information was hard to read because the gravel floor wasn't solid. I made it all white on top of the black background and it helped, but what really fixed it was making the picture black and white. However, I didn't like it. I tried to add some color by adding colorful stickers Canva let me use for free on top of it, but it didn't help. I moved everything around for an hour and played with stickers, but NOTHING. I gave up and deleted it all. Until I came up with something I loved, I refused to leave it. So after an hour and a half of work, I restarted.
     I went on my phone and started looking through every single video and picture on my phone since the start of this project. I searched until I found a perfect one. The image of me holding the notebook with Paz makes perfect sense after people watch the short and makes it look better, by appearing as if one side is from the front and the other side is from the back. Although it might make more sense for them to be backwards with the image of us facing the camera on the front and the image of us from the back being on the back side, I wasn't changing it. The current front was perfect and the front picture on the back would give me the same issue as the notebook would, which wouldn't work.
     I started by placing information in between the two bodies. With the colors, it wasn't happening. I tried lowering the opacity and ended up making it black and white. The showtimes I added were a bit more visible now, but a shadow in the back stopped in the center and made the background white, making it unable to be read. I went on my FaceTune app and made the shadow go more to the right and it worked! Then, I found a nice line of dots to separate the title "Showtimes" with the actual showtimes which looked much better.
     I then went on to the times and dates. I googled the Sundance film festival and got the right dates and times to make it as real as possible and corrected them. However, the outline I used didn't let me add the "pm" and "am." After a while, I finally solved it by adding small textbooks to the right of the times with the missing letters and trying to match it up as much as I could to make it look natural. Since this was all the information we wanted to add, I was technically done. However, I didn't like it. It was too dark for the family film we created. This postcard wasn't aimed towards our target audience and didn't match the bright colors I have been using on every other element of this project. For this reason, I started searching for stickers and changing their colors to add bright ones all around the image.
     At first, I tried adding stickers all around it to fill the empty space, but I asked my mom for an outside perspective and she said it looked too full. I took out all of the irrelevant stickers and left only a light bulb which symbolizes the imagination and a paint splatter which symbolizes the art used to show them. It still looked too dark, so I took to PicCollage and spent 25 minutes cutting out the notebook from the colored image and trying to fit it perfectly onto the black and white image on my tiny iPhone screen. However, it worked perfectly! I changed the background image and with that pop of color on the middle with the notebook, it looked 100 times better. I was still not done, however. It looked too empty.
     I looked at some sample projects from last year projects and saw that many included brief descriptions. I tried doing this on the top and it wasn't read. I tried adding it to the bottom and it wasn't read, again. I started changing the color of the text, but it seemed to disappear in the image. I tried EVERYTHING, until I finally found a cool white shape that I placed on top of the picture. I lowered the opacity and put the text on top and it helped! But, some words still disappeared. I started changing the colors of the words and struggled finding different colors that weren't too dark or too light for the area of the image where they were placed, but I did it. Almost done!! Now, all that was left was the top. It still looked too empty for me.
     In order to fix this, I re-wrote the title on the top and matched the font to the one on the front for continuity. I made the spaces in between the words much wider and changed the colors to finish it up! I photoshopped the image once more to make the tree in the back wider for the "P" to be easily read and was done! I got the feedback from Nicolas and my mom and everyone approved! Finally done! After four to five hours of stress and changing it and adding/removing, I actually did it.