Week of March 17th

This week we plan to wrap up our editing for picture lock. We have to mail our entry to the Academy on Monday the 24th to make sure they have it by April 1st because it is not a "postmark" deadline, it is an "on-receipt" deadline. We are going to send it priority mail through the USPS, so they should receive it within 3 days at most, but I want to be sure to give ourselves a little bit of a cushion. I'm trying to be a bit economical since I am paying for all of this out of pocket. Once submitted, we can not make changes to the film according to the Academy rules, so this will be the same version we send to all other festivals.

Taylor is currently working on color correction and finalizing the sound design, Nico is working on all the paperwork for the Academy, getting the home page of the website up, and has also begun researching other festivals. This week I am doing a few reshoots, mainly Chancellor's walk and I also am going into the Bluethenthal Nature Preserve to possibly replace one of our current sequences with a walking shot through the natural surroundings. (We have been watching some direct cinema and cinema verite over the last two weeks in 371 and I am feeling a little inspired and I thought it might be a good link to the shot of Natalie walking for thematic purposes). I am also finalizing the credits.

We did make quite a few changes on Saturday based on the classes feedback, but we have decided to keep the flood animation as it is. We are all ok with the look of it, this was my direction to Whitney and I think it fits my vision. I know you do not agree, but I have to go with my gut on this. We did fix the analogy animation, correcting the timing of the doctors and smoothing out the beginning and end transitions into and out of the animation. We also worked on enhancing the graphs and the second translation of the Greek visual. The one other thing we are still going to work on this week as a complete crew is the vox pop section. In the past only Taylor and I worked on this, so we hope with Nico's help we can perfect the goal of this section, which is audience identification through pathos. This is what I intended, as well as the translation of the love of nature/the earth, so hopefully we will be able to execute that better this time.