Film Foundations

  Recently, I worked on a poetic film, which I am overall very satisfied with. My goal with this film was to create a pastiche of the works of authors such as Clark Ashton Smith. I do feel like I was somewhat successful at aping that style in the script. My process for writing the script consisted of coming up with a few sentences that sounded interesting, and later coming up with 'filler' sentences in between them. While this made the writing process easier for me, it also meant that I did not go into the film with an overarching idea in mind. The film (to me) feels a bit aimless, and that is something I could have remedied by coming in with a strong concept.     While coming up with shots, I tried to make each of them match the script. As a result, there are a lot of shots with trees, water, and leaves, words I repeated a lot in the film. My biggest issue with the film was that it was very silent. I tried adding music to fill the silence, but nothing sounded quite right...

     This was our first real attempt at a narrative film. Previously, our films have not had much going on in the way of plot, but we remedied that with this film. With this film, we wrote a more extensive script than we had before - our script totaled about three pages, in contrast to our other films, which have all been one at most.      We experimented with the lighting a lot in this film, which (at least I felt) worked to great effect. We also used a variety of camera angles and reshot each scene multiple times from different angles.     The one thing I am not happy about is how after the first half, the film was entirely improvised, and we stopped using the script, but overall I am satisfied.

  My documentary is about what actions we can do as individuals to protect the environment. For most of the shots for my B-Roll, I used footage from a park nearby my neighborhood. I interviewed my father, who works for an environmental nonprofit, for the documentary. I was inspired to create the film after going for a walk in December in my park and seeing all kinds of trash just piled up all over the place. I created this documentary to draw awareness to environmental issues, and to show that individual action does help. The filming process went well for the most part, though getting B-Roll was tedious as I had to go out over a stretch of multiple days to find shots of anything interesting happening in the park. I used a phone for the B-Roll and a DSLR for the interview, which did not have the proper lens, so the shot looks slightly out of focus. By far the most difficult part of the making of the documentary was actually getting the video to upload in the first place. It took ove...

  The editing practice was difficult at first, as I had to assemble all of the footage into a narrative. Before I could do anything, I had to skim through all of the footage to mark down on paper what footage I would end up using, and in what order I would place the shots. This proved to be the most time-consuming part of the process - actually assembling the footage only took about half an hour to complete. Frustratingly, I accidentally deleted the footage during the exportation process, which forced me to re-download and import the footage into Premiere.      Deciding what goes where on the timeline was difficult due to the lack of a storyboard or script to base it off on, so some of the shots were almost certainly not where they were originally intended to be. Even so, I do believe that I managed to craft a coherent narrative from the footage. 

  For this sound edit, I recorded most of the sounds at school, with a couple of them having been taken at home. Initially, I used placeholder sounds, but I replaced them with sounds I recorded myself. The sounds for the cars, for example, were recorded by recording cars passing by my house, while the running sounds were recorded by recording myself running on grass. The sounds were layered over one another; in most of the video, there are at least two sounds being played at the same time. The video was copyright-striked when I first uploaded it to Youtube, so I went back and tried to see if I could fix it. Unfortunately, no matter what I did, it still ended up receiving a copyright strike. It was able to play on Youtube for me, but if it does not play for some reason, I have included the video below:

  Our idea for the narrative film was to shoot various clips of Dylan practicing basketball, eventually winning a game. We decided to shoot handheld to have a constantly moving camera to emphasize the constant movement of basketball. It reflects the theme of making one's own future by having Dylan improve in basketball. We started our work on the film by deciding that we wanted to have a film about basketball. After working out a shortlist, we went out to film over the next couple of periods. The filming process went well, but due to the fact that we used a phone camera, some of the shots came out in portrait instead of landscape, which had to be corrected in Premiere.