<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/33622304?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" width="400" height="220" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe><p><a href="http://vimeo.com/33622304">Untitled</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user9635394">Devon Catucci</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
This is the short film my group and I did for our final project. Originally, we came up the concept of doing a film showing a young man stalking a female student. We drew out a storyboard shot by shot, and I created a shot list, detailing what sort of angles and shot sizes we were looking for and brainstorming locations for each scene. We also came up with a props list and planned out the fastest way possible to shoot.
Unfortunately, due to medical reasons, I was unable to be there for the actual day of filming. Devon and Linda quickly bounced around our concept and changed it to work with our one lacking crew member. They came up with the creative idea of having the camera serve as the stalker's point of view, and they did a great job.
Editing was fairly easy. I had some familiarity with final cut, and I believe Devon also did. We choose music that would convey our message well, first we chose the more upbeat, fun, but still dark song "Psycho Killer" by the Talking Heads, which we thought had some nice foreshadowing, and then another song we found in the hunter library, an instrumental with sounds of suspense and doom. The hardest part was cutting the scenes so that they flowed and matched up, for example, in one pair of consecutive shots, the notebook Devon carried jumped from one hand to the other, so we needed to switch to another similar shot that was from an angle that hid the notebook. Other scenes we edited together, such as the shots where a character opens a door and then the next shot shows the door opening, were also a bit tricky to match up. But overall, I think editing went fairly smoothly. I enjoyed working with different shot lengths and trying to make the shots match the music and give a rhythm of growing suspense.
If we had more time to work on the project, I would have liked to do more editing with color correction, and possible add more sound effects, but overall I think the short film went very well. It was definitely a challenge to come up with a project with limited resources and such a short amount of time, especially since I was struggling to keep up this semester and was out a lot due to sickness. I'm really glad I had such a great group and they were able to deal with my unexpected absence the day of shooting and quickly come up with workable footage and an altered concept.
I really enjoyed pre-production, coming up with the concept, storyboard, shot list, figuring out props and locations and costumes, etc. It was a challenge to think of every detail (like wearing layers so we could make it appear that it didn't all take place in one day), but it was a chance to be creative and challenge ourselves to think quickly and be very efficient. I do wish we had more time to edit, and I look forward to learning more about the editing programs in the second portion of this class. It will take a lot of practice to become familiar with and comfortable with all of the tools and aspects in final cut and imovie.
All in all, I really enjoyed this class and the projects we did in it. Although I wish we had more time, and I felt some of the material was a little too basic, it was good to have a chance to reacclimate with programs I was only somewhat familiar with, and the pressure to complete projects in a short timespan really gave me a feel for what the industry and real-life deadlines are like. I was a little disappointed I didn't get to spend any time behind the camera during the actual shooting of the final project, but I learned a lot during the other filming project ("Traffic") and the photography project, and I feel like I got a chance to test out all the skills I needed to learn for the class.
