Lost and Found
The prompt for the first weekend project was simple: a character loses something and then finds it. The difficulty was in the challenge: the entire project had to be one continuous shot and under one minute. So without further ado, here is the my first weekend project!
So this video might be a little confusing to you at first glance - and I don't blame you, even I still don't fully understand it. FSU is a very story oriented film school. In the industry, the quality is always going to be there. With a $60,000 RED camera, super computers, and cheap outsourcing of special effects to Asia, the films coming out of Hollywood are always going to look fantastic. So the philosophy of the professor's at FSU is to teach us to make a compelling story. With that in mind, I wanted to be creative with a topic like "Lost and Found." It would be really easy to make a video about losing your cell phone or car keys, so I decided to get as abstract as possible. I thought to myself, "What can you lose but not find?" I immediately thought about virginity. How could a person get their virginity back? As a sci-fi buff, I came up with the idea of a time machine. However, with no special effects and a single tracking shot, I knew it would be really difficult to pull off. I came up with the idea of contrasting day and night, and using a Calendar to show the passage backwards in time. Our professor wouldn't let us do color correction on the video, so I had to rely wholly on the calendar. If you look carefully at the dates, you will see that the calendar actually flips back one day. To pull off that "magical moment" where time rewinds, we shined a bright flashlight into the lens. While the flashlight was flaring the lens, my crew quickly cleaned up my room, opened the blinds, made the bed, and my male actor got dressed. That way, when our actress got back into the bedroom, fully dressed of course, everything looked different. (If you look closely at the bottom left corner of my screen, you can see one of my crew members hiding behind the bed.) So after I submitted the assignment I went back and re-edited this project, just so that I could see it the way it was in my head. What resulted was the following video:
I think this version looks really nice. The day-to-night conversion turned out well and the image stabilizer made everything look much smoother. I had to letterbox the video get rid of some of the crop factor from the stabilizer, and even though I think the widescreen looks nice, it crops out the month on the calendar which is a major downside. This just goes to show the dangers of filming a project in 16:9 and cropping it down to 2.35:1 in post.
Problems
All that aside, let's look at some of the big problems with this video and what I learned from it. The biggest criticisms I received from my professor and classmates was that they weren't able to clearly follow what was going on. They grasped the concept that the boy and girl had slept together and that the girl had regretted her decision, but almost no one made the leap from that to "girl steps into time machine to regain virginity." Believe it or not, some students did pick up on the time machine, but the ones that did all believed she went forward in time because the calendar switched from a month with no strikethroughs on the dates to a month full of strikethroughs, giving the appearance of moving forward in time even though the calendar was in fact flipped back. The reason for this was that I didn't focus on the month of "July" long enough. The word July only has about 1 second of total screen time as compared to June which sees 5 or 6. I also got some comments on set dressing. Although everyone realized that the guy and girl had slept together, many people said it wasn't clear that the girl was supposed to have lost her virginity. One student suggested that I use more props, like perhaps open alcohol bottles and various sexual items around the room.
This video was a great exercise in showing a story, not telling one. I learned a lot about utilizing all kinds of visual elements like props, camera movement, and location to tell a story without dialogue.
A Christian Outlook on Sex in Film
This was a pretty intense subject for me to tackle in my very first project in film school. I had never explored sex before in any films I had made, and here I was about to explore it in a graded project that was going to be screened in front of a class of 20 year-olds and my professors. As a Christian, I don't think there is anything wrong with exploring sex in film. Sex is a part of life, and film is form of art. It is art's duty to explore different parts of life. I do think it is wrong to glorify premarital or extramarital sex in film; sometimes they can be necessary to tell a story and bring to light a greater message, but I think presenting them as good things is crossing the line. I also think it is wrong to use film as stimulus for people's lustful desires. Why must we get up close and personal on a woman during a sex scene? Often times the implication of sex is all that is needed to advance the story in a movie - we as an audience absolutely don't have to see that when it is not necessary. Sometimes, however, I believe it is necessary. Nudity as a whole in film is a slightly different issue though - I believe sometimes it can be useful to make a more powerful point. In Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, a young woman gets raped by Alex's gang. Kubrick, just wanting to be raw and show the audience the true horrors of rape left nothing out. We see the woman completely naked in a series of long takes. It is a horrible scene, and I hate watching it, yet I believe it serves an important place in art. It really shows the horrors and dangers of gang violence and rape in a way that a censored rape scene never could. That scene from Kubrick powerfully inspires people to go out and try to help other people that are put in similar situations. I believe that exploring the harsh realities of life is something that film not only can do, but something that film should do. Sex is no different. In my opinion, I have an obligation to objectively explore these realities of life; I should not glorify what doesn't need to be glorified, yet I should not censor things that shouldn't be censored. As a Christian, I believe in one truth. Part of that truth is an objective reality that we live in. As a Christian filmmaker, I would like to capture that objective reality on screen, hopefully leading people to the conclusion that there is one objective truth and that that truth lies in the Lord our God and his son Jesus Christ.
