I've been trying to get around to this post for a couple of months now, and finally here it is! All those weekend projects I posted and all the classes I went through during my first semester all lead up to this production.
Each person in my class wrote and directed their own student film. We began the writing process in our story class a few weeks into the semester. As the semester went on, each class began to devote more time an effort into our first student films (called F1's - see the Film School Lingo post). After writing the script, we had to break it down both from a creative standpoint and a production standpoint. Creatively, we looked for beat changes and various strategies that the characters used to reach each beat objective. This in turn affected how we directed our actors during rehearsal and on set. From a production standpoint, we broke down the script looking for what locations, characters, props, and other expenses would be needed. Eventually we held a casting call and I cast two wonderful actors: Ryan McInerney and Nikki Smith. Both of them did an excellent job both in rehearsal and on set and were awesome to work with. Finally our regularly scheduled courses ended in week 11 of the semester, and we went into production on Monday of week 12. Each student had one 12 hour shooting day to complete their film, and we entered post production on week 13. We had the next three and a half weeks to edit our films until viola, we reached our finished products!
I will write more about the film later - I hope to have a couple more posts where I go more in depth into the film, the production cycle, and what my film means to me. But that being said, please check out my first student film! Please share it and show it to your family and friends, it would really mean a lot to me. For my small audience out there, thanks so much for the support. It really does mean a lot :)
At long last! I have gotten around to posting my seventh and final weekend project. I love posting these weekend projects and sharing them with you guys - however small an audience you may be - however, I must confess, I have been really eager to finish posting these weekend projects so I could start posting some of the really cool stuff we have been up to here at FSU film. I wanted to post these weekend projects before anything else, so that chronologically in the archive they would be my earliest posts. They are the first things we did at film school, an honestly they don't compare in quality to anything else we do here, so I want them to almost hide deep in the archive, where they shan't ever be found…
Okay so I'm partly kidding. I take pride in all of my work, and would show any of these weekend projects to anyone on any day, buy I am absolutely stoked to be done posting them and get to move on to some of the much more awesome work I have been up to. So with that being said, let's get on with this post.
This project was all about using offscreen sounds to propel a story forward. I decided to take on the additional challenge of mixing the entire project within my NLE, Adobe Premiere Pro, instead of bouncing it into an audio DAW like Adobe Audition. I must say, Premiere was much more capable with the audio than I think most people give it credit for, although it is still no Pro Tools or Logic. So without further ado, here is the project!
We downloaded all of our sounds from Creative Commons websites, which means that they are free to use as long as we credit the original artist. As a quick breakdown into my workflow, I first mixed whatever in camera sound I wanted to keep, which was mostly a little bit of ambient noise and Victoria's grunt when he hits the ground. I made sure it all flowed together smoothly without any cracks or pops and then sent it all into a bus. Then I started layering on my sound FX that I downloaded from the creative commons sites and positioning them in the right places. Then I adjusted the volumes of everything, routed all my sends and returns, keyframed the overall track volumes of the bus tracks, normalized everything to -3db, and viola. A short film mixed in Premiere.
As much as I learned about the mixing capabilities of Premiere in this project and also about the importance of sound as an element in our stories, I learned a lot more through the very nature of this project. From the moment my second weekend project got slammed by my Professor until the end of the weekend project cycle, I looked at each one as a learning experience and tried to learn as much as I possibly could from each one. I didn't care about the quality of the finished product nearly as much as I cared about the elements that we were learning in each video. But through all of that, I lost sight of one of the most important pieces of filmmaking: HAVING FUN. Taking the mindset I had, I went in to each weekend project viewing it more like a homework assignment than an opportunity to make a movie. At my school, my homework isn't calculus or European history; my homework is MAKING MOVIES. How cool is that?? For this project, my entire crew just threw their arms up and basically said "screw it, let's have fun" and instead of meticulously planning everything out and being very picky, we all had so much fun. We made this project up as we went along, as opposed to the other projects which were storyboarded out cut by but. We came up with ideas spontaneously on set that were awesome, even though some of them didn't work out. We saw a train track and decided to film on it, which might be illegal, but I wasn't really sure so we just went for it. This project was so much fun, and one of those moments that I realized that if you don't put your heart and soul into what you are doing, you won't ever be successful or more importantly, create good art. Filmmaking is a balance between the technical and the creative, and I have discovered that both sides flourish the most when passion is put into them. When you're truly passionate about what you're doing, you're going to have fun doing it, and that's a fact.
