Being Behind the Scenes

Being behind the scenes and filming our own short film is a really interesting experience. I was glad the work was split up between multiple people because it simulated the real division of work for when making an actual movie. My group was able to play to our strengths and divvy up the work based on previous experience we had or roles we wanted to take. What shocked me was how much time went into making a movie that was only 2-5 minutes. I can only imagine how long it would take to make multiple hour long films and retake a bunch of scenes.

One thing we had to pay attention to was continuity. Because we shot the film over a couple of days, we needed to make sure wardrobe, lighting, and scene set were consistent over the course of those two days because it can really make or break the movie and audiences understanding of the film. Most of the thought had to do with the camera angles and what kind of perspective we wanted to use based on the things that were happening in frame. For example, we needed to use a lot of over the shoulder shots to see what our character was looking at or keep all peripheral vision out of the shot. We also chose to do some first person perspective shots where we took the perspective of what the character was seeing. 

Overall, I enjoyed the process of film making and have major respect for everyone on the crew and involved in film making. It's a lot of work between the development of the idea, structuring how you are going to film it, actually filming it, and editing it. The process was speed run on our end and we only had to do 1 or 2 takes per scene whereas big buget films may have to retake it tens of times and do the same scene over and over again. I hope that our film is portrayed well by the audience.