Throughout my time at freestyle, I’ve grown a lot as an artist, and as a person. I’d like to show two different projects I worked on to demonstrate how much I’ve grown. To be honest, I’m humbled at how much there is to still learn and improve upon when it comes to art, and everything really. Joining freestyle in the fall of junior year, I thought I was pretty talented at film making, but I was proven wrong very quickly.
Junior Narrative:
Junior Narrative for me was a little bit of a nightmare. Because I was inexperienced, I made a lot of mistakes. A LOT. Basically everything Mr. Taylor told me NOT to do, I did. He told us not to work with friends for the sake of working with friends… So I worked with my best friend in the class, Cris. He told us to find reliable actors, so I found an actor who had booked with 3 other films. He told us to organize our time and not put everything to the last minute (a skill I still have lots of trouble with to this day)… Yeah, you get the picture.
I remember my rough cut was so awful, I could not bear to stay in the class and watch everyone watch it. I focused so heavily on style, that I forgot to do establishing, medium, and holding shots. Not a single shot lasted for more than 3 seconds, and it ending up being a disaster. Part of it was a lack of real story boarding. Another was a lack of time with my actor. But I’d be completely lying if I said that the fault didn’t entirely lie with myself. See, I let my vision get in the way of working with my partner, and I put all the stress on myself to finish the project. That didn’t fare to well for the quality of the project, and we ended up barely finishing it an hour before we were supposed to showcase our rough-cut.
By putting in so much work into my junior narrative and failing, I learned the value of depending on others, and planning things ahead. It was a really tough realization for me that I was not automatically gifted at film-making, and that real quality takes time and effort. So, without further ado, here’s my Junior Narrative.
Senior Narrative:
The contrast between Junior Narrative and Senior Narrative is huge for me. Firstly, I planned out everything I had to do. For me, there’s two states of work I go into: Procrastination, and complete obsession over my work. In order to complete this, I had to switch between the two constantly. Although I would often wait uncomfortably close to my deadlines, I saved myself enough time to make the deadline without fail, and most importantly PLANNING. Completely planning every single one of my shots, and scenes, and revising over and over and over again completely made up for the lack of a schedule and minor procrastination during production.
To be fair, I might not be giving myself enough credit. I spread out our shooting schedule of a time frame over 2 months, so I did plan out my work effectively. So I think the end result of Senior Narrative was teaching me that if I wanted to get something done I had to make a fully thought out plan and stick to it.
In terms of creativity and artistic improvement, I’d argue that there wasn’t much of that in this film. I’ll admit that there were some moments where my unique editing style shined, for example my montage of the two girls getting ready, but for the most part it was really basic cinematography. Because I didn’t have to focus on the shot, it let me focus on EVERYTHING else, something I desperately needed. I was able to focus on communicating with my crew, which was made up of a lot more people than junior narrative, I was able to focus on continuity and following our shot-list, and I was also able to focus on keeping everyone happy. For me, the biggest difference was definitely on set.
Last year, I had no plan, and didn’t put any forethought into what I was going to do on set. We wasted time joking and laughing, and every time we shot I just thought to myself, “we can just wing it, we’ll be fine.” The end result was as expected: a complete rats nest of different shots and stylistic ideas but it ended up not coming together as an actual continuous story.
My senior narrative was the polar opposite of that. Instead of focusing on how fancy my shots looked, I instead focused on telling a good story, which is what let my film shine and be one of the few to be featured in the 2020 Freestyle Exhibition.
Freestyle is the key experience that helped me become a more capable adult. To me, Freestyle is not just a school, it’s also a closely knit family. And I think that aspect is important, because with inspiring people working alongside you, it’s hard not to try and be inspiring too.