Hi! My name is Alexa Hamlin, and I’m a Film student at Freestyle Academy. These past two years I have been able to recognize my passions for directing, character development, and story development. I enjoy spending my free time hanging out with my friends, listening to music, and watching movies.
For my Senior Showcase, I am thrilled to share my Junior Documentary and my Senior Narrative projects with you. These two projects display the work that I am most proud of and reflect my best work. For my documentary I explored Intel True VR. My roles during this project included conducting interviews, managing the audio, and partial editing. My partner filmed and edited. I chose to share this project with you because I learned a lot about the time and work it takes to make a documentary film and I grew immensely as a filmmaker. My Senior Narrative was one of my favorite projects because of how rewarding it was. I focused mainly on conducting sound and dialogue while my partner most of the filming. Senior Narrative was over the course of five months and my partner and I were filming almost every weekend during that time. This project was my favorite because it was the first time I did a big project that was humorous. I took all of the skills that I learned in Film leading up to this project and portrayed them in the production.
I am looking for feedback mostly geared towards the story aspect and the overall feel of these two films. Were you ever bored or did you ever feel that the story went off track at any points? Do you have any advice that I should take into consideration when creating my next storyline?
Next year, I will be attending the University of Alabama and unfortunately will not be continuing my Film studies. I plan to study business, but I will be forever grateful for all of my experiences and knowledge that I am taking with me thanks to Freestyle Academy and the Film program.
You can reach me at hamlinalexa@gmail.com
Junior Documentary:
For the Junior Documentary project, we were asked to find a focus and create a documentary film about that subject. My partner and I chose to focus on the company Intel True VR. We had to set up interviews, compose questions, and conduct the interviews.
ARVE Error: Mode: lazyload not available (ARVE Pro not active?), switching to normal mode
My partner and I decided on this topic because of our interest in the company and we also thought that others would find it interesting as well. The office that we did our interviews at was in Santa Clara so that was also super convenient for us since we did not have to drive very far away.
Overall, this was a very frustrating but rewarding project. I was required to go out of my comfort zone for the sake of the film. I think that the hardest part of the documentary project is how the whole project is based on other people so you don’t have that much control around how it will turn out. You never know what people are going to say in interviews or what direction the documentary will go in. The editing process was also very difficult because we had to sync all of our audio with our footage and sometimes we would encounter problems there. In the end, I am grateful for this project because I grew immensely as a filmmaker and student.
Senior Narrative:
We get to create a narrative film junior and senior year. The main difference between the two is that junior year we do not use any dialogue. We can choose to work alone or with a partner and we have about five months to create our project.
ARVE Error: Mode: lazyload not available (ARVE Pro not active?), switching to normal mode
My partner and I chose to create a funny film about two teenage boys who want to be rappers. I was intrigued by this topic because I have always been interested in making a humorous film but never had the chance to before.
The senior narrative film was my favorite project at freestyle by far because we were given the freedom and tools to create whatever vision we had. We also had a lot of time so our ideas were not limited by a certain time frame. One of the most difficult changes from the junior narrative was adding dialogue because this automatically made the whole story and pre-production process a lot harder. Instead of storyboarding, we had to write a screenplay and revise it multiple times. I personally enjoyed the screenplay process a lot more than storyboarding because it made production a lot more convenient. The senior narrative project helped me grow as a writer and improve my story development skills.