Senior Narrative
In Film class our major project is writing, shooting and editing our Senior Narrative. I’m a first-year senior and did a narrative project with no dialogue with AlexH, my partner who is also a first-year senior. Being first-years, less of the steps were mandatory, allowing us to focus on story writing.
We began making a storyboard for our initial idea: two girls on a road trip pick up a seemingly innocent hitchhiker, unbeknownst to them, the hitchhiker recently escaped from a psych ward. We were aiming for around 100 scenes and sketched out about 50 per person. We presented our storyboard to the class, although we ended up scrapping that idea.
Our second idea was to be on a character who gets bullied and has anger issues, later they learn how to control themself and not lash out at those who bully them. We created a storyboard for this story as well and later changed the setting from originally a prison to a school campus. Alex and I later realized we were not super passionate about this story and stumbled across a new topic that we were both drawn to.
Our third and final narrative we settled on is about two students who want to enter a film contest and try to compete against each other, but later learn that things are better when they work together. We did not create a storyboard for this on, but did do in-depth planning in terms of the plot and shots we wanted.
Alex and I worked on a shared document where we brainstormed and planned the majority of our shots. By the end of all this it’s just over 10 pages long and contains all three of the ideas we played around with.
What I valued the most from the Narrative project was having the freedom to choose and create any story and run with it. Alex and I did not anticipate to change our story as much or as drastically as we did, but it was nice having the freedom to do so. I also valued working with a partner and sharing ideas with one another. It was great we could bounce ideas off one another and deeply discuss various aspects of our film with each other.
Dialogue Scene
We did a Dialogue Scene with separate partners to get hands on experience with triangle coverage. We were given a script to interpret how we wished and filmed two of us acting it out. We had three cameras rolling at the same time, two to get singles of the people talking and a third for a wide shot.
After Effects Tutorials
During class we went through some After Effects lessons where we learned how to use the Puppet Pin tool and tracking moving objects.