Showcase – Eric Rustum

Introduction

For this page, I’d like to showcase my Senior Narrative and my Zenith projects which I felt displayed the most growth and development in my skills as a filmmaker. Each project is one that I poured a lot of time into and came out the other end feeling very satisfied with the product. I will always hold these up to be my first truly professional projects.

Senior Narrative

The Senior Narrative project is one that required Film students to create a cohesive narrative film with dialogue. This meant we had to implement many of the steps that people in the film industry take in order to create a truly professional short film: Writing, shot listing, lining, casting, script-breakdowns, etc..

For the first time, I worked in a group of three on this project with my classmates Kirsten Andrews and Ilsa Askren. While Kirsten was our production manager and handled all of the scheduling, planning, and time management, Ilsa and I handled the writing and directing of the film. In the end, we made a 13-14 minute romantic comedy with several interesting characters.

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The thing that I am most proud of with this project was the level of professionalism we had on set. We wasted little to no time getting all the shots we needed and we were very good at keeping track of every aspect of our shoots (largely thanks to Kirsten). I am also very proud of certain aspects of our final product. I think our casting decisions were very good, especially with the characters Matt and Alice. I also think the writing was good enough to satisfy the needs of the story.

Before this project, I was very bad at knowing how to use light to benefit the film, so when we came up with our night scene as our last scene in the movie, I was very frightened. Luckily, my film teacher, Mr. Taylor, recommended that I bring specific equipment to the shoot and suggested ways to light our actors. Sure enough, the final results looked way better than I ever could have hoped, so now I can be more confident with lighting my projects in the future.

There was so much that I learned from this project, it being the biggest one I had ever worked on. While I don’t think I have perfected my content in short narratives such as these, I have massively improved my level of professionalism due to this project. So going forward, I know whatever I work on will have the same standards as well.

Zenith

The Zenith project was a project that was meant to elevate our level of professionalism in our products even further by allowing us to create an entire project by ourselves. For me, that meant putting together videos that consisted of tips targeting Freestyle Film seniors that are just starting their Senior Narrative project. The Senior Narrative project was the Freestyle project I learned the most from, and there were so many things that I wish I knew that would have helped me throughout the process of making it. Therefore I thought I would use the opportunity of Zenith to compile everything I’ve learned about film into a series of videos.

I created 4 videos, the first being the introduction, and the next three detailing the three stages of production in any given film: Pre-production, production, and post-production. Of course, the process of making these videos also required elements of each of those stages. Below are the final four videos I was able to produce.

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With this project, I was very proud with the level of humor I was able to achieve with having two characters that were copies of me. I was also able to summarize everything I had learned about the Senior Narrative into a series of videos. I think this project helped me build a workflow that I know will help me with other projects in the future.

Conclusion

I have personally grown a lot since I started Freestyle two years ago. The projects I worked on helped establish a concrete foundation that I will hopefully build upon in the creative industry whether it be in film or any other artistic career path.