Introduction
The Explorations project was a project for the end of Junior year which all the Juniors do. This project was a time to put to use all of the skills we have learned throughout the year, but also take sometime to learn a new skill and also display that new skill. This was also an opportunity to explore a possible new passion and to do an assignment with full creativity and few limits. I wanted to improve my Technological Literacy, and specifically because I’m a film Student, something to do with the mechanics of a type of scene in film. Since it seemed exciting, I decided to learn how to film a fight scene in a film.
Process
1. Selection
First, I had to select my topic, which wasn’t as easy as you might think. Originally, I was eager to maybe do a music video for my explorations. However, Mr. Taylor said that to do that I would have to find an artist and collaborate with them in the video, since it is their vision after all. I still wanted to try that, but didn’t know anyone to work with. After a bit more thought, I got intrigued by the idea of learning how to film a Fight Scene like some of the ones I’ve seen in my favorite action movies. This is what I decided to do, and to finalize this stage of Explorations, I made a synopsis of my final idea. Once the synopsis was submitted to Mr. Taylor, I moved on to the next stage of the project.
2. Research
The second step was to research how to actually make a fight scene. As it turns out, it’s much different that regular scenes, and there are a lot of different nuances and strategies that are important to know prior to actually filming. To research, I watched youtube tutorials, looked at websites with step-by-steps for fight scenes, and also watched some actual fight scenes from feature films to try and notice what strategies made them work. My actual notes are linked here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mUFRbPiNwCRtsDna8dOIfSr86zWam8vuZywnSURm_7c
3. Filming
Once all my research was done, it was time to get to actually filming my fight scene. Before I could shoot, I made a quick storyboard to sequence my fight scene and make the actual filming process much easier since I had a good idea of the shot order and composition. I made sure to incorporate a bunch of the elements I learned about in research into my storyboard, and then went to filming. On set, I used tactics like handheld shots and also close ups of the important hits, faces, and objects to make my fight scene more engaging. I also made sure to apply the idea of camera stacking to really sell the hits and make it look like an actual fight. Special Thanks to Nate for letting me film at his house.
4. Post-Production
The final step was to edit all of my footage together into a final product. I made sure to get as many shots as possible on set so that I had a lot of clips to work with once I was in Premiere-Pro editing. As for the editing process, I made sure to keep the fight scene style of having fat cuts, and also varied cuts so that it felt more dynamic. I also played around with frame-skipping to speed up the swings and make them look quicker and more powerful. In all, post production took me around 3 hours for just a short film, but I think it turned out pretty well. I think that my final edited film is a good demonstration of my understanding of this specific type of scene, and I’m pretty proud of how the edits came out.
5. Final Product
My final product was a short fight scene inspired by poker-night with my friends. I shot it in a poker-night type setting, and used the game as a part of the story. In my fight scene, it is a 1v1 between two poker players that goes violent due to greed, ego, and a big bluff. First, Here are a couple photos from the film shoot:
Here is me presenting my final product, including my entire process, to the rest of the Juniors:
Music Production
For the Digital Media Portion of the Explorations Project, we were tasked to take advantage of the fancy recording studio to record some real instruments and use them to make a song. This project was different from the Parody Song from earlier, because we had to make our own music, and lyrics were just optional. For this Project, I worked together with Nate and Charlie. We decided to remake All I Want For Christmas Is You by Mariah Carey. One thing this project made me realize is that Nate, Charlie and I should really start a band or join Chorus or something because our voices together are absolutely angelic. Here is the masterpiece we made with out limited music talent:
[Will insert audio once completed]
Here is some behind the scenes of the Pro-Tools File:
Lyrical Essay
In English, we also did some Explorations. For the last month of two of the school year, we read and analyzed Lyrical Essays in English class, all with the objective of eventually writing our own. A Lyrical Essay is a piece of writing that doesn’t follow a typical structure or style. They are somewhat Avante Garde, and they can come in the form of anything from opinion pieces to narratives. They typically have some sort of weird quirk like using the second-person, appallingly long footnotes, or even weird formatting of the words themselves. In our preparation we read and studied the work of Claudia Rankine, Ross Gay, and David Foster Wallace, just to name a few. I decided to write my own Lyrical Essay about a strange experience I had in a hot tub at a random AirBNB in Moab. I wont go into too much depth because I don’t want to spoil the essay, but it can just be summarized as really weird. Here is my Lyrical Essay:
