Our narrative project for film was a grueling unit that would take up more than half the school year. We would learn countless techniques for narrative story design, camerawork, lighting and scriptwriting for the unit. It is one of the greatest learning experiences I’ve ever had, even though it was so difficult to manage. From creating the pitch for my story, to shooting, editing and pieceing together my film, This was the greatest project I had to face.
For the beginning of the project, we had to create a logline and a pitch for our story ideas. We had to come up with a general pitch for our ideas and a single line that would pull in an audience, describe the general idea of the film, but not spoil the entire thing.
my log line was:
A young man struggles to distinguish reality from the life in his head.
the general synopsis:
A teenage boy struggles to deal with the fact that he is the only survivor after a very recent nuclear apocalypse. To deal with the world around him, he becomes delusional and hallucinates a life for himself, and becomes immersed within it. He forces himself to believe that his pre-apocalyptic life has continued on, past doomsday.
instead, I was paired with another group and we chose another story. Here was the synopsis:
We see two brothers, the older being named Collin and the younger being named Rueben. Their relationship is strong, they are close together. We see them walking down a street, wanting to get (ice cream?). Collin looks in his wallet, which is bare. Tells Rueben to stay on the bench, he’ll be back in a second. Collin disappears around a corner, into a sketchy parking lot where he will attempt to rob somebody for (ice cream?) money. Rueben follows close behind and catches up to the robbery. Collin is shot and Rueben runs to the rescue. Rueben runs out of time but catches the guy’s face. Robber runs away before Rueben can do anything. Rueben runs home, in shock of what happened.
Rueban finds his way home. When he runs inside he walks into his own room which is shared with Collin. This inspires him to live up to his brother and commit crimes of his own. He begins a life of crime and robs people on the same street that his brother died in hopes of finding the guy who killed his brother. After robbing a lot of people his brother starts to show up as a ghost in the parking lot, telling Rueben to stop. The first time that Reuben sees the ghost, Reuben brushes it off as if it was his imagination. The second time, Collin is actively telling Rueben to stop robbing people. Rueben doesn’t stop and still thinks it’s his imagination.
The third time Rueben robs someone, he finds the man who killed his brother. Rueben gets mad and hits the guy with his gun knocking him to the ground. Rueben sees his brother again and finally realizes that it was actually real. Rueben now makes the choice of whether or not to take revenge for his brother or to stop his life of crime. He stops and Collin holds out his hand to Rueben. Rueben will reach out to Collin’s hand as a sign of change. Rueben and Collin have an emotional discussion of why Rueben is pursuing a life of crime. Collin realizes that he was not a good role model for his brother, and Rueben realizes that his need for revenge is not necessary. In the very, Ruben walks away from the scene, ultimately choosing to leave everything behind and move on instead of killing him for revenge. But, before he leaves, he takes the guy’s wallet and buys ice cream.
This was a very rough idea of what the story would look like and would change a huge amount as the story progressed. To prepare for our progression of our filming we were required to do some acting and some technical process. We had created an acting scene. This was a scene where we would act out any scene from a movie and then create our own edits for it. Here was our edited scene, it was from Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
Acting Scene
Our next projcet we would practice our camera dialogue scenes. We had memorized lines from a screenplay that was given to us and we were tasked to go out and create our own audio, and our own angles. Here is the scene
Multicam Scene
For our next production areas, we would create a screenplay. This would be an 11 page screenplay that would focus on all character dialogue and actions. It would line out the entire story of our film. As much as this screenplay was worked on, we didn’t use it as much as we thought we would need. Here is the link:
We also created a schedule to keep in order to keep our actors and crew in check. We created a shot list to keep track of every shot that we wanted to capture:
Once we created our script, we had to line it to match up with our shot list. We would create lines that would stretch through the screenplay of every single shot we wanted to accomplish. It would also include colors that show what props we need, what characters are needed, where we are to go, what time of day it is etc. Here is part of our lined script:
We then learned about lighting and al the different types of lights we can use in a film. Not just lights, but also the way we can use lights: what angles we can use, where we can place lights, how we can diffuse lights, how we can use gels, etc. Here is a scavenger hunt we did to create every form of lighting in film we learned about:
scavenger hunt
We then were greenlit for our filming. For our filming we had to put together all of our pre-production into our set. We bought our lined screenplay, our shot list, our equipment, lights, actors and schedule and began the shooting. Here are a couple shots of us on set:
Taking us about 3 months of effort we finally finished our complete film. It is called “low income” and took us an incredible amount of effort and late nights. Here is the final film:
Filming such a huge project has helped me learn what it’s like to be on set with such an important project. It showed to me the beauty of creating such a huge project as well as the grueling sides of it. The amount of scheduling needed and the time taken to create such a project needs a lot of focus, organisation and effort. Without the inspiration to do any of this, I wouldn’t have made it through. Part of my inspiration came from the lighting scavenger hunts and the pre-production we did. Coming from this project, I learned a huge amount about organization and scheduling. How it is very important to learn how to plan things in advance and to make sure that everyone is in the loop about a situation. Communcation is the most important thing in any project, not just film. I had a lot of fun doing this project despite how difficult it was and how alone I felt doing it. I’m just glad that its done and I can look back on and know that I learned something.