{"id":319,"date":"2019-10-28T20:27:11","date_gmt":"2019-10-28T20:27:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.freestyleacademy.rocks\/~SpencerC\/?page_id=319"},"modified":"2020-02-05T12:00:11","modified_gmt":"2020-02-05T20:00:11","slug":"reflections-film","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/freestyleacademy.rocks\/~SpencerC\/reflections-film\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections \u2014 Film"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reflections Film<\/strong><\/span><\/h1>\n

You know, this was a weird one. I might have a lot to say about it.<\/span><\/p>\n

So, basically, this project was introduced as sort of a personal essay in video format to potentially use in our college applications if we wanted to pursue film in college.<\/span><\/p>\n

The hardest hurdle to get over with this project was simply the narrow time frame. It was all conceived within the span of a couple weeks at the start of the school year, and was therefore hard to have done in the window of time we were given.<\/span><\/p>\n

I made my script as a sort of stream of consciousness puked onto a page. It surrounded introversion, a twisted form of anxiety that came out as a weird irrational hatred and anger, and learning to deal with those feelings in me. It was mostly based around my experiences from March to May of 2019, in which I dropped into a pit of deep dark depression and spent a lot of time thinking about how much I hated the world for no particular reason when it got too loud and energetic for me to handle. After being screwed over at the end of April, I found myself actually wanting to be alone… and in doing so, making peace with the fact that I may have actually been an introvert.<\/span><\/p>\n

I didn’t really like it my audio recording all that much. Still, I recorded it in my car, which was acting as a makeshift ISO booth. I quite literally did it after 2nd period before driving off to Starbucks for the middle of the day. If I remember correctly, I ended my recording by saying something along the lines of “I’m probably going to redo all of that. Now it’s time to go to Starbucks.”<\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/span> Taken in May 2019\u2014 from when the film was written around<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Shockingly, though, the class actually liked it. It kind of took me by surprise because I thought it was a miserable and misguided script that had a lack of focus and a pretentious feeling to it. Mr. Taylor asked anyone who could relate to it to raise their hands\u2014 at which point most of them did. Which was strange to me. I guess it goes back to that whole perfectionism thing that seems to define my life so often. It was so much better when I didn’t dwell on it obsessively.<\/span><\/p>\n

So I kept the script unaltered, aside from perhaps a slight rewording here and there. I then spent a few days in writer’s block hell, trying to figure out just what I would be making the story about. I didn’t want to deal with any actors, especially given the subtext of the narrative. I couldn’t decide whether to make it a narrative or more abstract. I wanted interesting camera angles, but I also wanted to tell a story. I couldn’t decide whether to use actual humans to represent humans or to use passing cars. I think it all reached a peak when my mind was coming up with some sort of ridiculous story that involved every car in the parking lot being my own, a million clones of myself walking around, and a twist revealing two clones to actually be the same version of me, just in different parts of a timeline, with one handing a pair of headphones to the other. It was stupid.<\/span><\/p>\n

Eventually I went up to film over the course of three or four days. The street I chose in particular was Cristo Rey Drive in the Los Altos Hills, just about a mile off from my favorite Starbucks location that’s carried me through my midday free periods during junior and senior year. Though I haven’t done so in a while, I used to love going out to watch an infrequent Union Pacific freight that runs down seemingly abandoned rails through San Jose, Los Gatos, Cupertino, and up to a cement plant. The first spot I went to see that train is on the bridge that you can see in the distance of the thumbnail for the video. The first few times I went there to see it were the same times this film was written around. So it felt only appropriate to pay homage in a way by setting it in the proper location.<\/span><\/p>\n

I actually really like some of the shots I ended up with. I’m not a huge fan of the close-ups I did of myself\u2014 mainly because I was too lazy to shave and the lighting makes my face look weird and red. But also just because I don’t think they’re framed amazingly. Some of my favorite shots are at the part where I start the car and have all the quick cuts. I remember trying to frame each close-up of the different parts of the car, like the pedals and the stick shift, and trying to get them look cool with the 250 mm lens\u2014 which I obsessively used to film most of this. And yeah, I ripped off Edgar Wright for that style. I also quite like the mirror shots I kept getting, the rack focus pull from under the car, and the shot of me cranking the parking brake on the hill. I remember framing a lot of the film’s structure around that shot of the truck going up the hill in the mirror and then in real life.<\/span><\/p>\n

And that shot of the car speeding onto the street is pretty terrible. Yeah, it’s sped up, and it looks really dumb. I know, I know.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the weirdest things to me was during the rough cut, when a couple people laughed at the consecutive shots cutting backward of me in the parking lot staring through the left mirror. I don’t know why I remember that. I just found it strange that someone thought it was funny, because it wasn’t supposed to be. But looking at it again, I can see why that came across that way. Mostly it just looks kind of stupid now.<\/span><\/p>\n

Okay, okay, enough rambling about it. Here’s the actual video.<\/span><\/p>\n