The Senior Narrative Film. A project that takes up majority of Senior year in Mr. T’s film class, and has been anything but easy. I partnered with Emma and Luca for this project, and it has been a crazy journey, let me tell you.
Original Idea
The first implementation of Senior Narrative was called “Fourth and Forever”, a football film that looked a little something like this:
When a single missed field goal shatters his confidence, a timid
high school placekicker must confront the fear of failure and
rediscover why he plays football in the first place.
You can check out my pitch deck below.
Unfortunately, due to complexity of shots, logistics, and time management, we were unable to follow through on this idea. We tried boxing for a little, but nothing came of it. That’s when we settled on a golf film, called “The Perfect Drive”. A somewhat similar plot to “Fourth and Forever”. However, I like to compare this film to “Cars” by Disney.
exercises before Pre-production
There were some helpful exercises we got to do before working on The Perfect Drive, like a “One Period Movie”, and Surround Sound shots. This helped us come up with simple and quick narratives in a short amount of time, and get a better feel for Surround Sound audio so we can bring our films to life.
And yes, the Surround Sound shot is the one I’m most proud of. It sounded a little too real when we played it in Mr. T’s room.
Pre-production
We began Pre-Production on The Perfect Drive with writing our screenplay. You can check it out below! This was probably the most annoying but also most fun parts of the entire process.
We also created a shot list for most, but not all scenes. Due to the shortage of time from restarting twice, we leaned on our instincts for some scenes, while using a shot list for more complex scenes. Here’s an example of a scene that needed a shot list.
Production
Production was very time consuming, but very fun too. We brought our friends Tyler, Rafe, and Amanda to be actors in our film. Tyler joined us very last minute, and delivered very well, as did our other actors. Speaking of acting, we had an exercise that put us in the shoes of an actor. Aidan and I recreated a scene from Breaking Bad, but in a completely different context and purpose…
Post-production
After filming, it came time to edit. We used Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Podcast to edit the video and adjust vocals, respectively. We had never used Adobe Podcast before to adjust audio, but it got the job done. You can remove background noise/music, and even add layers on top of the vocals to make it sound more accurate, via AI.
Trailer & Final Product
Here are our two final products: First a trailer we got to show at Exhibition, and the Final Film. Hope you enjoy just as much as we did!