The Senior Narrative project has been the longest and most demanding project I have ever worked on. Every film student is warned about how much work the narrative is but you are not able to truly understand how much work you’ll have to put in until you are right in the middle of it. Though there were some ups and downs in this project I truly believe that my partners and I helped each other through the project and ultimately have come out of this project with lifelong memories and lessons.
Before we began our Senior Narrative we did a lighting scavenger hunt! Each shot requires us to use a different lighting technique.
Pre-Production
During my Junior year each film was storyboarded, this year we learned how to write a screenplay with industry-level formatting. We also learned how to light scripts and make shot lists. This was also the first time we used boom mics and slates.
The Dialogue Sene Exercise was a great way to put all of these skills to the test, though we didn’t write the script we did have to line it and film it using the slate and boom mic properly.
Now the only thing left to do was to write out scripts for our actual Narrative films, make the shot lists and get green lit and we would be on to the production phase.
Production
Before we could start filming and directing our actors, we first had to be the actors so we could understand what it was like to be directed. My partner and I acted out a scene from “10 Things I Hate About You”.
One of the biggest challenges my peers and I faced was finding actors. We ended up being a full month behind because once we finally found actors we had to work around their busy schedules but we made sure to make efficient use of our time and to edit in between shoot days to try and catch up on time.
Post Production
The editing process was the longest I have spent on any one project. There was so much footage to get through but with the help of my groupmates we were able to devise a system in which we split the project up and then after months of working on it independently with small watch-throughs with each other we combined the projects and moved from editing more or less independently to editing together on one project. After countless nights of audio editing and color-correcting, we were finally done with the most challenging and demanding project of our freestyle careers.