The short film was approximately 15 minutes long but yet it seemed like the timing was not enough for the movie to show everything, yet the film and storyline itself was kind of slow. It scared me, because in our films the average time should be 5 minutes; I was afraid that either we will have too much footage and need more time in our film, or not enough time to make the five minute line. Looking at our script right now, I'm not sure what to expect for the total time that the movie will run. I thought it was really neat to see a student made film, in some ways it made our confidence boost up, but then I realized that he was a film major student, this was his thesis...I wonder what expectations Donna and Eric have for our film then? Overall, the movie seemed very cleanly edited, and the background music fit well in each scene. I was a little disappointed in the acting and some of the lighting and camera angles. But then again lighting and camera angles are usually elements that the director thinks, but I felt that sometimes these elements were not relaying the same kind of message, or the correct message to me. But then that might also factor in with the fact that I could not relate to the character at all because I did not have similar experiences when leaving/making a choice to leave for college and which college to attend. But the complete project, I could tell that he worked really hard in the entire process, and one must consider that he worked with really low budget where the only pay that the actors got was being fed a meal; I believe in the making of this film, it is quite impressive.
After watching that film, we got to watch some fake trailers and movies, and some trailer versions of movies like "The Shining," and "Mary Poppins," but they were edited in such a way to show that sound and editing play a great role in film-making. Like Eric always says, editing can be so effective that it can even make a bad actor look good on-screen. I haven't seen "The Shining," but if my memory is correct I think it was a horror or scary film. And the spoof that we saw made the movie look like a "happy" movie.
But I think my favorite one that Eric showed was definitely the spoof for Mary Poppins which made it look scary. Honestly, when I watched the movie, I watched it in my teens one summer day, and I thought that this movie was really weird, and very happy like. When I saw the scary version, it made me laugh and glad to see it in that form also.
We also split into groups to work on our scripts and films. Our group seems to be pretty confident about our script. That day we just worked out the things we are going to need for each scene. We basically realized that everyone's schedules are crazy, everyone is going to have to make some sacrifices but we want to make the week with the camera as efficient as possible. I'm a little afraid that with so much concern in trying to be efficient with time and what we film, that the film will lose its detail part of the film. I intended to have a lot of subtle detail in the background of the scenes, but as we plan more some things are becoming easy to visualize but hard actually grasp on how we will obtain certain things. Maybe when we meet this week, things will go better, and the film will start looking like what we had visualized in the very beginning. Overall though, I'm excited about planning things for our film (since we get the camera last, we have plenty of time to plan things) and trying to figure out how we will accomplish the task of filming things that we thought would be so cool to have in our film.
Also, as discussed in class many times, to make a film you need to study other films! So next few weekends, my intention is to watch a lot of movies and analyze the movies! Which already happens now with anything I watch, which I'm thankful for, but also sometimes I wish I could stop thinking why the editor cut a certain scene or why the lighting seems to be dark in a certain area compared to the other places in the room, and actually concentrate on the story. But I do remember that there have a couple of times when I watched a movie, and half way into it, I realized that I haven't even analyzed this movie. In general, I think its really cool that I have a completely different understanding of films now.
So my question? I know that everyone plays a major role in film-making. But yet the director gets most of the credit for the film, and more than the director, the actor I think gets even more credit. Why? After knowing the deals that happen behind the scenes, do the actors even play a major role compared to the director and editor? I ask this, because I noticed in my group, that we didn't worry about who the actors were going to be until we had everything else decided!
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