A drama short film about a teenage girl struggling to confront her reality after a recent traumatic experience at a high school party.
DURATION
4 Weeks
ROLES
Art Direction, Cinematography, Visual Effects, Editing, Story Writing
TOOLS
Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, Keynote
PROJECT OVERVIEW
The goal of this project is to create a 5-minute short film that tells the story of one character. The character must have an objective and faces some sort of obstacle. The film can be an adaptation of an existing film, tv series or story or it could be an original story in any type of genre.
PROCESS
We approached this project with a goal of steering away from the common themes of comedy, action or horror. We decided to create a film that would impact the viewer and leave them thinking about different issues after watching our film.
A rough draft of the script was written to help visualize the storyline, plot, setting and shots for the rest of the project. From the working draft, we began to curate a moodboard for the visual elements we want to portray in the film. We wanted to go for a more cinematic approach, using natural light and bright colours. Using our script and moodboard, we sketched out storyboards and wrote out a camera shot list to help prepare us for the production of the film.
Moodboard.
Storyboard Artwork by Clare Maglanoc.
Our film was shot within 2 days at two different locations, a highschool and an apartment. Each filming day was strategically planned out based on our storyboards, shot list and filming schedule. Natural lighiting was a key factor in filming the classroom scene. We made sure that we would have enough time to film all necessary shots within the time we had the classroom reserved. The apartment scenes were shot during the late afternoon/evening to mimic the lightinng of the corresponding scenes (morning golden hour and a house party at night).
POST PRODUCTION
Music selection had to be the most difficult part of post-production. Finding the correct soundtrack to match the general tone and mood of the film took a while, we had to test multiple different tracks before finally deciding on the final track. The titles sequences and end credits were done last using keynote and premiere pro.
CONCLUSION
Working on this project allowed me to build on teamwork and time management skills. I have learned how to create a film from the ground up, from the pre-production to post-production. I was able to express my creativity and explore new approaches to film making. As a result of this project, my team and I received multiple film awards present by our professor and teaching assistant for the quality, story and editing of the film.
