For our short film this year my group decided to do Cas's script entitled Good Old Boston. The concept of this script centered around a girl of Jewish faith who moves to Kansas from Boston and becomes home sick because there is no one else who shares her faith at her school besides one other person. This story shows the journey she goes on in finding and creating her own community. We were all really excited to bring this story to life due to it showing a community that is underrepresented in film and television. Once we had a finished script we decided our roles with Cas being director and editor, me as DP, Avra as an assistant cinematographer, and Asya and Alexis as art direction. Honestly, pre-production was a mess because there was no organization. We didn't really know what scenes we would be filming on the first shooting day making me guess at what scenes to storyboard first causing us to only have half of them done. Then I was unable to be on set the first shooting day and soon found out that my storyboards weren't used in their entirety making me scared to see what was shot. Casting was also hard due to no one we knew being available making us use our fellow classmates which actually turned out really well.
The Rest
Everything else went good, there weren't any bumps in the road besides having to change a scene from outside to inside because of lose of daylight but other than that it went really smooth. Post also went well, Cas went to town and did a good job editing the footage together. There wasn't really anything to special during this project, it was pretty straight forward.
My Place
Not being at the first filming day kind of messed up the rest of the film for me. On the first day of filming they used the kit lens and also used the kit lens on the second day before I got there meaning I had to use that lens or else the quality difference would've been noticeable. I honestly got mad and annoyed at this especially when we had checked out a 50, I just didn't understand why we used the kit lens, it made our film look cheap and that's one thing that bothers me the most. I also felt like I couldn't do my job effectively when my storyboards weren't being listened to and that I felt undermined. I learned that I need to make it clear what needs to happen when I'm not there and what I expect to happen because I straight up could not make it to the first filming day and to communicate to my fellow group members the difference in lens's. The only scene I'm proud of is the one where she is in her room on her computer in the dark but even that one could be way better.
Learning
I didn't really learn anything technical because I didn't use any new software or equipment but I did learn how much I love the 50 lens and how difficult the kit lens is to work with and the quality difference between the two. However, in professional learning I once again learned how much I need to work on my communication skills because they are always the root of my frustrations when it comes to projects. I just feel like sometimes I end up getting undermined and pushed down by bigger personalities when they don't mean to and it's hard for me to crawl out from under that and stand up for myself. For my next project I will draw from the experiences of me being talked over and my ideas not being listened to and tossed aside to inspire me to be more outspoken and have a conversation about what we want to happen with my group.
In The Future
I would redo this entire project in the future starting with script, adding scenes and lines to make it flow more smoothly and make the story even stronger and impactful to the storyboards, making them really good and making sure everybody understood what each shot was going to look like and then to using the best lens and making sure we have the best lighting possible. I would also schedule more days to film in order to make sure we weren't rushing and then in editing doing more color correction to make the shots look clean and even. Doing all these things would bring the film to its full potential and make the story even stronger. The only thing I would keep the same is the actors, they did good and I liked their interaction on camera.
