Hello, it’s just after Halloween so I think we should start this blog post with a little short horror story. This is a short 1 minute video called Run!

Did you jump? Most of my class did. Just shortly after we watched this, we were told we were going to be making an exact copy of this video, or at least as close as we could get. But before beginning to start recreating the video we did the 16 personalities quiz.

The 16 personalities quiz is a quiz that helps determine what type of person you are, as well as how well you cooperate and are compatible with others. It is a series of questions and each question works towards what 1 of the 16 personalities you are. I was a logician, which is also in the group of architect, and commander. Each personality is accompanied by 5 letters which help determine even more what type of person you are. The letter I got were INTP-T, which stand for introverted, intuitive, thinking, prospecting, and turbulent. I am a turbulent logician and there are 3 other turbulent logicians in my class. The reason we did this was so our teacher could figure out our supposed strengths and weaknesses when working with a group so she could make the best group for each person.

My group was Holly, Malaika, and myself and I thought we would be a pretty good group considering we are all friends and can take initiative on a project. This was true at the start. We learned that the first step in making a video was to write a screenplay. Since we weren’t actually writing a movie and rather just reshooting an already written video, it was much easier to get the screenplay done. The next step in making a good video or movie is to create a storyboard.

  A storyboard is like a screenplay but it actually has photos and images that go alongside it so when shooting you know exactly what angle, character, and setting to shoot it in. As you probably noticed in the original video above, there are three characters. The primary jogger, the super fast creature, and the second jogger. Our screenplay was animated so that we could see exactly what the character was doing. The only problem to this screenplay was that when we finally got out there to film, we couldn’t figure out what direction the characters were facing, so if I had to redo this that would be the main thing I would fix or focus on improving.

The last and final major step in pre-production is making a call sheet. A call sheet has all the info a crew member, actor/actress, or any other member of the movie needs. It talks all about where we are shooting each scene and on what date, as well as when and what characters and crew are needed there. The address and who is what character is on there as well. The call sheet is very good for organizing a large group and making sure everyone knows what is happening. Our call sheet was mainly about when everybody was free and when and where we would actually be filming it.

We are finally out of pre-production and now into production! Now is the time that we actually film. We decided on a little trail near our school that looks a lot like the trail in the video. I was actually in Victoria when we first started filming so Holly and Malaika took the role of filming and directing in the first video. When i got back we filmed my scene and then since I didn’t help film I offered to edit. Editing was a bit of a pickle. We had forgotten to shoot a few scenes and some of the audio and scenes were obviously messed up and some of he audio decided to not cooperate. This obviously was not our best product we could have gotten and we immediately started working on figuring out times to reshoot the video.

The second time around instead of Malaika being the main runner and Holly being the shadow creature, I was the main runner and malaika took Hollys place as the creature. This was simply due to acting skill. If you didn’t notice it was tough for malaika to run up the hill so we actually found a new trail that was closer to the school so we could film quicker and it was generally flatter ground so it would be easier for me to run through the forest. This time I was needed for most of the filming so I was there for most of the filming which let me realize why it was so tough to get good shots. All three of us are good friends and so this means it was very easy for us to get distracted and have fun instead of actually filming. It was difficult to stay on track so this project ultimately connected to another subject called PGP, where our main focus right now is managing impulsivity. There will be another blog post in the next month addressing that more. But it took us two days to film the shots, which does seem long for a one minute video, but then again we were not very good at managing time. If we had one more shot at filming this video my main focus would be to manage our time when filming to be more efficient and fast so we have more time to edit.

Here comes the big post-production part. Post production is all about editing and reshooting. Luckily we didn’t need to reshoot anything but editing was a problem. Yet again it took a while for us to get the videos from Malaika, who we filmed the videos on. Once I did get the videos I realized that yet again the audio wasn’t cooperating. This meant that I had to make my own audio and loop it into all the running scenes. In the first remake of the run video we had forgotten to speed up Holly’s scene of her sprinting at Malaika, so this time I made sure to speed up Malaika running at me. Last remake our video was about 30 seconds shorter than the original video so this time I managed to match the length by the second. As you can see there was a lot of things going wrong but a lot was going right. One of the things going wrong was the spooky sounds when the creature shows up. I managed to find some good horror ambience music for the background (link in description of video) but the big boom when the creature first appears was a problem. I ended up taking my big drum and the mic I have at home and started banging the drum right beside the mic. This did work but it was tough to keep the drum resonating and holding the note. I expect you are tired of reading so now is the time to watch the video.

Overall I am pretty proud of the final product of this project. I am proud of what I managed to do in editing and I think I participated and contributed to my group as much as possible. However, I think I could have done more in the pre-production portion of this video. I think I could have done more for the screenplay and call sheet. If I could redo this I would focus more on pre-production. A movie needs good planning and communication so that the team can finish efficiently and with good quality. Pre-production is by far the most important part of the movie. I really did enjoy this project and I can’t wait for our next video! Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope you have a wonderful day!