Third Time’s the Charm 🎥🎬3️⃣

Have you ever made a movie? If you have, I assume you know it’s hard, and if you haven’t well, it’s really hard. Coming up with a detailed, cohesive, realistic movie is where my group struggled a bit. In this project, we had to create a two-minute thriller. We had to come up with a solid idea, and how were were going to execute it. This project was a very big learning experience for me.

Our initial idea was to be in the ocean, swimming, at night, in the middle of November. Now we quickly realized this would be a stupid, and cold idea. As we do we started problem solving. What if we went to my grandparent’s pool? They have a hot tub and it would be somewhat less cold. Ahh yes, a great idea. Hypothermia here we come. This is just a joke no one got hypothermia or was injured in this process. But it was freezing. We got in the first time and just thought how are we going to film all our scenes in this cold pool? It’s going to take forever.

We took it one or two scenes at a time and then jumped in the hot tub to warm up. This was our very good strategy to not get hypothermia. I’m glad it worked! Because the pool was so cold, we took many shortcuts. This is where everything went downhill. We had a great vision, storyboard, and detailed plan, but we just couldn’t execute it. We started to not follow the plan in order to make it easier. In some shots, we had too many people, some not enough. Instead of being in the middle of the pool, we would do it on the side, for easy hot-tub entry. I guess these were also our ways of not getting hypothermia, and they worked, but they ended up with a video we could no longer use.

After our first idea failed, which was just our first attempt at learning, we came up with a new one! We kept the same concept but just moved it into a forest. This idea worked way better. It was way warmer, which made it way easier to film and produce a good video. We also had someone there to film for us, thanks, Zach! This allowed us to have shots of all four of us walking. We were supposed to film right after school on Friday. Keep in mind it is mid-November and the sun is setting around 4:30. There were some conflicts and people late, so we really only started to film around 3:45. We figured this would not be enough time to film and ensure the lighting was good. We also had some errors in what people were wearing, or what we were doing. To film, we were using a GoPro. It had a setting that would make for some cool POVs. What we didn’t realize was that the camera quality is not so good, especially when the sun is starting to go down. With all of these problems in mind, we stopped filming and said we were going to start again on Saturday morning.

Saturday morning came, and we had our one-man film crew (Thanks again Zach!), a detailed storyboard, proper camera, good light, and all group members in the correct clothes. Everyone was on the same page and it was very clear what we were doing. There was no confusion or criticism, well maybe a bit when it came to my acting. The last problem we faced was the timeline. The video we made was too short and we needed more film. We found a cool bracelet in the forest, and what you see at the beginning, before we come in, was something that was thought of to fill the space. Want to see the video now!?

My group worked really well together, aside from all the laughing and talking about non-related things. This project was the perfect example that showed me that failure is the first attempt at learning. When we failed the first and second time, did the world end? No! We tried to use the original film, and we couldn’t, that’s too bad. We just kept persevering, solving each problem, and eventually, we made a film that I am really proud of! As they say, the third time’s the charm!

Syddy Giddy out! ✌️