My dad asked me, “What’s your favourite Pixar film?” I said, “Up. Yours?” Dad: Wow, that’s extremely rude!

This project we just finished was called “vibrant video”. I’m just going to say that it has definitely been on of, if not my favourite project ever done in high school. It combined some of the things that I like doing the most, editing, filming and directing. I’ve always been a creative type ever since I was young, but one of the things that peaked my interest just in the past couple years is movie making. 

Since I was a little kid watching movies has been one of my favourite things to do. I always found them to be very interesting and wondered how they made them. I mostly thought that about animated movies because I watched many when I was a kid. My two favourite movies growing up were Cars 2 and Star Wars episode 6. But when I got into grade 6 I got introduced to IMovie for the Mac. We did a project where we had to edit together a movie and I was so pumped to do it. Ever since then I’ve been making random movies on random days for no particular reason. 

I first got introduced to maker this year with DI and the 7 Habits book. Then once DI finished and everyone was happy as can be, they introduced “Vibrant video” and made me even happier. My sister told me long ago that grade 9 in PLP is all about Film making so I was looking forward to it. Before doing anything that includes filming, we learned about the history of film making. Things like the first moving picture, the first projector and the first animated movie are all things we talked about. But one thing that our teacher highlighted on was silent films because we were instructed to make one for the next class.

The fist film that I made was a silent film. Together with my friend Ines we made one about her steeling a painting and me being a police officer and chasing after her. Like all silent movies we did the whole “Wacky Running” and the big face expressions. In post we made it black and white and also added old timey music. After that we learned about the creative process behind making movies. We learned how to make a story board, log line and treatment. With the knowledge of those three things, we made a tutorial video showing how to draw a “Big Happy Family”. In this we planned out every shot we were going to take, and what would happen in it. For the video, I co-directed and filmed it, Makenna co-directed and Hannah stared in it. Then for the last skill, we put everything together and added SPECIAL EFFECTS. Like in the tutorial video, we made a treatment and planned out a movie that had to use special effects. For this I took creative control and did most of the planning. I came up with a great story that I envisioned right away and directed the whole thing. The only creative constraint that we had was that it had to be one scene. I also filmed it because all the other people in my group were staring in it, not just one person this time. The “Short Film” was about a homeless teen where one day a director in Hollywood comes and asks him if he wants to direct a movie with him. The homeless teen played by Dylan Schombing says yes to the Director played by Mateo King but short afterwards a missile blows up the director and the homeless teen steels his wallet and car.

Like I said earlier in this post, this project was my favourite ever. As of now it is not completely done because I think that we will be making a documentary of some sort. But the grade 11’s made a movie as a class this year and I hope that I get to do the same in two years.Â