The Script – Short Film

The Script - Movie PosterSometimes I obsess about things. Most of the time it is an obsession with a T.V. show or movie. I will start watching a series and if I have to stop watching in the middle of a season then there’s a good chance that I just start thinking about that show constantly. Wondering what’s going to happen next. Analyzing all of the details, etc. Same thing with a movie. I will watch it and then think about it so much that it becomes this weird obsession.

There are times where this obsession extends beyond T.V. and film. Recently, my cousin and I have been working with a group of students so they can create a short film for this festival a few teachers and I are trying to put together. So as me and my cousin are talking with these kids and telling them that making a short film can be challenging but can also be somewhat easy.

It’s easy right? At least that’s what we’re telling these kids. Come up with a story and then start putting together your shots and you’ll do great. So why not show them how easy it actually is. So I started obsessing. I got home one night and spent 30 minutes trying to come up with an idea. Most of the those ideas were way to crazy. I wouldn’t be able to pull off over half of them. So I went simpler. That’s when the idea hit me. I spent the next 20 minutes writing a script and I fired it off over to my cousin and he took a look at it and gave me the thumbs up we needed to get started.

After a bit of back and forth to figure out logistics we had our plan in place to get this short off the ground. We planned to shoot everything in one day so the schedule was going to be pretty tight. I figured the majority of the work was going to be editing. So once the day of the shoot arrived we knocked out all of our shots four hours ahead of schedule. We could’ve maybe done some more, but we had what we needed and we didn’t want to over complicate things. Remember, we’re doing this to show teenagers how to make a movie.

20 hours was put into editing the footage, creating the animation, and editing all of the audio we had our short film. I created a poster and a little behind the scenes slideshow to show the students. We went over how we did some of our effects, practical and digital as well as where lighting was set, the acting process, and a few other neat tidbits about our process. The students seemed to really enjoy our short film and now I hope you do as well.