Finding Summer

Making this project was just something fun to keep me entertained. Once the COVID-19 pandemic shut down schools and all extracurricular activities, I still wanted to do something that was fun and somewhat challenging for me. I decided to create my own little film festival with some of my friends, calling it the "60 Hour Film Festival." Since we are all working by ourselves, having a bit of a longer time to self-produce and do everything was nice to have instead of condensing it down into a 24 hour event. I invited some of my friends that I thought would enjoy this as well: some that use TikTok, a few that don't have much film experience but wanted to participate and have fun, and one that's an animation student. This entire thing took example from the Geneseo Insomnia Film Fest, so basing the rules off of that was simple. We were given 30 different prompts and were told to use at least 5. We had from Friday at 9am until Sunday at 9pm to shoot and edit a video that's no longer than 5 minutes. 

My plan of attack was broken up over the three days of the event. Friday: brainstorm ideas and decide on a topic I want to go forward with, then make a script to go along with that. Saturday: film everything. Sunday: edit and refine up until the deadline. On Friday, it was brainstorming day. I had no idea where I wanted to take a story, so I started imaging it all like a preview on Netflix that you'd scroll over. I was thinking at first of just doing a compilation of mini-shorts, but one of them stood out as one I wanted to expand upon. It was a coming-of-age story about a group of neighborhood friends, and I thought that it would be a good test of my skills to act as many different people. Saturday was filming day; I took this one character at a time. It took about an hour and a half to film each part for every character. Remembering the tone I used in the scene previous for other characters and how it was delivered to have a proper response was a challenge, but really cool to see as it came together. Which leads into editing, one of the more difficult parts. Stitching myself into multiple scenes at the same time (like the one shown in the preview) was difficult to set up, so it was also difficult to put together. However, though it is crude, I think the idea still comes through. I also think its kinda funny to see myself so many times playing so many different people. 

What I liked most about this experience is the fact that I was able to see what everyone else did with theses prompts. Being able to create an event in the middle of COVID and have some sort of interaction with my friends was really great. There was no prize ceremony or anything like that, but we did have a streaming night where we all come together to watch everyone else's videos.