To Get a Job

This is my final project for my basic video course at UB. There was little direction on what this project had to be, just as long as we used the skills form the semester to made something. I wanted to make some sort of narrative that tested my skills in writing, the variance of camera shots, and my work with sounds design. As well, I wanted to make something that incorporated one shot in particular. On campus, there is a building that has a staircase that goes up 10 floors and you can see all the way to the top from the ground floor. The view of that is one of the shots that I had planned from the beginning... now just to make a narrative that fits that view.

For the cast, I used a roommate of mine, one of my roommates from a past semester, and my girlfriend. The script was pretty quick to write, and I took care of most of the filming in one night as well. One of the hardest shots to film though was the sequence of having the briefcase fall down the stairs. Since the stairs are not angled in the way to make it fall all the way to the bottom naturally, I needed to find angles where it could give the perception of it falling like that. And even if it isn't the most plausible in real life, I thought the comedy of the moment would make up for it. One of the things that I enjoyed most from this project was the sound design. I wanted to challenge myself to use none of the audio recorded from filming and use only sound effects and dubbing. What made the voice dubbing easier was the use of masks because of the pandemic.

Towards the end of the semester, my professor nominated my short to the the UB Student Showcase where it was nominated in the "Best Undergraduate Narrative" category. While it didn't win any awards, it was still very nice to see my work featured in that type of level, especially since only around three dozen student films were selected. Out of the entire showcase, my film was the only in the undergraduate narrative category that was made in a basic level production class. That means that everyone else had a crew and other people working on it, in comparison to me creating this by myself. 

Created by:
Eric DeVore

Cast:
John Bologna
Phoebe Maxwell
Eric Moran
Eric DeVore

Music:
Come And Get Your Love - Redbone
The Red Desert - Hayden Folker
100 Seconds - Punch Deck

Special thanks to:
Jesse Rodkin
The University at Buffalo Department of Media Study