We Have Film School At Home

I participated in a filmmaking competition, the 72 Hour Shootout put on by Film-Lab, this year. I had intended to do it last year, but was caught up in other things that made it impossible. I had actually been aware of it for a number of years, but hadn’t really been interested in more formally trying to do film work outside of music videos. So I was happy to participate this year, even though it was still a time crunch.

I won’t talk about the short film that I made, except to say that I pretty much did everything myself. There were some technical challenges that I worked around, in order to shoot everything in the time frame – including the usage of a mic stand with a handkerchief on it, to work as my stand-in, so I could nail focus in a shot, while behind the camera. There was also an attempted dialogue interlude in the film, which went disastrously. It turns out, I still need to learn a lot about both writing dialogue and directing actors in said dialogue. But I was able to pivot and was really proud that I even submitted something within the 72 hour time frame.

In any case, I won 2nd place (i.e., first runner-up), and will at the very least be able to take advantage of a mentorship opportunity to help me think about how to continue to develop as a film director.

What is important about this accomplishment, I think, is that helps to validate some of the basic project-style studying I have been doing on my own. Learning competence at skills such as color-correction, cinematography and editing was very helpful at putting together a film in such a short amount of time. It also freed me up to concentrate on other aspects such as storyboarding and script writing.

The other thing I learned, I guess, is that coming up with something that has some intelligence and personality to it, goes a long way. I don’t think the film I made was technically advanced, from a cinematography or editing point of view. I put in some interesting cuts, but otherwise, the interesting component of it was the concept and the narration, which discussed the issue of how apologies can be complicated – both in how they are offered and how they are accepted. And that went a long way with judges who were willing to take in the material.

This does give me a lot of ideas in terms of what to work on next. I think I want to work on just shooting a simple dialogue scene from an Ozu film, partly to get comfortable with shooting audio along with video, as part of dialogue. I’m still testing mics for that project. And then there’s a scene from Widow’s Bay, which I want to recreate (in spirit) where the protagonist walks in on a conversation between two other people. Then after that, perhaps I will come up with another short film to make, with what I’ve learned so far.