Young Filmmakers

From just the first two weeks of this course, I can gather that many of our final pieces of work will be developed from small snippets of information as a starting point, allowing us as young writers and filmmakers to use our creativity to make something of our own. Last week in class we were given a simple piece of paper describing a specific character:

Above is my character, Brody, and the emotion I was given was “waiting anxiously for a train”. From this little information we were asked to, in 15 minutes, write a short prose incorporating the character and the emotion. From there, we gathered into small groups. My group was Jamie, Laura and myself. We then constructed a script based on one of our three stories, which conveniently for me, we selected my little story.  Below is the start of the script:

We then compared scripts and decided we liked Jamie’s content most, so this was the one we would share with the Creative Writing students. On Thursday we met and broke up into groups, to construct a single shot take of the script, and a filmed to edit version of the script. We wanted to choose a very simple setting, that could pass off as a part of a train station (while still hiding somewhere quiet on the RMIT campus). We found a great old wall in the Gaol part of the campus and actually made somewhat of a grim discovery while on set, that none of us knew was even part of RMIT:

Opposite our set was the City Morgue….oh the things you find when in search for nothing more than a good wall. Anyway, we took it in turns to manage different parts of our filming. Our single shot take consisted of our group discussing ways in which we could move the camera around to make it visually more interesting for the audience than just a front-on view. We decided to use the oh-so-typical pan and zoom, and also frame it so that our actors weren’t centred in the frame. As it was such a large group, I was only in charge of camera & directions for the editing take, however, we all contributed to every aspect of the filming to ensure that we all agreed and were happy with the decisions being made.

Above is the single shot take that we filmed. Overall I really enjoyed the experience of filming with people I didn’t know, and discovering our hidden talents of RMIT Media & Creative Writing students. To evaluate our efforts, I think everyone evenly contributed to the filming because while this was never to be officially marked, we wanted to achieve something that showed we grasped the concepts of how to make a single shot take visually interesting, and how editing can dramatically change the way we look at a video.