An Unforgettable Celebration is a satirical psychological thriller that explores the story of an emotionally unavailable boyfriend who forgets his girlfriends birthday causing the two to argue about it. After arguing the boyfriend decides he will take matters into his own hands to express his feelings about the ‘disrespect’ that he thinks he was shown.

Overall the film aims to express discomfort through its unorthodox editing and unique camera angles. It also aims to express comedy and humour through a satirical lens in order to make the audience question what type of genre this film could fit into.

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Kazuki’s Reflection:

In this film, it was important to collaborate effectively with my group partner. I believe we successfully built a great relationship that led to us sharing many ideas and, as a result, creating an endless number of opportunities.

One of the biggest benefits I gained from working collaboratively was the ability to support each other’s weaknesses by leveraging each other’s strengths. For example, I excel at creating movie ideas and have developed numerous movie scripts, making me the designated “idea man” for our group project. However, I struggle with editing due to technical issues with my computer. I could envision that if I were to edit the film myself, the

outcome would be subpar and unwatchable. On the contrary, my partner is an expert in video editing, and it always astounds me how efficiently he can edit a significant amount of video footage while maintaining high quality.

With many benefits, we have undoubtedly encountered some challenges in collaborating. For instance, if one of us is unable to work, both of us struggle to complete the task, even if we could work remotely. To me, collaboration is all about effective communication, and from my experience, it’s difficult to generate good ideas without clear and smooth communication. Last week, I caught the flu, so we weren’t able to work together face-to-face. Despite our best efforts to collaborate through group chat, the results were quite disappointing, and I didn’t feel like we accomplished anything significant during this whole week. After this unproductive week, we finally had the chance to meet in person, and it turned out to be much more productive for both of us. This experience taught me the importance of understanding that successful collaboration isn’t just about who I am working with, but it’s also about how we communicate.

 

Louis’ Reflection:

With this film I believe the area for me that benefited the most was the ability in working collaboratively. Up until this point I had mostly only worked by myself on media products and had never really had an opportunity to work with someone else. From early on in the semester, Kazuki and I built a good relationship after working on class activities together and quickly learnt each other’s strengths and weakness which allowed us to divide the labour into areas that were best suited for each person (as Kazuki mentions in his reflection).

Working with someone else allowed for us to bounce ideas off

each other and get a second opinion on things. This is what I believe was able to actually make the film into reality. By doing this we could see what does and doesn’t work on audience, for example; how naturally the story would flow after editing, I obviously knew all the greater context since I was editing the film, however Kazuki would see it without any of the cut or redacted elements and was able to assess how clear the plot was and what needed to be changed in order to make it clearer for an audience to understand.

Process:

Our main goal with the cinematography of the film was to be able to express story elements through shots and make unique shots that illustrate a feeling of discomfort, for example; the main characters Josh and Sally are almost shown to be within an arms length of each other from a side view in order to illustrate an emotional distance between the two. Another example of this would be the close up shots of the medical bench, the unique shots make for the scene to play out awkwardly and uncomfortably as the audience sees this playing out from angles they necessarily wouldn’t thin

k too, almost as if the audience are on the set of the scene and are hiding to watch it play out.

Editing:

The editing was extremely challenging as due to delays we were only able to shoot for a day and had to use all the shots from that in the final edit. We had over 100 shots however most of these were multiple takes of the same scene and due to the delays and aiming to maximise the time on set, we had a relatively small number of filler shots. The first challenge was re-purposing the off takes and deleted scenes into filler shots by finding the parts that were closest to what we need and (if applicable) further editing the scene in post by doing things such as changing scale or lighting in order to fit into the required spot in the editing timeline. The audio was also quite challenging as we had to pair it well with the vi

suals (e.g: notes/chords landing on scene cuts or action within scenes, sound effects being matched with the right levels of audio). This stage was not necessarily the most challenging, however it was extremely time consuming

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Overall, there was a lot that was learned about the whole film making process and how difficult it really is. We believe that we were able to work effectively together and with our actors and crew to create a compelling narrative that expresses

feelings of discomfort to its audiences while also being engaging and telling a complete story from beginning to end.