I don’t think that anyone will actually read this. If, however, you happen to stumble upon my humble little blog, welcome!
Today, I finished all of the editing needed to complete my video entitled “This Story is Not About Sarcasm At All”. I have to admit, it’s a strange story. It has a sort of dream/nightmare feeling to it, and ultimately, I leave it up to the viewer to decide what has truly happened in the film. I wrote the screenplay over spring break, and then filmed all of the acting bits with my friends Diana and Meghan over the course of three days. It was only supposed to take one day, but my perfectionism revealed itself during the editing process, so I kept asking them to film more filler shots. All in all, I have filmed about an hour’s worth of footage for a video that should be less than five minutes long (and ended up being just over six and a half minutes in length). It’s crazy stuff! I should have known it would take this long, though. After all, my brother’s five minute version of Lord of the Rings: Two Towers took an entire weekend to film, and that was with no conflicting schedules.
I’m pretty proud of my official directing debut, though. Seeing as that this is the first project with multiple actors and a script that I have completed without the aid of any of my family members, I feel like this is quite good. I never realized how hard it would be to juggle schoolwork, filming, and life, but somehow I managed it (thanks to my tolerable schedule, amazing friends, and many sleepless nights).
This is also the first time I’ve ever attempted to create true songs with lyrics for my videos. One of my videos has a jingle I made for it, but this was much more difficult to create. It doesn’t help that I’m competely lacking in sound equipment, musical knowledge, and musical instruments that are compatible with my computer. All I have is my 19-year-old keyboard (which has a few broken keys and tends to buzz), my voice recorder (intended for recording voices, not music), and my own voice (which I still need to train). Oh, and I can’t forget Audacity, the lovely music editing software I used! What I really need, though, is Garage Band or a digital keyboard or something else that I probably can’t afford right now.
So… after all of this work, was it worth it? YES! I’m very excited about entering the film in the Rojhelio Studios contest. Beyond that, though, I can honestly say that this has been a valuable learning experience for me. I discovered my directing style, taught myself how to edit music, learned that stop motion animation is much harder than it looks, and filmed something I truly enjoy. I also discovered that continuity errors are the easiest to make, that puppets sometimes have minds of their own, and that you shouldn’t leave your friends alone with your camera unless you want to find that they have filmed something completely unexpected while you were gone. =D
Well, that’s about it. I can’t wait to get started on my next project!
