Showtime!

It’s finally time to see what we’re made of, and needless to say, the nerves are starting to set in. As of Thursday night, I will abandon my place among the honors students of UCA to step into the roll of motion picture camera man. Earlier this week, a few members of my film crew and I took a tour of various locations around town to determine the setting and order in which we will attempt to shoot each shot. Using a digital camera, I took some placement snapshots so that we could construct a more detailed storyboard of our film and determine the placement of the camera for each particular scene. It seems that the schedule for me and my crew is more complicated that I initially thought, and I feel like it’s going to be truly difficult to get everyone in the same place to get the project underway. Anything I can do now to make the stressful process flow more smoothly could mean the difference between the success or failure for my group.

One thing I have noticed about this entire situation is the fact that, even though our group only consists of five people, it is extremely hard to find things that we all agree on. I’m not sure if the teachers thought about the repercussions of throwing five highly intelligent, opinionated teenagers on a project and giving them the freedom to create anything that came to mind. It took my group hours to produce an initial draft for the script, but even it isn’t complete, because we couldn’t agree on a few key aspects that function to tie the storyline together. There were only three group members present, counting myself, when I began to take snapshots for our storyboard, and even we had some trouble reaching a consensus on simple things like the amount of extras in the shot or the placement of the camera.

It’s odd to see how much each person’s personality is portrayed in the decisions they make and the ideas they offer. Some members in our group are perfectionists. They strive to make the film a memorable cinematic experience by putting all of their energy and resources into creating new and exciting scene structures. Other members of the group are passive and don’t contribute much to the project overall. They don’t really care about the small details of the film that a tuned critic will notice, and they aren’t really picky about the way that the plot is developed or any other choice that must be made.

Because I am one of the perfectionists, I don’t really know how to go about shooting this film. I want the shots to look like they came from an actual film. I can’t stand the thought of turning in something that looks like it was thrown together by some amateurs. I hope that I can give my editors something to work with.