It's Fall in Motion

If there is one thing I will take away from the past few months, it is that filmmaking is a challenging, rewarding process. There are always lessons to be learned, visions that'll be compromised, and a team that you have to depend on. These are the expectations I've attained through the creation of my first professional short-films.

Work on Out of Time (2022) began just a little over a month ago. As our professor detailed the characteristics of an experimental film, the seeds of a deeply personal and profound storyline were planted within my internal garden of ideas. The themes that this film explores pertain to universal situations that audiences can resonate with. At face value, this film explores the general frustration of feeling as though we don't have enough time to complete our required tasks ahead of a looming deadline. On a deeper level, this film channels the sensations of realizing that a certain period of one's life has passed. This odd notion typically manifests itself through the physical interactions with locations, media, objects, and people who indirectly embody said period. As a recent high school graduate, I spent most of my freshman year of college navigating through this feeling.

Preproduction for Out of Time was incredibly difficult, mainly because I was fearful of my writing. I was terrified of producing an awful product, mostly out of concern for having my ego checked. I was so blinded by this unnecessary paranoia that the quality of my original draft suffered. There was no clear progression in the narrative, the dialogue - influenced by a real conversation - was too edgy and ambiguous, the scenes simply felt directionless, random for the sake of being random. With that came a crucial t lesson in letting the project find its voice, naturally. I'm an inherent perfectionist; from start to finish I stress over the quality of my project. This entirely defeats the purpose of a rough draft; if my writing isn't taking shape the way I want it to, I must not succumb to the fear of failure. This reinforces the importance of collaboration.

I've always held the perspective that my best writing comes out of a collaborative environment; I have a knack for gathering other people's strong ideas and morphing them into a great collective product. Over the past year, however, I've become increasingly worried about my dependency on other writers. Men of Circumstance (2021) was solely written by myself, which ended up proving my fears to be untrue. Still, that project had not prevented me from trying to prove myself as a writer fully capable of crafting an entirely original story. That is what I was trying to accomplish with Out of Time, but I was fortunate enough to realize that I don't need to prove myself through such means. Working with Hannah and Courtney on the script ended up being the greatest thing that could've happened to this project. They provided insight that I had simply not considered, and dug up ideas that had been floating around within the deeper confides of my musings. Leaving that meeting with them, I was decisive, confident, and excited to finalize our script. Storytelling is a collaborative process; it has the potential to come from a sole auteur, but it takes a team of creative minds to truly develop something special.

As far as our production process went, it was incredibly challenging! One of the biggest takeaways from our shoot was that finding that right balance between quality and efficiency is the key to a successful shoot. I had a very difficult time generating the motivation needed to compile a list of decisive shots, I realized I required a distraction-free environment to let my imagination roam free, and to focus on the visual composition of our film. This environment ended up being a bus full of loud, energetic college kids; I guess it beats the mundaneness of my dorm. My original shot list was bold, at times audacious, and demanded ironically, much more time than we had. Still, on the evening of Monday October 10th we trudged along through a comprehensive, seven-hour shoot. We faced a myriad of technical limitations, mainly working with the natural lighting of on-campus areas. We had scoped out the locations the Thursday before, just to have an idea of how the scenes would be set up, but we still had to overcome numerous obstacles to get our shots just right.

I have to say, HUGE shoutout to Samanna Wilson, our leading actress. She was always incredibly patient with us, was very invested in the character, and powered through my nitpicks like a champ. We covered 51 individual shots that night, more than enough which was required for our short film. My vision was to craft a film composed of many 4-5 second long shots, since a majority of the narrative was told through movement and facial expressions. There wasn't even any dialogue that evening! Still, I was immensely proud of my crew for committing to arguably the most difficult process of our film's development. Hannah and Courtney exceled in their positions.

The following morning I had a long chat with our professor regarding the intensity of our project. He appreciated the commitment I was putting into this film's direction, but encouraged me to strain out the excessive shots with a "less is more" approach. Up until this point I had not considered efficiency to be a qualifiable aspect of filmmaking; just as essential timeliness was to our leading protagonist, so too was it for reaching our own deadline. I adapted a mindset for maximizing efficiency with quality during our next shoot. The remaining 45 shots were reduced to a mere 15, and we had such a better time!

I had a great joy working with all our actors in fleshing out these characters. Working alongside Samanna, Ashley, Jill, Charlie, and even my roommate Shane was perhaps the greatest joy I got out of directing! I took on a large producorial role for this project; I coordinated schedules and arranged times for our shoots, determined which locations we'd be visiting, and in what order. By far the greatest pleasure I faced out of all of these was recruiting our actors, getting to know them, and guiding them toward bringing their characters to life. I cannot be more excited to work with more actors in the future!

There were more lessons to be learned from this shoot, particularly managing on-site filming. Our professor looked over my shot list during the revision phase, and knew where we were filming, and what we were going to capture. He did not find any problem with the locations I had picked out, believing them to be valid public spaces for a non-commercial, class project. Ultimately we had a bit of trouble with an employee of a particular location, who I foolishly got into an argument with. Fortunately, the situation worked itself out when I reeled myself in and asked for permission to film at a certain spot, under certain conditions. I.e. students left this area on their own accord, and the background was entirely made up of windows, meaning we weren't filming people without their consent. The employee graciously allowed us to film, and I am forever grateful for that. The following morning, I had a discussion with my professor about the incident in question. He said it's part of the course, and that he was surprised to hear we had trouble where we did. He sincerely believed there wasn't an issue with filming there, and that he'd look into university policy. At the end of the day, it was a transformative experience in learning how to communicate with authorities while filming "out in the real world."

Postproduction went by relatively smoothly. I scoured over our files and determined which shots were appropriate to use. At the end of the day, we had 14 minutes of good footage, nearly 10 minutes over what was required! Oops.

Courtney Kerr took the brunt of editing, but Hannah and I were sure to look over her rough cut and implement a series of notes, suggestions. While there were some things she did with the edit that did not fit my vision, I realized it was important to let go of these little desires, to understand that the final product was still good. I couldn't have absolute control over everything, especially when making last-minute changes. A director has to have a loud, noticeable voice, but they also have to understand when it's appropriate to keep their mouth shut.

Ultimately, I am immensely proud of the work we put into Out of Time. This is a film that means so much to me, not just on a conceptual level, but also from a parental level. It's practically my baby, for nearly a month I spent each and every aching hour putting my everything into this project. Even during class, clubs, or hangouts I would think about it! I am so grateful for the creativity, labor, and talent that went into this production.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Since we've submitted this project, I've had a fairly active autumn. The next two short films my group made was a documentary on a PSN-TV executive, in which I served as the director of photography, and a horror film which I am currently in the process of editing. As Courtney, Hannah, and I evolve as filmmakers, our craft continues to improve, as do the memories we make.