Starting Off

 

This was the start of things for me. It was my second year of college and my second film course I signed up for.  Interesting side not, during my first year, I finished a short film prior to this one, and during that year my professor at the time, had us work with DV Tapes. It tested our patience and got rid of our desire to shoot digital. Unfortunately, my laptop at the time had a hard drive failure and all of my work was wiped clean, resulting in the loss of the short film. I still own those DV tapes... somewhere. I plan to eventually look for them and look over the footage I shot and try to do an edit. Well, for my second year, our professor assigned us to film our projects on DV again. I didn't mind it, it taught me that you could shoot what you can and what you want with whatever you want, just have your content be presentable. But at the same time, I wanted to test my learning abilities every time a project was assigned to me, so I went ahead and bought myself a K-3 16mm film camera and shot some segments on film. Now that was a learning experience.

Since this was going to be my first official short, I set out to have a goal for this and every other project I were to work on, whether it's working on style, composition, color, etc. And for this one, I wanted to tell a story using different video formats. Tape, Film, and Digital. I snuck all of those in on this final project.

Ideally, I was going to shoot the entire film on 16mm, but I ran into the realization that shooting on film is expensive. It has to go through processing and transfer to your choice of digital quality and at the same time, I had no job, only went to school, you get the idea, it was tough. I shot what I could with that film camera and in the end, only some shots were usable. I had no prior experience shooting film, but I learned a lot from just this one short. Mainly to be mindful of what you're going to be shooting. Time and management are important here. Those are valuable things I still carry on till' this day.  

But outside technical aspects, this was the first time I stepped into the filmmaking realm. This was the beginning for me and others. I saw people change their minds halfway through the course and some people pushing hard with their filmmaking goals. It was exciting just to be around people who are discovering what film means to them. This was also the same year I met Michael Allen. He plays Joe in the film. He's a character of his own and I've been working with him since. I like his spunk.

 I learned a lot that year, I found my medium on telling stories, I figured out what I wanted to do, and I was ready to work on another film. This was the film that started my path.