The First Step Weekend: 2008 Review

The Film Making Experience with Erin McCuskey and Amanda Lines from yum productions.

The film making experience was divided into three sessions: 1. Ideas Creation, 2. Media Creation and 3. Future Creation.

Session one (ideas creation)
A discussion began about the creation of ideas and how it is important to share ideas, compare own ideas with others’ ideas which can be positive even inspirational and consider the competition while being aware of the environmental/cultural context from which it comes.

The story telling session then commenced, which was part of everyone’s homework prior to the weekend. One person would hold the microphone for their neighbour sitting on their right for the story to be digitally recorded.

Each story was then transferred onto a storyboard with six frames of pictures depicting each person’s story by that person – each scene would be one action and if acted out these could become camera still shots or moving action shots in a presentation of that story.

Session two (media creation)
The whole group then divided into smaller groups with the aim of choosing one storyboard from the group, acting out each of the six frames which would be taken as still shots and when these shots are combined a story on film is made. So now the ideas creation would be moving into the production stage.

The story had to have a pitch (title to sell it to the others in the group) and the actual storyboard had to be finished to be able to sell it, then the choice of story was made by the group, and the group was given a genre card like alien, period or spy which would either enhance or make things difficult for the actors. The small groups then had to decide on a director, rehearse the action shots and be ready for the performance /actual recording.

Many things were learned from this production stage time, for example one had to be prepared with the story, be able to communicate one’s ideas, be prepared to think outside the square and that one’s ideas for shots as in angles, depth and height etc may have to change to suit the situation.

Session three (future creation)
Session three commenced with watching movies of the previous day’s storyboards .Erin then spoke about Web 2.0 tools that help in online production. That should be very useful for directors who can access the internet. If using these tools that are available online and you are new to it, learn one thing first then extend your use of the other programs as confidence builds.

The next activity was character creation. This creation had to include the character’s name, age, gender, passion, what they are wearing and what they look like. Each person’s character had to be set in an opening scene of a movie with the opening line “Obviously today is what you’ve been waiting for…” Then each character had to pair up with another, combine the two scenes and make a third scene where the two characters would combine. This was quite simple until each pair were given two genre cards – one emotion card and one type card like experimental or sci-fi. Some very interesting stories resulted and this method of story-making was actually quite simple and effective.