The making of "The Bully" was more difficult than what I thought I was going to be.. Evan, Ian, and I couldn't come up any good, feasible ideas. For example, as Ian drove me to school, he says something like, "we should make a movie about one of us going home and playing Halo, then go to the bathroom and when we come back its not there anymore. It could be like a horror film or something." I don't think I even bothered commenting back to the idea. There was another idea that dealt with a dream inside a dream inside a dream, something similar to the short film we saw in class. It took us a while to come up with something decent and we couldn't really film anything during anything during the break because Ian went to Florida and he was kind of the brains behind everything. We came back to school and we were still juggling ideas around. So that Friday we decided to go to Evans house and get something done. And still nothing came to mind. I forgot who came up with the bully idea, but we decided to go with that. Little by little we pieced parts of the puzzle together. We all contributed as it went along. Someone would suggest an idea and someone else would add on. Like Ian said something about the victim wanting to get back at the bully and Evan had some workout equipment in his room, so I suggested that we film him working out with the Rocky Balboa music in the background or something along those lines. Like I said earlier, Ian was the brains a.k.a the director, but we all pitched into things like how the frame should look, the dialogue, angles, cuts, little things. Like he would come up with the ideas and we would alter them somehow.
I was the cameraman, but we didn't have one, so we had to borrow one from Simon. After he had what seemed to be a good idea for the movie we started to film. The 1st day was somewhat productive. We finished up, and ian took the footage back to his house to edit it, after a few hours he calls me over to his house to ask me what I thought of the editing. I was okay with it, not amazed, it was alright for the 1st day. The 2nd day of shooting, caught me a little bit off guard, apparently the music was too dramatic and the footage itself was too boring,plain. We basically wasted a day, so again, we sat down and tried to come up with some good ideas, we were going to do this thing on the terms we had learned and compose a song and make a montage out of them. I didn't like it. We decided to stick to the bully idea, but this time we got serious about it and thought out and planned out beforehand what we were going to shoot and set up a basic story line. And we did.
Shooting was actually pretty funny. I think it always is, last year I had the privilege to work with Simon, that might of been the funnest project I did throughout high school. We found out that Evan could change his voice pretty well and it fits his character perfectly. We went to the playground too. That was funny too, there's a part in one of the chase scenes where a little boy rides his bike across the camera, and also in the confrontation scene, there's this elderly man who walks along the edge of the frame, after we paused it he offered Evan a ball. It was a little strange. We were actually set back a day because of the weather, it was raining and the camera wasn't ours and I didn't really want to break it or something.
But overall making this film was very entertaining. I think the hardest part of it all was getting the ideas cemented. I think we did a good job in implementing a little bit of everything into the film. There are several low angles, we have close ups at the moment when they meet up at the basketball court, long shots, I don't think we have high angles shots because it was probably too difficult to get that high up. We have some montages, and I think we used sound appropriately too. The films well balanced. The film we made last year, was a great film and everything but we didn't know anything about cinematic aspects. We didn't know about all these different kinds of shots, how to use cuts or when to use long takes. This was a really insightful course, it opens your eyes and now I pay attention to the little details that I would never did before.
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