Our film “True Life of a High School Senior” produced by the company “True Life” is based on four different high school senior students. Each one tells us about their experiences in high school compared to other years, what they expected of senior year, what they enjoy about senior year, and about their future in college and how they see the rest of their lives.
Our group came together in an unconventional type of way. We formed our group not based upon a vision of what we wanted to do, it was a coincidence that there were two people in a group alone and too many in our original group. Aleena and I decided to join Marisa and Elaina. They had a great idea to make a documentary on the lives of high school seniors. I thought this was a great idea because I am a high school senior myself. It would be very interesting to see different views of high school seniors that attend various schools from different areas.
In our group, we all shared our roles, but I really enjoyed being the interviewer. At first I thought I was going to actually interview the people, have a microphone and state each question but, instead we decided to let them restate our various questions. Before each scene I spoke with our subject and made sure they were familiar with the questions and had something of substances to say. I enjoyed doing this, meeting new people and learning about their different senior year experiences. Coming up with questions wasn’t so challenging because I am a senior myself and I thought if someone were to interview me what could they ask me that would help me best describe my senior year.
This was a very fascinating process to participate in while we controlled the cameras and the questions that we presented. We did not dictate how the subjects would answer. I personally enjoyed seeing the different perspectives that these students had about their senior year in high school and how they saw their future. Because we are in a senior class I believe that all of my peers will also enjoy our film being able to connect with some of the interviewees and perhaps even shocked about the answers and attitudes of others.
The inspiration for our film was, the real television episodes of “True Life.” I had fun making a movie based off of a television show, it was enjoyable to make a film that I could probably see while flipping through the channels.
My favorite scene by far is the medium shot of Justin standing next to the sign that shows the year his school was built. I like the balance of him next to the large numbers while he is speaking about his senior year. These numbers make you think how long this school has been around for and how many people have been through this amazing senior year experience.
I feel that our film was very successful, so successful that I could see it on the show we based it off of. At first I did not know how it would come together, because I have never made a movie before. Our M.V.P was Elaina Epifan, I would say this because we all put tons of effort into the project by filming, interviewing, and directing but Elaina did the editing that brought it all together.
There are many techniques that we learned throughout our course in Rhetoric of the Moving Image. I enjoyed learning about them and putting each thing we learned about into our film. A few examples of what we used were high angle, long takes, tracking shots, transitions and close up. Our high angle shot was used during Silvana’s basketball game. This was appropriate here to see not only our subject but our subject in an environment that made her high school and senior year special to her. Our long takes where during the actual interviews. These were appropriate at this moment to allow the interviewee to continue speaking without stopping. The tracking shots were used as we followed our interviewee taking a stroll while they spoke to us, which made this technique appropriate at this moment in our documentary. Throughout the documentary we used transitions of fading and having the screen role into the next so it seemed as if they did not stop speaking. Other transition shots were iris shots and dissolving. Lastly we used close up, this was used at appropriate times while our interviewee was speaking allowing us to get more involved in what they were explaining. It gives the viewer a feeling as if the person is talking just to them. We made our documentary flow by using the same plain black slide with the persons name, age and school on it before each person spoke.
This project has shown me that the art of film is an intricate web of details. It takes many people and many hours to incorporate and send the right message to the audience. We were able to use the techniques that we learned in class to make our subjects come forth and exhibit their true feelings and experiences about their senior year. Thus bringing about a very successful film.
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