Turds to Birds Reflection

This final project involved me in a film for the first time. I had never in a before and I have never helped produce a short film; therefore, I was inexperienced. I didn’t exactly know how to make a successful film because I didn’t thoroughly comprehend the fact that it is a long and well thought out process of hard work. I basically felt like an amateur and figured that it would be easy. I thought that ideas would pop up left and right and that we could just act upon it as we filmed. Although ideas did pop up in our heads very easily, putting them together and actually making scenes for a short film was hard.

I was an actress in our short film and I helped with the whole idea of our final plot. I was a woman who worked for “Turds to Birds” as a dance teacher. Everyone contributed to the film in terms of the script, acting, and the general production. However, Ben was the cinematographer and the chief editor. He produced the cuts and knew which transitions were perfect for making it a short and concise film. Our group helped with the music and the minor problems involved as Ben was editing the film through our Facebook Message thread.

Our group worked well together because we enjoyed being around each other which made the experience ten times better. We didn’t really have a pre-production this film especially because our original story didn’t work out the way we thought it would. It’s easy to talk about a great story; however, tying it together and making it a short film is much harder. Originally our story was supposed be a love triangle between me, Gavin, and Lauren. It was an awesome story that would have been very funny and creative if it was well thought out; however it wasn’t. We didn’t know how to condense our information into a short film. Therefore, we changed our minds and decided to do an instructional video of how to do the jerk. We didn’t know how to break down the instructional video into different scenes and involve 5 cinematic elements at the same time. Therefore, we decided to do a weight loss infomercial that involved three different classes.

The last minute change of the story caused us to have many weaknesses because we didn’t have a well thought out script. It was poorly planned, but we went with the flow and improvised. Our strength was that Ben adjusted well to our quick changes as a cinematographer. We were able to slip in the five cinematic techniques easily. We used title cards to show the change in time in our film which saved time. We took a close up of Jessica yelling at Lauren to show the anger she had for Lauren’s poor work as a “stepper.” The beginning shot of Gavin’s class was a split screen to show the differences in weight. It was added to show the irony because Gavin, the teacher, had the small weights and Lauren had the heavy weights. We took a high angle of Lauren to make her look small and insignificant in the beginning. Lastly, our fifth technique was a low angle of Gavin when he’s yelling at Lauren complaining about her nails. This shows Gavin’s superiority as a teacher.

Overall this film was a good experience for me. My favorite scene was when there’s a high angle of Lauren and she’s asking if she could join “Turds to Birds.” Next time I work on a short film, I want to put more effort into the pre-production so that production would be much easier for me.