The Bully

Ian Krotinsky: The Bully -- Reflection

The Bully is a story about a nerdy kid (Evan) who is constantly bullied and tortured by my character (Ian). After being tormented by Ian, Evan goes into his interview and realizes that it is time to start working out and rebel.

It was day one, we had just received our project, and we encountered our first setback. What could be a possible plot!?? I started throwing out ideas. Some of the ideas were of upsetting stories while others were with a twist. Within a week of thinking and brainstorming we finally agreed……… that we had no clue what our plot would be. We called a meeting at Evan’s house to discuss possible ideas. I have seen many movies with twist and was really into that sort of theme but every idea I came up with had a beginning and end. The middle was the toughest part. One possibility was that I would wake up to a rock hitting me in the head, barely realizing it was a rock because I was in such a deep sleep. By the end Evan would bet me I couldn’t throw a rock through the window and I do and it hits a different, alternate universe me, which wakes me up, continuing the cycle, similar to Donnie Darko. Within a couple minutes the idea was shutdown. Nobody liked the idea, including myself once I thought it through. I can’t remember the exact moment when our idea struck but I think the catalyst was a poster of a stick figure holding another stick figures neck in Evan’s room, which is a perfectly normal poster for a person to have their room (Sorry Evan!). I think it was Saruen who started it off. Luckily it was there and within minutes our short film was roughly thought out.

At first Evan was the bully and I was going to be the victim. A minute later we agreed that the irony of the smaller kid being the bully was a better fit. That night we just ran with the idea and shot a scene or two. One of the scenes consisted of me opening Evan’s door to his room and taking the Mickey Mouse hat with the elastic string going under his chin and flinging it into his face. Our roles in the film started shaping up. I was directing and acting, Saruen was filming and Evan was acting. I thought it would look better if we shot this scene from many angles and replayed it a couple times really quickly. I would rather not share the amount times we shot this scene and the amount of times the Mickey Mouse hat did not hit his face but did something unexpected. The best part of it all is that we didn’t even use it in the film. The idea was there, but the plot wasn’t.

The next time we met I had what we were doing in mind and the actual progress began. Our group worked well. I took lead with the ideas and how we would shoot everything and Saruen and Evan chipped in (I just reread that and it comes off as really mean). I think what made our group successful was the fact that we didn’t argue very much. Usually when an idea was tossed out we immediately realized it wouldn’t work out or we would immediately incorporate it. We filmed at first in chronological order because it was easier to visualize how it would look.

That night I went home and took what we filmed, plugged the usb from the video camera into my brother’s mac, and opened iMovie for the first time. iMovie is soooo intuitive. I learned everything just by going through the buttons and within a couple hours I knew mostly everything I needed to know. I watched the unedited shots through and that’s when I got a bit scared. What you envisioned the movie like is not what you see. It seemed so bland. I started by taking every shot that wasn’t a blooper and dragging it to the project folder. Then I cut the beginning and ends of every shot which usually began with “yea, its recording” and ended with “aright good” or an empty stare at the camera until the stop button was pushed. After that I cut it down even more to make sure the shots coherently flowed. Then I put music to it and that’s when it started shaping up. I watched my edits and edited it some more until I was at best decently happy with what I had. I added some sound effects, some a bit more obvious than others but overall fitting fine.

For the next day of filming we knew exactly what we wanted to do. We had the workout scene, the interviews, the bullying scenes, and the final showdown. This time we filmed our outside scenes first and then our indoor ones to catch the daylight. I was very impressed by the way we handled and blazed through the scenes once we knew exactly what we were doing. The filming honestly took less time than the editing. I spent awhile trying to find fitting music along with figuring how to use slow motion for the final showdown. The second half took me literally five hours to edit. It actually looked great if I do say so myself. Even the acting from Evan and me was pretty good.

The cinematic techniques that we have learned in the past months flowed naturally throughout the film. During my interview scene we used low-key lighting to make me more devious and scary. We used a close up during the final showdown to show the emotions of both sides right before battle. The non-diagetic music was very fitting depending on the scene whether it was an intense working out scene or an epic fighting scene. **SPOLIER BEGINS** We used a point of view shot during the very last second of the fight from Evan’s point of view. It was used as visual metonymy because it cuts right into the credits where you know Evan just got knocked out but you don’t see it. The slow motion was used in my opinion very well to make that last scene that much more intense. **SPOLIER ENDS**

As for the MVP award …. The person that deserves this award should be the same in every group. It is not the director, camera man, or any actor but the editor. The amount of time and effort that goes into this role is deserving of some sort of award. If you were to see our film without any editing I would give you about 30 seconds tops before you fall asleep. If you don’t agree that it is always the editor then I would also like to mention that I was the director and an actor as well. As conceited as this sounds, I, Ian Jared Krotinsky pronounce myself the MVP.

There is one thing I wish we could have done in hindsight. I wish we could have came up with an exact idea and had everything thought out before we started filming. This would have saved time and reduced stress. Other than that I was very happy with the final product.

The best part of our film is the finale. The entire three and a half minutes builds up to this one fighting scene. We knew this would determine the likeability of the movie. Too many times has the ending of the film ruined the film all together (I am Legend). I would like to say that our ending doesn’t disappoint and the film hits its climax a second before it ends.

I will end this reflection with a short film anecdote. In one of the scenes I steal Evan’s lunch, hit him on the head with it, wonder off for a second, come back and knee him in the … Anyways, Evan’s lunch bag contained a fruit in it to make it seem full. In our second trial run of acting it out I took the bag from his hand, was supposed to get close to his head and make it look real, but ended up nailing him in the head with it. Fortunately Evan was fine; unfortunately we don’t have it on tape.