The Making of "A Boy and His Box"

The making of the film, A Boy and His Box was a great experience for me and everybody else who helped out during the process. Asian Chris Productions was made of about ten people and whenever we were working on the film everybody was always enjoying themselves, while using all the stuff that I had learned in Rhetoric.

In our film we used many different cinematic techniques; the most major one was probably the three minute montage. We felt that the best way to tell the story of this boy and his box was to put it into montage form, that way instead of just boring shot after shot there would be variation and we would be able to put the shots in any order that we would want. Without the montage we felt like the story would just be boring and it would have been a pretty bland film that would be easily overlooked. Another cinematic technique we had used was the low angle shot used to film the box on the roof. In this scene we could’ve just had the shot taken from the roof as well to provide an eye-level shot but instead we wanted to make the box look like it was taking more of a risk, and that it was in a really high up place, with the possibility of it falling. Another thing we did with this one shot is that we took it early in the morning to get low key lighting. We wanted to put low key lighting in this scene because we wanted to make it look more like the box was blending in and it actually could have been used as camouflage in certain situations instead of just making this entire film a joke. This scene was the hardest scene to capture from the entire film. For this scene a few members of Asian Chris Productions stayed up the entire night just so we could get this shot in the morning. Getting on to the roof provided a more difficult challenge since it was really cold outside. I had to get some gloves and my roof was a lot steeper than I thought. Once I was up on the top of my roof we encountered another problem, which was getting the box up there. We finally came up with a solution after many minutes of trying to throw the box onto my roof when putting the box on a long stick and moving it up to the roof. Another cinematic element that we used in the creation of A Boy and His Box was the long shot. This was our basic type of shot, and we decided to do this instead of medium shots or close-ups because we thought it was a better idea to give the viewer a better idea of the setting and where the box was in relation to everybody else in the area. The fifth cinematic element we used was the eye-level medium shot for the first scene where the two characters are talking about the box. We used this type of shot just to show the characters and for everybody to understand what was going on and to understand the main point of the film. We chose this type of shot over everything else because we felt that this was the best way to show two characters talking without any bias towards the characters and so that everybody could understand what was going on.

My role in the group was originally to create the story and film it but after a long turn of events I just ended up being the main character, the box, as well as the director. Mitchell was the one who came up with the box idea. It first started out as being a parody of a famous game called Metal Gear Solid but Mitchell decided we shouldn’t do something as complicated that and we dumbed it down to sneaking around in a box, and it seemed like the idea worked out. Asian Chris productions started out as a bunch of people, and we kept on changing the story enough so that almost everybody left except for me and Mitchell. The story first started out as being an action-comedy about how this kid tells his brother to fight two bullies for him, which changed to just an 100% fighting movie, which than evolved into something involving Metal Gear Solid, which moved onto the A Boy and His Box. Once we had this idea down we had to somehow find a box and get ideas of what to film. Mitchell’s dad was able to provide us with the box and we wanted to do most of our filming in school, but we had run into a problem; we only had one day to do our filming. We tried to get as many shots as possible in that one day, and we had to cut two or three classes to do it. We managed to get a bunch of shots, in and out of our classes. The next problem we ran into was that nobody in Asian Chris Productions knew how to edit. We were able to find somebody who knew what they were doing and in that one day we had finished most of the movie, but we still needed 13 seconds of footage for the montage and to film the first scene. I tried to get everybody from Asian Chris Productions together that Saturday with no luck, it turns out Mitchell’s uncle had died and I couldn’t get in touch with anybody else. I tried once again Sunday and instead of helping me out everybody wanted to watch football. I was down to the final day, the Monday before the film was due and I still needed to film more. I had to turn to this kid I used to be friends with, who I didn’t like very much, but because of him I was able to finish the film. He also provided us with a car in which we could do one of the more important scenes of the montage.

The next time I make a film the first thing I would make sure to do is get a group of reliable people who would actually want to film rather than watch football, and I would also want to get a more organized plan rather than just take a camera and box with us wherever we go until we come up with ideas for a scene. To be perfectly honest I feel like I could have done this film without the class but it was nice to know all the terminology and to be able to know what kinds of shots reflected what types of feelings and how the viewers would look at the movie. If I had done this film without the Rhetoric class it definitely would not have been as good. Before creating this film I felt like I would be able to give meaning to every scene and making everything in a scene cinematically meaningful wasn’t that hard. It turns out I was wrong and there’s a lot more to worry about than I would’ve thought, whether it be what type of shot to make or how loud the non-diegetic sound should be in comparison to the diegetic. A Boy and His Box really was a great experience but whatever comes next, I feel like I can make it a lot better.