True Life: Brian Bergman Reflection

Ever since I was a little boy the world of movies intrigued me so much that after I would see a movie I would beg my parents to take me to Toy”R”Us so I could buy all the merchandise from that movie so I could pretend I was a part of the adventure. My love for movies as grown at such a rapid pace that almost every week me and my best friend Derek go to the movie theater at least once a week and see a movie. The best part is that we see any kind of movie just so we can expand our knowledge of movies, and this year when Dr. Ganes told me about Mr. Daszenski’s Rhetoric of the Moving Image class I knew I had to sign up for it. The best part is that this class has actually helped guide me with my future and has helped me to figure out what type of career I might wish to pursue. So far the best part has been this project, besides the fact that I got to make a movie about myself, (what’s cooler than that????) I got to learn what it takes to make a film, which is something I had never tried before.

One of our first assignments to this project was creating a production company, after hours and hours of arguing Derek, Andrew and I finally came up with A Sour Diesel Film. We finally were able to agree upon this because we felt it was something that really represented us and one of the reasons why we are such good friends. In this group my role was to play the leading role in our film and to be the assistant editor in the post-production part of our project. These were to things that I knew were very new to me and were difficult tasks but I was up to the challenge. Andrew was our director of course, because I don’t know if you know Andrew but he is always the head honcho and he also can do anything else but boss people around. Derek was our head editor, we gave this position to Derek because of his extensive background in film editing and since he spent an entire summer working at a film editing company called Company 3. In our project there was no screen writer because our film was a documentary and in a documentary everything is real and unscripted. The only parts that were written down were the questions that were asked in the film. I’m sure that it is expected for me to nominate myself as the group’s MVP, but to be honest I can’t give myself that much credit, I really believe that as a whole we were all MVP’s because without each other our project would have never gotten anywhere.

I do not know how well our group worked together compared to other groups but I know we didn’t work as well as we had hoped. Most people would think that friends would work well together because you know what the people in your group are capable of and what they aren’t capable of, but the problem with our group is that we let personal issues interfere with our progress. In the pre-production we had some complications; our biggest problem was deciding what our film was going to be about. Even though we are similar people and we all have a very similar taste in movies deciding what we were going to film was almost impossible. The reason for this was because every time one of us made a suggestion about what our film should be about, one of us would immediately find reasons why we shouldn’t use that idea. Not until we had a “film-making conference” with Mr. Daszenski did we finally settle on our film. During the production stage of our film everything started out easy and of course everything went downhill from there. On January 13, 2010 our group was supposed to begin our filming process, but with our groups luck Andrew forgot to charge his camera, which ended up putting pressure on us to film everything we needed the next day. The reason we need to do all of this on the 14^th was because on Friday the 15^th I was going to be in school and without me (lead role) we couldn’t get footage. Finally everything came together with our post-production and we were able to work together as a group to make our film the right way.

The inspiration for our group’s film came from our teacher, Mr. Daszenski. During our “film-making conference” with him he gave us the idea to make a documentary about Brian Bergman. The reason he did this is unexplainable, but if I had to guess it’s probably because he finds me to be an interesting individual. A True Life: Brian Bergman is about a high school student named Brian Bergman, and what his fellow students and teachers think about him. To me I feel our film was very successful, yes it had some weaknesses such as the planning of our film and the constant fighting that took place during the production. Strengths of our film to me were finding out what people really thought of me, even though most of them were joking around and trying to be funny, I still as able to get a jist for what people thought about me. My favorite scene in our film is the opening question, in this question we ask people to describe me using one word. It was my favorite because we got to really play around with different transitions and we were able to make 12 seconds of our film hilarious. To be honest throughout the production I would have been able to come up with several reasons of things that didn’t come out the way I had hoped, but after we finished the film I was very happy with the way everything turned out. Next time I have the opportunity to make a film I will certainly not choose a group the consists of my closest friends, this way my group will focus on what’s important not who looks the most important in the group. In our film the 5 cinematic techniques we utilized were inter-titles, tracking shot; close up, medium shot and long shot. In order the portray the scene of “Brian being Brian” we had to use a low angle tracking shot to represent the emotion and significance of the scene.