End of MP 2 Presentations Reflection

Seeing the work of my peers was helpful in understanding our universal limitation of Covid and ways to work around that limitation. The best work around to this limitation I saw was Zach Willard who maintained the idea of an expansive comedy, while justifying his limited characters through manipulating the plot. Link to Zach's Presentation

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The planning it took to make this film is truly inspiring. Creativity almost always comes with a lack of structure, however Zach was able to plan this film extensively while still maintaining a creative spirt. While I feel I can do that for a 5 minute film, Zach did it for 20 minutes through a trimmed down shot list style of planning that I will adopt in my future endeavors. On the more creative end I feel this is an excellent example of blending the weird artistic tendencies with more populist elements. At least in my personal experience the more you do film, the weirder your ideas become. This film touches that line in a beautiful way: having Tim and Eric absurd comedy --the spam and voice over scenes in particular-- and close ups of ears, as well as Seth Rogen style comedy and simplistic representations of music. One of my greatest difficulties is in finding that balance and this film shows a way to do that.  

Another strategy I saw was to simplify the original idea for a film. One of my greatest difficulties/advantages as a filmmaker is my tendency to think of ideas that are right on the edge of feasibility, which in the past has not burned me, but in quarantine that strategy was doomed to failure. To counter this, I opted to just do a different project. However, in the future I would like to take Sean Ross' strategy and simplify my original ideas. Link to Sean's presentation.

One of the greatest challenges in music videos is developing a narrative while still serving the song. Sean expertly combined traditional narrative filmmaking through a combination of dialogue and montage, providing a clear story, and edited the montage according to the beat of the song. Furthermore, I like how the video was relatively contained in its locations, which again made the idea Sean was trying to illustrate clear. Seeing the opposite style of music video to my own was useful in considering the direction I want to take with my music videos in the future. I think the technical quality here is excellent, which is probably a product of taking more than a minute to set up a shot and doing more than two takes, something I should start doing. Effects are used tastefully, apposed to just using as many effects as possible and then making fun of that over-usage as I do. My favorite choice in this entire piece was the bald cap. An almost universal issue in making films at the high school level is that all your actors are essentially the same age. To work around this Sean deployed the bald cap, but if you watch the film Triston is clearly wearing a bald cap. In this the audience understands that this is a teen playing the character of an adult, and not an actual adult that is supposed to represent reality. Essentially, Triston is playing the teenage perception of a teacher, which interestingly places the audience into the subjective point of view of Zach and helps develop meaning as the film goes on. 

The final, and perhaps most commendable, approach to the problems of shooting in quarantine was to just try your original idea and accept if it does not come out perfect, as you still get to in-act the original idea. I feel I am to controlling to go in this direction, however I should learn to give up on some control like Anna Hamila.  Link to Anna's presentation.

While this film has some issues in sound design and Anna clearly had to abandon her desired complexity in parts, the film still upholds and follows her original idea. I liked the editing, especially in the opening scene, which both is fun and follows the tone of the scene through tempo. Furthermore, the way Anna combined visuals with music established a fantastic tone for the entire film. This use of music will be something I will incorporate into future narrative projects. The most inspirational section of the piece was the way she filmed conversations through handheld shots. This filming strategy looks relatively easy to do and is far more interesting than the traditional 180 style of shooting dialogue as seen in Zach and Sean's films. I have already started thinking of ways to incorporate this shooting method with primordial planning on an absurd, running-race film.