Thursday, April 30, 2009

Making a movie

Last weekend I finally got together a couple of friends and shot a movie that I had in mind for a couple of weeks. What an amazing experience. It was very interesting. When you try to make a movie you start realizing all the little problems that you can bump into and that can make something that you would think as very easy to do as a titanic project. But it went well. The audio was kind of bad, but we all had a lot of fun acting and two of us ended up jumping in the lake, which was freezing cold.
I have had some experience with editing movie clips, but I had never tried to put together a short movie before. I have indeed acted before and I knew that it is a very tiring process, that you have to repeat many times the scenes over and over again. But it was a completely different experience to have to tell other people what to do. When directing a movie you need to be conscious of the other people needs as well as your needs to get the scenes well done, which can take many tries. It is a hard balance to keep.
Then, once the shots have been taken, I brought everything to my lab. It took at least eight hours of work to edit all the scenes together, and to think as well how to put them together. It is a sad process, since you also have to decide what to keep out, even if you liked and you know that everybody else put efforts in acting it. The movie ended up being kind of long, about nine minutes. I thought it would have been about three. That tells already how unexperienced I am.
Overall, the experience was a blast. If you have the time and the skills, I suggest to save a weekend to do it. It pays off a lot, and watching it a long time from now will bring back a lot of good memories. On the side, I developed a kind of tick now. Everytime I see a movie I am now always looking at where the hands are and when the angle changes, you will always find out that their position moved a little bit. After you try to edit a scene with multiple angles, you cannot stop thinking about it.
Final remarks, what is the movie about? Well, I do not want to give the details away. If you are curios, then you need to ask me.