Ever since I was a small child I’ve always been really into movies, no matter the age I always found an interest in movies and watching them was a huge hobby but one thing which I personally never though about was making one of my own until now.
A couple of days ago we begun a project where the main focus was creating a remake of a short horror film called “Run” by creator @CookieImagination on youtube. This simple video consists of a man jogging through a forrest when he suddenly realizes that he’s being chased by a misterious entity. Our challenge was to recreate it in around a week, the sounds, the backgrounds, the wardrobe and basically everything else in the video.
We begun the challenge by mapping out all important aspects we would soon recreate. We started off by recognizes and writing down every single one of the camera angles presented in the video and their respective lengths which was extremely important as we wanted the videos to be able to be exactly the same. We also wrote down all the wardrobe neccesary to recreate the video (what the jogger and entity were wearing). Finally we gave ourselves goals for each day of the week to make sure we were on track (this would later be forgotten and never used again).
After the planning was all said and done we brought our wardrobes to school the next day and begun filming shortly after choosing our location. Making the actual video didn’t go as smoothly as mapping it out as even though it all looked really well in the beggining as we went on some glaring issues started to become extremely clear. The first one of these being the length of the original video compared to ours, the original video had many different shots which went on for a long, long time, one the other hand ours made these camera angles go on for around three seconds on average which wasn’t nearly enough, but at this point there wasn’t much we could do so we kept on going. Another one of these blaring issues was the audio. This aspect of the video we didn’t plan too well and it ended up costing us in the long run. This is as when we filmed the original video we thought we would use the footage we had which included audio but we didn’t care to check if the audio had distracting backround noise until the very end of production. Because of this we had to finish the audio with random sound effects found on Cap-cut which can be a positive but wasn’t in this case as we didn’t really have time to prepare it so we kind of chose the first thing we could find.
Fortunately the video wasn’t all bad as even if there was a couple of negative details about it the video itself looked extremely solid other than the audio. For starters the camera angles in the video were in my opinion recreated one to one and were extremely similar to the original, the lighting of the video also looked great and added to the feel of the video even though it didn’t quite look like that in the original. Finally the horror aspect of the video was also accomplished in my eyes as the main actor (me) looked genuinely fearful which added to the horror plus the final jump scare was done really well as the entity come out of nowhere and isn’t seen until it’s too late.
After we finished the video our whole class watched each and every one of the videos we made and we were given feedback. We took the feedback and re-shot the video within 2-3 days. This was pretty hard as we didn’t really have time to re-shoot a camera angle if it didn’t look like we wanted it to but we were lucky enough not to screw up too much this time (last time we re-shot around half of our footage). In our updated version of the film we actually followed what we mapped out to the letter and made it way better in many different ways. The biggest of these being the length of each shot. As I stated previously our shots were far too short compared to the ones in the original film so this time we made each shot overly long so we could later make it the exact length it needed to be in editing. This worked out perfectly and our film basically mirrored the length of most shots in the original. The second and last thing we hugely improved on was the audio. In our first attempt the audio was rushed so we had silly sound effects which ruined the feel of the video and took the audience out of it, this time we made sure to make all the sound effects were at least similar to the originals and matched the vibe of the video.
All in all I think we did a great job with this video as we demonstrated planning, creative angles and taking feedback to heart and far more skills which will help us in the rest of our lives and help us with any other endeavour or challenge we will face in the future.