RUN! A Short Film 🎞 🎥

Hi everyone, I started a project that I worked on for less than a week! This has been a really big challenge. My class was separated into groups of 5 and we had to recreate a short horror film called RUN! My group included Simon, Liam, Josh, and Indi, go check out their blogs to see what they wrote about this project. The film was about a jogger getting chased by a weird creature in a forest and my group and I had to use all the resources that we could find and make a 1-minute short film as close to the original as possible. Some of the things that were required were using the app clips to record, using iMovie to edit and to use our iPads to do everything. 

Here is the original video we had to create

Driving question 

How might we learn video skills by recreating a short film?

How I interpret this question is that we needed to learn how to use our resources to make a slightly professional looking film. Some of the things we had to figure out were keeping the camera still while moving around, getting all the angles and shots aligned, and figuring out how to get nice sounding sound effects. Yes, I did learn a lot more than just those three things but those are the things that stood out most to me. I will explain what I learned in each of those aspects of the project while I explain what milestones or stepping stones stood out in my learning. 

Milestone 1

In this milestone, I had to create an introduction video of myself. I feel this was one of the more important milestones because I had to learn how to use clips which is the app we have to use to create the short film. to create the video I had to start by making a story with a beginning, middle, and end of one of my hobbies. I had to experiment with different effects (music, green screens, and visual effects.) I had to use all of those things to create the best looking and sounding video about me and one of my hobbies. 

Milestone 3

In this part of the project, we had to create a first draft of the short film. We all thought that this was the final draft but we didn’t know until after we created it and got critiqued on every mistake that we made so that we could fix them in the last draft. We had to use all the skills that we learned about using clips and iMovie to create the best looking first draft that we could. We went outside for about an hour and a half to film all the scenes. After we filmed all the scenes we went back inside the classroom and edited everything, after all the editing we added sounds. Then we presented the video to the class (which was a little scary but we got a lot of feedback.)

Milestone 4

This was the last milestone of the project we had to create a final draft of the recreation. This time we went outside for an hour and 45 minutes we had to work on everything that went wrong in the last attempt and fix it. Some of the things we did wrong in the last video was: a dramatic scene change, camera shake, not well timed, angles weren’t right, and the sound was a bit off. That was a lot considering my group and I thought we did pretty well, but the next time we went outside a little more prepared, we went out with a list of each angle we needed and how long each shot exactly was. It took longer than we anticipated to find a spot that we thought to be adequate but we did although it didn’t match the video exactly it had a path and trees so it worked out. We got a short film in the end that resembled the original but there are a lot of things we could have improved on including:

  • Sounds that matched the video better
  • A better log
  • A dirt path, not a cement one
  • Being less shaky while shooting
  • And maybe adding a filter or editing more to make it more of a horror scene

There is a lot more I believe we could have improved on because the film was not perfect but those are the things that stood out to me. Now that I have listed what we could have done better I will list a couple of things we did well cause there are a couple

  • The costumes
  • timing of the scenes
  • angles of each scene
  • The last scene turned out good in my opinion 
  • And the teamwork through the project

Here is our final video

Curricular competency 

Innovative designer: How might I design a solution to a problem, process, or challenge

This project had many challenges problems pop up throughout the whole 3 days of working on it. I personally think one of the biggest challenges we had to overcome would be finding a spot that looked as close to the original as physically possible. Yes I did not figure out how to solve that problem as well as I believe I could have but I did learn something from my mistake, I learned that I shouldn’t just settle for ok or good enough I should keep looking or trying to do better no matter how much time I have cause I can always have a good outcome eventually or better at least better than if I don’t try hard to do my best. 

Thanks for reading my blog post about my first project in grade 9, I hope you liked it enough to check out my other blog posts that are coming up🧡

 

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