Stephen Taylor-Wehr’s
Senior Project
Making a Movie.
This paper will describe many things. Of these many things, will include all of
which goes into making a movie (shooting, camera placement, lighting, story boarding,
sound, editing, etc). I will also tell what I did to make a movie, how I did it and what I
did on my three days off of school. This experience has definitely shown me much more
interesting things about this field of work. It has only made me want to make movies
more as a profession.
In order to make a movie, you must first create a story and better yet, an
interesting one if you want people to come and see it. Making a story for a movie is
much different from writing a story book. The difference is, is that a screen play is a lot
like a play. It’s mainly just dialog. There will be a look into scenery and camera
movement if it is a well written screen play. The story that was written for my movie, not
by me, was about a city boy living in the urban area of Detroit, or at least, that’s where
the majority of the movie was shot at. The boy’s name was Joe bromhouer and he is a
young brilliant pool player. His uncle, Mickey, is an old time gambler who tries to use
Joe for his own greedy uses of gaining money and getting out of debt. In all stories, there
must be a main character, Joe, and there must always be some kind of conflict. In this
case, the conflict is uncle Mickey brings Joe into a bad crowd. In this story, the main
character is torn between good and evil so there must be some to be torn between and that
would his girlfriend Ariel. She’s the sweet one who tries to reach out to Joe. Screen
plays are simple to write. Just pick something you want to make a movie about and write
your characters around that.
The next easiest part is getting your crew together. Compared to all the rest of the
work, this is easy. Once you’ve got your crew and actors together and locations together,
you can start filming right? Well….sort of. To be completely organized and prepared, it
is best if you put together story boards. Story boards show all the shots and angles that
you want so that when you get to your location, you don’t have to waste time figuring out
what kind of shot to get. You can just look at the story board and film your shot. A story
is almost exactly like a comic book. They’re little squares that draw out the characters in
the scene as the director would like them. They can be extremely detailed drawings or
stick figures, as long as people can tell what’s going on. Story boards can be a big life
saver if you’re short on time for a shoot.
No is the time to get all the equipment together and start shooting. The equipment
that I was using was not high quality Hollywood stuff, but it is pretty high tech and state
of the art equipment for a high school. The cameras that we used were mini DV
camcorders made by canon. Mini DV is the type of tape or cassette that the camera uses
to record on. DV stands for digital video. These cameras are the best mini Dv cameras
on the market. Other equipment that was used was a tripod, a sound mixer, and a boom
microphone. Another main piece of equipment that is extremely important was the light
kits.
The next few parts are what really make a movie what it is. This is movement
and lighting. Anyone can set up a camera and film people talking, but it’s all the cut in
that one can do with a scene. When filming a person must always get good and
interesting angles in order to keep peoples attention. Close-ups are also good to show
texture or facial expressions. You also want to make sure that the shutter speed is where
you want it to be. The higher the shutter speed, the more fluent your motion looks. The
next most important part of filming is the lighting. Lighting the scene gives the film its
look. It is also important to have the characters well lit in order to see them on the screen
clearly. The picture cannot be too hot or too dark.
Sound is real hassle when it comes to making movies. One can run into the most
problems when striving to get good sound. The main concern with sound capturing is
ambient sound. Ambient sound is the sound that’s always going on in the room.
Everything makes noise including, refrigerators, lights, water running, anything. It all
creates a buzz sound. This is important because when someone goes to edit the movie,
the movie and the ambient sound is different then there is a problem. It won’t sound good
at all. The ambient sound can also not be changed if the character is talking through. As
the saying goes, ‘if you put crap in then crap comes out’. There is no way you can fix it.
Once all the scenes have been shot, then comes the longest and some times
hardest part about movie making. That is the editing. This is exactly what I was doing
during my three days off of school for this project. I came in at 7:30, when school started
and edited the movie until about 9:30 at night every day. This is the post production part
of movie making. When I made my movie, we edited on the program called Avid. It is
probably the most well known and most used editing system in the world.
Editing is an extraneous and time consuming activity. It is where all the pieces of
the movie puzzle are put together. The editor goes through all the footage and puts it
onto the computer and when you have over 40 hours worth of tapes, it takes a long time.
Then all the close-ups, music and special FX are added to make the movie interesting.
Editing is painstaking work but I love it.
Finally after months and months of filming, editing and promoting through
newspapers and word of mouth, we had our movie premiere. Our particular premiere
was held at the beautiful Ford Community and Performing Center’s theatre. There were
about a thousand people who attended. Watching the movie on the big screen made me
feel proud with myself, and even more so by hearing that people liked it. My jobs were
the executive producer, head camera man, actor, editor, art director, and special FX
editor. I half killed myself making this movie but it was all worth it.
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