Sometimes the best experiences find you.
I enrolled in a film class called "Analyzing Film" on a whim during the second semester of my junior year. I thought the class would be a fun experience and something new. I didn’t expect it to change my outlook or the way I experience films the way it did, and I certainly did not expect it to lead to creating films myself.
But it did.
Through this class, I began to understand critical thought surrounding film and became aware of my own viewing experience far more than I had ever before taking the class. I began to question director’s filmmaking choices and really question why I enjoyed or disliked a film. It expanded one of my favorite hobbies light years beyond where it had been and made me want to continue learning about it.
Once summer came and went, I was back on campus for my senior year and wanted to be involved once again. Unable to enroll in another course because of senior classes that were required being scheduled at the same time, I joined the film society club. We met twice a month to watch movies and talk about them. It was all pretty straightforward and fun. It was a film class without the weekly attendance expectations.
When our advisor suggested we participate in the Four Points Film Project, the club was excited. The Four Points Film Project is a national competition in which filmmaking teams of small and large size write, cast and create a film within the time limit of 48 hours. The time limit made us a little apprehensive, but we were excited nonetheless.
Our team consisted of four people, two of whom had made films before, one who had made a documentary before, and myself who was just there because I wanted to learn. We split up roles, and got the equipment checked out from our advisor.
Four Points will send you guidelines (a genre, a line of dialogue, a character, and a prop) that need to present in your film at the start of the 48-hour period. Ours ended up being:
Genre – Sitcom
Character – Rina Kilna, Baker
Line – “That is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Prop – Chicken Nuggets
We thought the best thing to do with the sitcom genre was create a parody of it. We made our character an actress named Rina Kilna who plays Joy Baker on a show called “Mediocre Days.” Joy Baker is a baker, who consistently fails at baking and lives a lonely life with her cat.
Filmmaking is hard, especially within these contexts where time is limited and big ideas need to be traded in for realistic ones. We had originally planned to shoot the film at one of our team member’s house and cast his pet cat, but that plan fell through and we ended up shooting the film in a campus apartment and using a stuffed animal cat instead (which added to the comic effect).
The weekend became a whirlwind.
We spent four hours writing, casting and planning the film the night it started, woke up the next morning and shot the film for 12 hours. Our editor then spent the night and wee hours of the morning editing. We came together the next day to find music and record some post-production sound and finally sent the film in.
“Mediocre Days” taught me how to make films while making a film, which is both scary and exhilarating. It didn’t end up winning any awards, but all the effort and passion towards the craft made it something I will always look back on as worth the stress and time.
If you have an inkling of passion towards something, pursue it. Join clubs even if you know next to zero about the subject. You never know where it might lead—you may end up learning how to make a film in a week.
