Last week was arguably one of my most difficult and frustrating experiences in college (so far). No, it was not midterms or finals week. It was the first time I would be participating in Campus Movie Fest, an annual contest where students across the country get the chance to make a five minute film. Participating students were given all of the equipment they might need in order to do so. The only problem was that there was a twist — all of this had to be done in a week. The idea was simple, gather a bunch of friends willing to come up with an idea and film all week to the weekend rather than do whatever a college student normally does on his/her spare time. So many obstacles started popping up, such as some group members having to do a lot of work for class, or even the sudden "Crap, I already scheduled something for that afternoon" type of shenanigans the night before or even the day of meetings.
We were given all of the equipment on Wednesday, March 16 and were to turn in everything on Tuesday, March 22. So on Tuesday, we obviously were not going to film. There was way too much going on, and we only had so much time. Wednesday, we started to share some ideas we had for a film, but got to nowhere. The thing happened Thursday, and I think that it's a universal concept among college students that work is simply not done on Fridays. Ever. That meant that we would be filming on Saturday, perfect! That meant that we could film everything on Saturday, then just edit on Sunday and Monday, and turn it in on Tuesday!
Except we didn't film Saturday. It felt like no one in the group had any intentions of filming at all. Saturday was going to be my breaking point, where I was about to either give up and turn in the equipment or just make a one person film. As I contemplated on what to do, one of my group members invited me along for a walk in the city. I told myself that I was going to need a big stress reliever, seeing that nothing was going to go to plan. I go to school right outside of Philadelphia, and have simply not been able to enjoy the view as much as I hoped I'd have been able to. So, I accepted and we headed into the city.
Our first stop would be to my friend's boyfriend's apartment. Having gone there multiple times, I almost didn't take any pictures. As a photographer, I made a promise to myself, that I would capture beautiful moments and share them with people, so I took out my trusty Nikon D5200 and started documenting the day!
An interesting thing about Philly is that there are so many different things happening all at once! As Ferris Bueller once said, "Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” It's important to realize that beauty exists all around us. Sometimes we just need to look out for it. The image of the fence was taken as we passed a small parking lot by the Pennsylvania Convention Center.
This is the view from my friend's boyfriend's apartment. The next couple of images are of inside his apartment.
We wandered through Old City, where I took some interesting shots of trees and flowers.
One of the best things about Philadelphia is that there are so many places and objects to capture. I haven't even seen a small fraction of them. I love the city so much, as it's one of the places to go to for stress relief and to appreciate the environment.
Plus, on Sunday, we were able to film a short comedy, showing some of the basic steps on how to survive college, with the information we have so far as freshmen.
(Here is the movie poster!)
