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Film School

Cycle Projects

In my first semester in film school, we were divided into “cycle groups” and made six total projects over the course of the semester, cycling through each of six different positions: Sound Mixer, Director of Photography, Gaffer, Producer, Boom Operator, and Director. Before pre-production on each cycle, we were given a prompt and roughly an hour to write a short 2-3 page script. As a group, we decided which script to film. After filming, we each made our own cut of the footage using Premiere Pro. These six projects are included below, with a brief description of production and what my role was.


Cycle 1 - Sound Mixer

This project did not go particularly well, though my sound mixing went fine. I did run into some playback problems with the sound mixer, but I was able to resolve them on set. We were wholly unprepared for this first cycle. Having used Premiere only once prior to this, I had to learn the program while editing. I had fun with it, reorganizing the story somewhat and messing around with different features (like slowing down the footage and freeze framing). The opening credits are about as long as the content of the story. I edited the opening to resemble the closing credits of the Twin Peaks revival series.


Cycle 2 - Director of Photography (and writer)

This cycle went much better. I wrote the script; I wish I could have directed it. The director decided that the actors should do Boston accents, which I think was detrimental to the story. It would have come off more naturally with their regular accents. Regardless, the actors did a good job and my edit ended up pretty good and actually coherent. As Director of Photography, I was inexperienced, but it still worked out well. All the setups were on sticks, so I just had to worry about the framing. The gaffer did an excellent job with the lighting. I really like the final shot. We set up the camera on a hill across from the apartment where we were shooting and the gaffer quickly flagged off a light several times to mimic the appearance of gunshots. It looked very cinematic.


Cycle 3 - Gaffer

In this cycle, everything went wrong. After selecting a script, we were told to pass it onto another group and then received a random script from a third group. So, none of us had written the script we were shooting, and the director and I were not big fans of this script. The two of us rewrote the script, keeping the base of the story, but changing it from a bizarre feel-good story to an absurd comedy. It could have turned out well with our rewrite, but things did not go smoothly from this point onwards.

Several scenes were to be filmed outdoors, and it was raining heavily on shooting day. We had trouble finding a location, and then the producer got us an actor whose mom offered to let us use their house. The director did not like the location, but, even worse, he had trouble getting the performance he wanted from the actor. Then the second actor suddenly had to leave early. We had to figure out how to make the story make any sense since we still needed to shoot several scenes with that actor. We settled on shooting those scenes with the first actor, since the story was weird anyway. In the editing room, I decided to just make my cut very trippy. It’s strange.

As far as the gaffing is concerned, it went okay. I did not know exactly what I was doing, but we experimented and the footage did not look terrible. I used bounces a lot to try to get the right level of light on the actor in the indoor scenes. The gaffing is not exactly what stuck with me with this project. It was mostly the disastrousness of shooting day and the fun I had editing it.


Cycle 4 - Producer

As producer, everything went pretty smoothly. In fact, this was our smoothest cycle of the semester. It was shot in my apartment and we only needed one actor, so my job was not particularly difficult. We were very efficient in getting the shots we needed. Perhaps things went so well because the story was very simple. I helped the director rewrite it in the way that she wanted, but I still felt like the story was lacking. Because of this, I was bored with the footage once I started editing. I realized that the film would work better as a silent film, and then I actually had a lot of fun cutting it together. I put a black and white effect and a motion blur effect over all the footage; it looked better than I was expecting it to look. I tried to incorporate as many silent film techniques as I could think of. I experimented a little bit with speeding up the footage in certain parts of the story as they sometimes did back in that era (I wish I used this technique more in the final edit). I also adjusted the aspect ratio to resemble silent films. I made the music for this, using a MIDI keyboard along with GarageBand. I played some simple chords while watching the final picture edit, and then I edited it together. It was simple, and it served the story well.


Cycle 5a - Boom Operator

This time we collaborated with two business students, making an advertisement for their subscription service in which the customer receives a box containing snacks and knickknacks from a different foreign country every other month. We did not use any of the sound we got from the Boom, since the video has narration playing over all the images. It was still good experience managing cables in a tight space and making sure the Boom was picking up good sound while not entering the frame. I also made the music for this; I am not sure how well it fits tonally, but I enjoyed putting it together. I should also note that this video was a rough draft, which I was not required to complete, as I had another project that I was working on.


Cycle 5b - Director

This project was a recruitment video for the Bedford Fire Department. As director, it was my responsibility to interview firefighters in order to get responses that would attract possible future firefighters. I wish I had the opportunity to direct a narrative piece rather than interviews. Nevertheless, it was still interesting and a valuable experience. Editing it took a long time, but it was some of my best work of the semester. I played GoPro footage (provided by the Bedford Fire Department) over a lot of the interviews to make it visually more interesting than a talking head. This was also the best music I made the entire semester.