Quarter 3

 During Quarter 3, I really got into film-making. When I first got into STAC, I wasn’t sure what I’d be doing because to my knowledge, I was only good at writing. If I wrote a book during my time in STAC, nobody would read it. I would be the only one without anything to really show. Writing is also really hard to do research on, because it is really all about your personal style. I started writing scripts but they would have been very difficult to act out because they were incredibly maximalist. I had wanted to delve into film-making for a while but I wasn’t sure of what talent I could possibly have. It says on my blog, “I was thinking about learning how to make films, but they'd just be mediocre anyway and I think I need more experience with a camera first.” It turns out, I wasn’t really that bad at making films. So far, I’ve only made two silent films, so in the fourth quarter I’d like to try to make a film with dialogue because that seems to be the next step. I’m a bit apprehensive about that because in silent films, you can give the actors direction while they’re acting, but when there is sound you have to trust that they’ll do everything right. I would think that it takes longer because you’d have to practice more before actually filming and rely on the actors to know what to do.

            My experience in film-making has been really fun so far. The actual filming is the most fun for me, because it’s not as frustrating as really getting it together. When you’re developing the storyline, you have all of these ideas and you can’t use all of them and you have to organize them. Towards the end of this quarter, I especially had a problem with organization. All of my ideas were scattered in my brain and I couldn’t seem to get them down neatly on paper. Writing little snippets on separate pieces of paper really helped me because I could rearrange them as much as I wanted. That seems like a really good method for me. Editing only took me a few hours in my first film, but with this second film it took a bit longer because the way I filmed was I got more footage than I needed so I wouldn’t have too little, but I was still rummaging for exactly what I needed. I was more proud of my first film than my second, but it sure isn’t awful.