Experimental: Looking Back

Well, it was a crazy semester but I am still alive! This class was wonderful. I took this class purely for fun, and fun it was. Experimental helped me to break out of my shell as a filmmaker, I pushed myself to really go for it and try new styles of film. The self portrait project was definitely something I would not have done on my own, however, I am proud to the end results and I believe my message come through well. At the very least, it looked cool! Ha.

The music video was my favorite project of the semester. I LOVE LOVE LOVE shooting with film and I had never shot on Super 8 before so that aspect alone was just magical. Being the cinematographer, I was quite nervous, what if the exposure was off or the film did not load right and we were left with nothing?! (AHH!!) Thankfully, everything was fine. Even with very little time for preproduction Chris and I were able to come up with a very interesting plan. By using a bit of camera trickery, matting, and LOTS of planning we were able to execute a simple but awesome video (in my opinion).

I was also very happy with how the installation piece turned out. With so many things that could go wrong, everything went smooth. Visually the piece was beautiful and the message/ crowd interaction was great also. Since we were the first to go people were a little shy but I think it was a great icebreaker for the night! As I was watching what people were doing to our two "technology trance" actors, one of whom was my boyfriend and the other a great friend, I was thinking "oh gosh, I hope they knew what they were getting into by agreeing to be in the installation" and also a little worried that I might be single by the time it was done! HA! Just kidding. Kind of. Any who, I was very pleased about how it all turned out.

The soundscape project and even the sound and light observation exercised we did gave me a much greater understanding and appreciation of them. I though it was extremely interesting how much the emotions of the soundscapes changed once we add the photographs to them, weird. Gathering sounds for the sound library allowed me to be creative about creating sounds, which is something I had never done before. I am confident that I could accomplish it on my own in future projects too.

Overall, we had a great semester. I learned a lot about my classmates, some I knew but got to know better and some I had never met before. I always looked forward to seeing what everyone else had done with their projects. It was really cool how different everyones work was even though we had the same assignments. I created friendships, memories, and overall knowledge and experience with filmmaking that I will never forget. Thank you Shannon for another fabulous semester!