Whoever loves making and producing films, more power to you. The multimedia project for me was definitely a challenging experience. It definitely was a hard task but it had such great benefits in the end and it was pleasure to have my group and work on this project. Hopefully in the end other people in Macaulay will look at the films and be jealous of what we had to do, but they should know that spending an entire month making a film is not as easy as it looks.
Before I talk about the whole film experience, I definitely had to look back on what being part of the film meant for me. For me the film meant so many things. One thing was that the film allowed me to go out of my comfort zone; I have always been used to writing essays and papers for a final. Making a film made me step out of my comfort zone. I remember making a film last year for high school, but it did not require the different job assignments as the multimedia project did. This film required a designer, and a dramaturg as some of the film’s roles. Additionally, the film meant an opportunity to be more open and outgoing. I know that throughout the semester I was shy because it was hard for me to say my opinion so openly. Everyone spoke so fast and it was hard for me to express myself. For me, making this film was challenging but I wanted to use it as an opportunity to be more open and outgoing. Taking part in the film allowed me to take this chance.
I took the role as one of the dramaturgs in the film. At first you would think that making a script would not be difficult but it was challenging. I had to be flexible with the rest of the cast members in terms of making the script. For example, at first we were going to use the text in its entirety, so all I had to do was discuss with the director how to portray each scene in the film. However, when we were doing some aspects of the film, I realized that I had to create a different script. This mainly resulted from the director modernizing the text. Making the text that we were given modern was difficult at first. It was hard to do this because your redoing an Ancient Greek myth into a modern script. We did certain aspects of the text in a modern concept, and it was hard to change the text into a modern aspect. This was difficult because I still needed to stay true to the text and this took a couple of hours in itself without revisions, making this part very difficult for me.
One thing that I enjoyed about the project was seeing how creative we were with the scenes. I was so surprised at how our community had a scene to describe every situation in our text. We were able to do a majority of our shooting in the Queens College dorms itself, which shows how much you can do in such a small area. I would of never expected to make a film by using our campus for most of the scenes. I thought we would have to go from place to place just to get good scenes. We became more creative in our scene selection which was fun to see. Yet, one thing I liked and enjoyed the most was seeing the film come together. Our cinematographer did such a great job in putting together the film that it was definitely a sight to see. We spent hours filming sometimes in the freezing cold , and to see it all being put together is amazing.
Overall, the film project was a good experience. It was a lot of work and very challenging. I did get to know a lot of people more, and had a great time. I was so glad to have Nicole, Par, Marianna, and Janine as group members. Although, we did have a lot of laughs, in the end we enjoyed working together and focused in on what we had to do. This project will be something that I will definitely remember for all the hard work, difficulty, and fun for years to come.
