My roles in this filmmaking process were director and actress. I was really excited to start working on this film because I saw a huge opportunity to work on both of my main interests in the world of theatre. I’ve only worked once as a director, on a high school film that I wrote and starred in, and I was really excited to try my hand at directing again. Naturally, I was also excited to have a chance to act in a medium I was majorly unfamiliar with, since acting in front of a camera is so different than acting onstage.
Our group worked really well together and we had lots of really great ideas. Unfortunately, more than once we had ideas that were just beyond the realm of being realistically possible, which could be disheartening, but we worked around it as best we could. We also went through a few different ideas of what we wanted the film to be before settling on an early nineties setting that later becomes the present day (as coolly represented with different filters). We had to compromise on some of the things we wanted, but I think our final project turned out great.
The biggest obstacle in working on someone else’s piece is the struggle between maintaining the artist’s original intentions while personalizing it. Sometimes the ambiguity of the script made it difficult to make decisions because of the fear we’d miss the artist’s intentions and change them to something he didn’t want or wouldn’t like. Personally, I had a lot of trouble memorizing my lines due to my hectic schedule outside of this class and the differences between Spider’s short lines and lengthy monologues (fondly called “douche-a-logs” by me). Due to this, I felt like I didn’t realize the character of Spider the way I wanted her to be, which makes me a little sad as an actress, but I still feel proud of the whole project.
Despite the obstacles, I really liked the challenge of making a film. I loved having the chance to act and direct and work under stressful conditions. Sometimes it was really hard to find time to try memorizing lines while working on other final projects and juggling lots of other work, but it was necessary to get all of the filming done. I also liked getting to work with my friends who were thankfully all really invested in the project and had great work ethics. I also loved watching the entire thing come together and the transition between making major choices about filming to smaller ones like what kind of music we wanted to use. I also ended up liking the script a lot because the ambiguity of it gave us a chance to make our own creative decisions about the characters and their motivations. Though my favorite part of the filming project was when we messed up lines and Ariana showed us her scary side by glaring at us over the script.
In the end, I think the film was all about learning about the creative process of art. Throughout the semester we’ve been analyzing films and talking about selling out. Now we had the opportunity to be filmmakers, making our own short indie flicks based on an unpublished, ambiguous play. It also meant learning to work cohesively and make compromises to create something great. So despite the stressful days and tiring nights, it was a lot of fun.
