Inhabited – a real final project.

Our eighteen minute film of our interpretation of Inhabited was probably one of the most tedious and difficult projects I have ever had to do. It required team work and cooperation with four other people, all with different time schedules, ideas, and visions of this film. It  wasn’t until this project that I remembered why I had always hated group projects. However, as much as I may hate them, I can’t deny that I always have an amazing time watching the results of all our hard work.

So to begin this film we were a bit stuck. We had to make many decisions on how to dress up, do we decorate the room, do we use a room with no doors, do we dim the lights, do we use the lights on full brightness, and even how we will go about including those in our group who don’t want to be filmed. As we started, after maybe five lines we came across the biggest problem of them all however. How on Earth could we act and remember our two word, constantly interrupting, breaking, pausing, screaming, trembling lines? Then however aside from the remembering lines situation, came the problem of how dynamic the film would be. At one point, we had to figure out how to move the camera, the actors and actresses, how to keep to audience interested and make the piece flow. It’s incredible how unforeseen problems led to even more unforeseen problems because in figuring that out, we had to decide on the best places to cut the lines so that important lines would not be separated such as Spyder’s mega-long dialogues that seemed to go on an on. I’d say these three decisions were probably the most difficult. I’ve never had so much respect for actors since filming this project. It took maybe eight hours to film fifteen minutes. Whether the actors and actresses go through intense line memorization or have to do the constant retake because lines can’t remembered, what they do is overall incredible.

Now along with all the  movie filming problems faced came actual personal problems. Looking back at it I have to laugh, but during our five hour long sessions of filming, as stress levels and exhaustion levels increased, so did tensions amongst us all. At one point our “studio set” became a sarcastic, tense, and scream-ridden room. None of us could agree, nor empathize with one another. For example while I was getting annoyed at Waseem for expecting us to memorize an entire page within ten seconds AND also have our motions thought out, he was getting frustrated with us for forgetting lines, having to take over 10 retake for a 30 second long scene, and for laughing unprovoked while practicing lines. This movie was really a trial of patience for us all. However, after all is done, I believe we made a great movie.

After the film was done, I came to my own conclusions on how I would have changed it and will if we ever have another project similar to this one again. First of all, all the lights will be turned on and just have the brightness edited in the movie maker as well as add film effects in the movie movie maker. I would also change the filming style a bit. As opposed to cutting a scene on one persons face and then making the next scene begin on the same face in the same general area, I would Mae it so that when the scene cuts it cuts to a different view so that the film flows more smoothly. Whatever the case, the project is done now and I’m just glad it’s still came out amazing. I really enjoyed your class Professor Healey and I hope I can take a other one of your classes in the future. You really took my perspective of education away from just the common reading textbooks, studying for quizzes and tests, and writing essays. You made me consider and analyze social problems in the context of art, and that was truly mind blowing. Writing blogs, reading movies and plays, seeing live performances (whether I enjoyed them or not) was really a different educational experience, a more liberal one that I feel high school students are often deprived of. I think it often hinders their ability to be creative and to question what they are told, and I really think your class is a very untraditional one that goes against that. I can’t wait to hopefully have you again as my teacher.