My Multi-Track Continuity Story

My short film was called "Hey! That's My Hat!"  It is made in the style of old silent move era films.  It involves one character chasing after another character in order to retrieve his hat.  The idea for the film was pretty easy to get to.  We decided that we would work on a film in which there was a chase, and a point in which the two characters meet with one another.  The production of the film went extremely smoothly due to our pre-production planning.  We knew exactly what we wanted to do and we decided how we were going to do it.  

We had mainly only successes with our shooting.  It seemed like we knew exactly what we wanted to do and there were only one or two scenes we had to re-take.  Since our film was modeled after a silent movie, we did not record any dialogue, and our audio was mostly music, white noise, and one sound effect.  It took some work trying to line everything up perfectly.  As for editing, it was mostly a matter of cutting out any excessive material and lining up the video with the audio.  Our shots were already taken in order so there was not too much of an issue with continuity.  

I really enjoyed editing the piece.  It was fun picking the proper sound track.  We found some great old-time music that went with our theme perfectly.  We found some recordings of a record spinning that filled the blank spots with audio that also fit the film well.  There was a point when we showed the character who took the hat, and we wanted to play a dun-dun-dunnnnnn sound effect.  It took some work to time the sound effect with the video properly, but it ended up working out. 

I think the things that we learned in class that helped me the most were lessons in camera-work and also lessons in artistic expression.  I think that we brought the story along pretty well with the use of our camera angles and different shots.  we kept it by the book.  We used long shots, medium long shots, medium close ups.  We also used our zoom and panning shots.  In addition to that, all that we learned about artistic expression, and using what we want to tell our story best helped me feel pretty free in the production of the film.  I didn't feel confined, and I feel like Buck and I got to make exactly what it was that we planned on making.