Experimental? Bring it on.

Six groups. Six themes. One goal: to make a movie. Each person in our class was separated into one of the six groups and assigned a theme (horror, action, comedy, romance, experimental, and drama). My group was assigned experimental… when I first heard this I was confused… I had no clue what that meant. Basically I think it is anything outside of the box that challenges the viewer’s perception of what a movie “should be.” Each person in the groups is assigned a specific job—director, editor, camera operator, and sound editor. I’m the editor, which I’m pretty excited about. I feel that I can manipulate the footage we capture to make a very compelling film. Mariam is the director, so I’ll be working closely with her. Matt is the cameraman and Jo Beth is the sound editor. We all seem to be clicking very well since our first meeting during the last class, and I’m excited about the ideas we have come up with already.

Before we knew that our genre was experimental we brainstormed several unique ideas for our short film. Our first intent was to keep our story light, meaning that we did not want anything too complicated or draining. Also the film is only nine minutes long so we wanted to leave the audience with a positive impression, and that would be difficult to do with a serious subject with the allotted amount of time. I think a general consensus was that we wanted to focus our film from the perspective of a main character, probably a girl, who was having a unique day. We aren’t sure if the world will be ending or if she’ll be going on an intriguing date, but we want the audience to see life from her eyes. The audience will be welcomed into all of her actions and possibly even her thoughts. This could be slightly disturbing, because no one really knows what is going on inside another person’s head—that’s the “experimental” aspect of it. I think these ambitions will take a serious amount of planning and strategy as to how we want to portray her point of view. One thought we had was to make the camera be in front of the character, so that we never actually see her… we just see what she sees. It may even be unsteady at times. I’m really excited to make this movie! Next step, plan plan plan.