Short Film Production Portfolio

A. Rationale
The film we made was a movie about cyberbullying and how these type of choices lead to unwanted outcomes by the victim. We wanted to inform people that this is a serious issue that goes on worldwide and it can't just be ignored. Because very day teens are committing suicide or hurting themselves because of what other people say. The audience we were making the film for was mainly teens because this is where the problem is the worst; amoung high school teenagers. This film is used as those teens unspoken words calling for help. Those 3 simple words "I need help" may be the hardest to say when going through this kind of stuff, but in this film we see how Selena, a high school teenager, gets the courage and help needed in order to admit those words.

B. Written Commentary
For this film, my group was just made up of two. We had to give each other 2 roles each since we didn't have other people. My partner took the roles of the director and writer. Whereas, I took the roles of the editor and cinematographer. We both came up with the film concept during the pitch stage. I came up with the idea and then the writer extended the idea and wrote up the whole script. My original idea really never changed when we had to write up our own treatments. We pretty much just added more detail to the story and what not. We had trouble coming up with a prank that was reasonable to our story line and climatic moment. After reviewing our idea with our teacher we finally came up with a prank that involved toilet paper being stuck to her butt.

There were quite a few problems/challenges that arose during the film and editing process. One of the challenges that came across that didn't have to do with my role in general was developing the climatic moment. We needed to show more development to the characters breaking point. I feel like the writing process is where we could of took another day or two to develop these kind of mistakes that we missed.

Another problem that I faced during shooting was the lighting. When I went into final cut pro to start editing, I looked at footage of when Selena is in her room and between two shots, the lighting is different. I wanted to go back and reshoot these scenes so that the lighting and the mood which be constant, but our actresses never had time to re-shoot scenes. What I ended up having to do was to use color correction on the scenes that the lighting looked orange in order for it to match the lighting in the other scenes This ended up working for the most part, but I could still see a little difference. There was 2 other continuity issues that we came across. One was something we couldn't control, which was the weather. During our outside school scenes, we had problems with continuity in weather. One day it was sunny out when we were filming and then two days later when we went to finish filming a scene it was cloudy. I realized this in the editing process. Only one shot was cloudy outside, so we decided to get our actresses together and re-shoot that scene. This scene would of literally took 5 minutes to shoot, but our actresses weren't giving us that 5 minutes to shoot it. This frustrated me a lot because we ended up having to stick with the footage we already had.


Another continuity issue we ran across was a door being closed in one scene and being open in another. The door is closed when Selena walks down her stairs to her room when she first gets home. The door "magically" opens when Tiffany comes running in to help Selena. I don't think many people realized it in the final film, but it bothered me in the editing process.

Overall I thought the film was well thought through for the most past. But evaluating it is where I see all the mistakes that could of made our film better. First off we had a couple scenes that dragged on too long and were necessary. It was mainly the travel scenes that would could of cut shorter. Also something that would of been necessary would of been too add flashbacks during the travel scenes to show how much bullying she has been through. This would of helped showed why she was making the decisions she did. This would of made the climatic moment more realistic.

I believe that our strongest point of our film was our cinematography. I made sure I captured the emotions in each scene and got a variety of different shots to help show the story. There was a lot of good close ups in our film like the mirror scene. I feel like the mirror scene and on is our best footage and editing techniques. Everything is cut good, especially when Selena throws the mirror on the ground. The match action cut used there is perfect! I also like the use of the classroom scene and how we used different camera movement in that scene. In that scene I just did a close up of the first girl mentioning the toilet paper on Selena's butt and then as the rumors kept spreading around, I walked around with the camera showing how the rumors keeping spreading around Selena since she was in the middle of it all.

















We only had one sound effect out of the whole film. The sound effect that we used was the school bell. We didn't have a recording of our actual school bell, so we had to go into the video main folder in our classroom and look for a bell. What we used in our film, was the closest thing we could find to sounding like an actual bell. For the musical side of the film, we had trouble finding a musical score that perfectly fits the movie. We ended up going into Logic Pro, which is like garage band but 1000x better. We ended  up putting together some violins and drums together. We were mainly looking for orchestral music to fit in with the emotions and actions of the film. In the very last scene where Tiffany is running to help Selena and when she gets there, there was already a score mixed together in logic called pendulum. When I heard it, I had to make sure the sound designer/director put it somewhere in our film. After reviewing it with her, we put it in the end of the film. It matched up pretty well with what was happening in the film.

For the most part we didn't have to direct our actors to act a certain way or what not. Our actresses have been apart of the drama class at our school, so they have been involved in plays and acting experiences before. We even told them to improve a little to the way they think it would sound best. In our own mistake some of the script was repetitive because we had our actresses saying something that they were already showing through their actions. This could of been an improvement by taking some dialogue out that wasn't necessary. Looking back on the film as a whole, we rarely had problems with our actresses and acting, but we did have scheduling problems here and there, but we worked around it.

Overall, I think our film was pretty good. I mean we definitely could of taken a little more time during the script part because it would of helped to notice our mistakes in the dialogue. It would of also helped to add more in order to make the climatic moment more intense. These little mistakes do count in the end, because by adding flashbacks, it would of helped developed her insecurities and why she lead herself to the decision she tried to make. In conclusion, I think the film was good and I'm proud of it.