I got the amazing opportunity to compete in the Kansas high school 24 hour film festival, and it was an amazing experience for everyone.

 We started on Friday October 16th at 3:00pm. They gave us a whole long list of prompts, lines, camera shots & angles and props that we had to choose from to make our video. There were only three of us so we had to use our time pretty efficiently at this point in time because we only had about an hour to come up with our story so that we could still film in the day light. As we drove to pick up our actress for the video we wrote everything down on paper and started to plan because with so many things to choose from we couldn't decide (prompts). By the time we got to our actresses house we had chosen the third prompt of 'obstacles to love'. We came up with the basic plot line of: A teenage lesbian with strict parents realizes the only way she can be with the person she loves is to tell her parents who she truly is... So we talked this over with our actress and she was okay with acting lesbian but we ran into the problem that she was our only actress, and so came the challenge of finding another actress in a short amount of time that is able to stay up with us late into the night.

After a waiting a long time to hear back from our friends on that topic we decided to ditch that idea and find another one and landed back in square one which incidentally is the prompt we chose to pursue next. After talking and talking for what seemed like ages we all kind of agreed on ' the pursuit of happiness' and we hashed out this plot line: An orphaned teenager in a abusive foster home has enough and decides she needs to get a way. She reaches to a friend in order to go visit her parents grave... We had our idea and we went with it. We got amazing shots of the sun, the car trip and loads of other stuff and we got what we needed around 12:00pm. We got home and imported the footage and as we were looking through all of it we all agreed on one thing: we hated it.

So yet again we scraped the idea and tried again. We stuck with the same prompt of 'pursuit' but this time cam at the idea much, much differently. Because our team is extremely good at music videos that's how we treated this. Being the month of Halloween we went and picked out some ominous/ creepy copy write free music and then asked our selves " What kind of music video would we make for this?" and we took inspiration from a video called 'The Smiling Man' (here) and from a project we had to do in film class freshman year called 'The Chase'  which is exactly what it sounds like: a basic chase scene. So in the middle of the night we grabbed all of the necessary equipment and hit the streets. Filming all though out a neighborhood is pretty difficult because cars would drive through the shot when we were going for a "dead of night" theme. We filmed at the near by elementary school and the road leading to it using the street lights as our source of lighting in the movie and unfortunately we got a lot of really grainy shots but the composition still looked good.

Once filming was all said and done we went back to the house and imported our new footage. We edited through the night not getting any sleep what so ever and emerged from the basement with a finished video that we where all proud of. Then we hoped on our bus with the other teams from our school and set off to Wichita, KS for judging and awards. We ended up winning 2 awards for our video: Best Cinematography & Best Editing. Which is funny because as we were filming we realized we didn't really have a story and decided to try and win either Cinematography or Editing and we got both so that's cool! Click here to watch the finished video!