Our final this semester in my film class was a 3 day film challenge, and had to create an ~ 3 min short film with the concept of love/lost, forgotten/remembered stuff like that (watch it here). Ive never been too good at these sort of film challenges, sure I did a 24 hour short film festival and won 2 awards but we had more specific guidelines (here). This challenge was very open ended which allowed for a lot of creative choices which is very nice of our teacher, but my group consisted of the 3 most indecisive people in the whole class so this was a very big struggle.

      We finally decided that we could  make a movie trailer for a longer short film so that we didn't have to think of all the  plot points and it  didn't have to make  much sense as far as structure goes.
We then came up  with the idea to do a sort of  witchy video, ya know kinda sinister, kinda creepy,  with a lot of room to get super nice shots,  we also had to figure out what song we where going to make this trailer to because if it doesn't have music then it gets very boring and no one wants to watch that, and after a long search we picked  'Night time' by the xx.

     With no time to lose we grabbed the equipment we needed (Cannon 70D, L..E.D. light kit, tripods, extra batteries, glide track) and we went shopping. The first thing that we bought were candles because you cant to creepy witchy stuff without candles can you? (We got up to the check out counter and I swear the cashier thought we were going to do some satanic stuff because she gave us the weirdest look). Then we headed to our first location.

Our first location was just behind a suburban neighborhood pool on a running trail. There are plenty of trees and coverage there to defuse the natural light so that we could incorporate it in along with light from our light kit. So by the time we get there its like 8:30 so not too late but it was about 30 degrees out so our crew was bundled up, but the thing we were more concerned with would be the fact that we could be seen by the inhabitants of the houses around us and a group of teenagers in the middle of the "woods" setting up lights and making a bunch of noise. So the threat of the cops loomed over us, but it would be the first time we have had the cops called on us while filming. Anyway we wrapped up at our first location at around 11:00 and everyone went home, because we would  continue filming tomorrow morning.

The next day we all assemble at one of the crew members houses and prepare to head off.  Our second location was at a local park in a clearing we had found earlier this year (we do love our nature shots here at Olathe Northwest). Anyway we had to hurry because we had a pretty strict time schedule. For our film class, e-Communnication aka e-Comm, we could be called out of the class to film outside of school during school hours, so we only had about 2 hours before we had to get back to school and it was a pretty long drive so we had even less time. At this point we had figured out that we really wanted a desaturated look  to the film so we had to  adjust the camera settings from the previous night to match the over casted daylight that we had. Although I was the actor I also acted as Director and Cinematographer, so I would set up the shot with a crew member filling in for me and once I got the shot perfect we would switch and roll the camera. This made thee filming process a lot longer because I had to recheck the shot to make sure that the camera movement (if there was any) was at the pace we needed.

Our last location was at a crew members house on there patio. We had our candles but also a special piece of equipment, a ring light. I had bought this light a while ago but never found a use for it yet and I thought this would be a very good opportunity to try it out. So at the end of the video you can see a very nice close up of me with the ring light in my pupil as it cuts back and forth to me in the same position with yet another candle in my hand.

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