An invitation to a film festival brought back memories of my filmmaking interim freshman year in high school. A vagabond trio of at least temporary fanatics, we created two short films that generated more rave reviews than the other group (of about 7 people) that created their own film as part of the weekly project.
The first one we did was titled "Stop all Commercialism," and basically it was a series of silly ways to express our views of the endless advertisements so dutifully crammed onto our TV sets during and between shows and other broadcasted events. We had a scene of us painting the title, followed by random clips of commercials that happened to be on TV that day, and a hilarious animation of four rocketships zeroing in on a can of pop, causing it to explode on contact.
The other, which didn't take nearly as much work to film, was titled "Nathan Uses the Force." Basically I walked around secretively in my winter coat (Interim Week took place in November, so it wasn't unbearable to walk around in it), and I went to an indoor balcony and brought out my DoughBoy effigy. I dropped it over the edge, and then had to use some magical power to bring it back into my hand (thanks to Ben, the film brain, they had me drop it again and we just recorded it in reverse), put it back into my coat, and I walked out of the building. [Not to mention we changed the picture to black-and-white after editing.]
Alongside the songwriting workshop I participated in Interim Week of my senior year, the filmmaking was my favorite project. Although I can't really complain about any of the interim projects I did... after all, the other two years I painted a mural and studied comic books. So I can easily say Interim Week was my favorite part of the school year.
...which brings me to tonight. Ian IM'ed me and invited me to a film festival at his school a mere few hours before it actually started. Getting a chance to hang out with one of my friends, I was happy to go, but I was also hoping to watch one of the films that he created from his Colloquim period project.
Unfortunately, some other people in his group somehow sabotaged the film, so it never got shown. The films that were shown, however, ranged from pretty good to kind of crappy. So, in order not to hurt anyone's feelings, I shall comment on only one film. It was titled "1,000 Satellites" and it at least had somewhat of a plot. It's hard to say what all happened, as it had sophisticated music in the background, almost no dialogue, and interesting written messages stuck throughout the whole film (both within and in-between scenes). Suffice to say, it was well put-together, and it had some decent humor.
So anyway, I finally got to visit Northside Prep High School, where Ian just graduated, and where the film festival was held.
No comments:
Post a Comment