The Film Senior Narrative Project is known to be the most difficult and time-consuming assignment in our two years here at Freestyle. That’s true in part because we learn how to use more advanced film equipment, how to write a screenplay, and how to record audio/sync that audio back with video in Premiere. We operated not only audio recorders, but also mics, LED/tungsten lights, and dollies, all of which we didn’t have access to. This allowed us to light our film so it would look more appealing and include tracking and other moving shots without having to do hand-held shots. This was very exciting because it gave us the opportunity to expand on creative decisions for the film. The senior narrative is also a group project so I worked with Jordan and a lot of our classmates helped us on set when filming.
Synopsis of our film (a synopsis is an outline of the plot of a film):
We shared our synopsis and got green lit by Mr. T, which means that as our producer, he is formally approving to our project and allowing it to move forward from the development phase to pre-production. Then, we drafted and revised a screenplay, editing the story until we were satisfied.
Next, Jordan and I lined the script (lined it and also highlighted props/costumes/extras and wrote notes for how we envisioned the film). We created the shot list below which is a list of every single shot we wanted to get to fully capture our vision in the screenplay.
Some shooting production photos featuring Bandit 🙂
Our film is titled Te Dua, which means “I love you” in Albanian. We had a great time researching and learning more about the Muslim culture to make this film as professional, accurate, and well informed as possible.
After five months of hard work, we finished Te Dua!
Additional links displaying our film process:
I am so glad that we got to learn more about pre-production and how much longer the process for films with dialogue take. We got to use a lot professional equipment and it was a great experience working with a lot of classmates, friends, and actors.
Film exercises that we did during the narrative unit to learn how to use film lighting/camera/mic equipment and write screenplays: