Unexpected Killer

Process

During the 4th quarter JJ, Stockton, Kacie, and I worked on a film called unexpected killer. We started out trying to come up with a couple of ideas to film for our story but none of them were working. We tried to come up with something that wasn't so depressing or serious but that is all we could come up with. It was starting to get frustrating that we couldn't come up with any ideas until Brooke suggested that we do a video about a hit and run, so we just went with that idea.

We pretty much skipped the packet that we were supposed to do and went straight to storyboarding. I was in charge of the storyboarding most of the time. Meanwhile working on that, JJ worked on the script writing. Later we came back and met up again and we all had a look at the script. Stockton and I looked at the script and thought that it was terrible but Kacie thought it was okay. Stockton and I wanted to try to take charge of the script writing because we feel as if it had a lot of unnecessary words and scenes in it. We also felt like the script had too many references to the TV show called Dexter. Stockton and I felt as if we needed to completely write a new script but we didn't have time to so we just went with it.

When we started filming, we had little time to film for a 16 page script, so we ended up cutting out a lot of the script. We worked together very well while filming and built ideas off of each others ideas. Our shots that we got were pretty good overall but we probably could have maybe changed our panning shots a bit. Also while filming, I noticed that the actors were not staying in the same position in each shot and I wanted to film those shots again but we were low on time so we had to work with what we had.

Challenges

I am not gonna lie, we had so many challenges while filming this short film. I'm gonna start with the first thing that went wrong, our script. I absolutely hated out script, it's awful and probably one of the worst scripts I have ever read. It had too many references to TV shows and it had a lot of unnecessary sciences and dialogue. Most of the dialogue was something that a person wouldn't say in real life and it made the outcome of the video kind of cheesy.

Another challenge was the actors. We had one good actor and she didn't even talk, and that was Katie who played the dead girl. She was out best actor. All of the actors in our video were pretty bad actors and could not get their lines right. Now of course I know that people are going to screw their lines up and that is no big deal but if you look at all the shots that we had, we had a lot of screw ups with lines. Most of our actors could not act and we probably should have hired other people from outside of class.

The last challenge was the editing of the video. I realized while editing that the story line, our story line got very weak. Our video couldn't hold a good story line because the script wasn't good and the acting was terrible. Instead of trying to make the video more serious the video turned into more of a joke and had awful comedy instead of being serious. I kept editing the video and I absolutely hate it but I guess I have to deal with it. I finished my video and I thought it turned out better than I thought it would but it was still pretty terrible in the end and I am not happy with the outcome.

Things I would change

If I could change things, I would change everything. I would change the script because it was poorly written. I would also change the actors (except for Katie) because their acting was bad and they kept forgetting their lines. The last thing I would change is my video editing, I think it could have been better if the story line had more power and strength instead of having a weak story line.

Experiences

My experiences with my group were pretty fun. I honestly had a lot of fun filming with my group. I honestly had one of the best groups ever but the only thing was that we needed to manage time a bit better but we handled it pretty well, even with the outcome of our video. I enjoyed working with the extra characters such as John (who played the killer) and I also enjoyed working with Zoey even though she wasn't in our group. We all had some struggles in our group because Kacie had swimming and Stockton couldn't start after school at all and John couldn't get out of class. We managed to make it through though and everything turned out better than expected in the end.