Exunt - the movie
I've been behind on documenting - heavy load and stress. I'm now playing catch up, since I have just turned in my last final!
Storyboading
The process for our movie started off with a very abstract concept: playing chess with death. Most of us agreed that we wanted it to be a philosophical mood piece, and we were debating making it a silent movie or not. The most important thing for me while making this movie was aesthetics. I wanted it to look beautiful and dark, because I felt those were the factors that would set the tone of the movie.
Our storyboard was done textually. We had agreed on a simple plot and chronological event order, however abstract. We didn't want to limit ourselves, and I think we all were open to see where the movie would take itself. We all agreed on the basic plot, and the things we couldn't agree on (e.g. the ending), we wrote down mulitple endings and at the time decided we would shoot more than one during production.
Production
We met on a Sunday afternoon at Baek's apartment. We needed a set with a bedroom, and a sparsely furnished room with just a table and a chair. During production, things we had originally planned in our storyboard changed on the spot because we liked something more, or a happy accident occured, etc. It was great that everyone was flexible and we all had the same common visual ideas, so that worked out great.
I played death, so I had to paint my entire forearm and hand in white. Dean played our protaganist I. Baek was the cameraman for the entire movie. Corrine played death's shadow in the shadow scenes. All of us contributed to scene setup, sequences, ideas, and visuals.
It took us all day to shoot, some scenes took A LOT of takes, while others took only one. Many of the scenes were impromptu scenes that we had not orignally planned, but we all wanted to add into our movie.
Post-production
It was difficult to have all of us meet for editing, so we decided that whoever had time would go in and work on our project. We had all initially agreed on the basic idea and sequence, and we all had the same vision for the final product.
I worked on capturing our footage. Most of our footage looked extremely dark on the computer monitor, but it was fine on the TV. Lesson learned: always have good lighting, and make it darker post-production, because going from dark to lighter degrades the quality. During production we had agreed to use natural light, and didn't realize that it would look different or extremely dark on a computer screen. Dean did the bulk of the editing, and was extremely creative in making the loss of quality and he darkness of our footage work to our advantage. I was extremely pleased by the outcome.
We had all agreed we wanted no dialog in the movie. Dean had woke up on morning and wrote a song that worked perfectly with our piece, so we used it. It all came together nicely.
It is extremely important to trust the talent that you have with you, when working in groups. I think the simple, abstract plot line, the shared vision, and the group trust that we had established resulted in a really good short. I am proud of it, since this is the first movie I've ever worked on or contributed to. I would love to go through this process again and work on some ideas I have.
I will post the movie once I figure out a way to compress it!