Week 8

This week was a turning point for our film group. A majority of our film was shot during this week and we have already sat down and edited most of the shot footage. Ed started things off with spending a day filming his portion of the film. He shot a majority of it and just needs a couple of interview scenes. It was fun watching the process figuring out camera positioning when we filmed the scene of Ed drawing. Joel brought out a desk that rolls from our room and used it as a dolly to have the camera circle Ed smoothly while he drew. Editing sections of the movie together has been a fun learning process. Joel knows how to do a lot of editing, and watching him edit makes it easy to learn. I will stop him if I don’t understand a particular editing technique, he will explain it, and then we move on. It has been a fast learning process, but it has also been fun.

Joel then took the helm of filming his movie. I sat with Joel during his editing process and am excited to see his film come together with the other films. The idea of blending our four films was debated this past week. We questioned whether or not we should truly try and intertwine the movies together or to have the four films just play in succession and not have much connection from one film to the other. In the end we decided to make bridges between films, but not to have the four segments be completely intertwined which we were going to do previously. The four films will now have minimal references to each other, and will mostly relate with the overall theme of the film. I brought up filming our transition segments sooner than later, but the rest of the group wants to wait till the end to film these transitions. So we will wait.

I filmed a big portion of my film this week too. I had a general idea of where and what I wanted to film but knew that once I got out to the filming location, ideas would flow into my mind and I would take the film in the next direction from there. When we were filming out on the “set” I could really feel this improvisation of filming come to me. I would direct Ed and Joel with the camera and then act out my scene. After we filmed a scene, I would just have an image of what I wanted to come next. This was usually off the cusp and just felt right. I can relate this improvised session of filming with improvising on my guitar with my band in Seattle. I may not fully plan out my next segment, but when I get there, I can just feel how it should sound, and in the case of filming, I can feel how it should look.

This past weekend I went to Prague, and realized that I haven’t been in Berlin for the past 5 weekends. I feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment with exploration, which was one of my major goals when studying abroad. I feel like the main character from the movie we watched this week entitled “Run Lola Run.” Every weekend I find myself picking up the phone and running around the same Europe (berlin for Lola), but a different city every week (story line for Lola). I hope that last part made some sense.