Initial ideas: I created this film to visualise the teenage experience of many during recent isolation and pandemic situations, contrasting the difficulties of online learning in isolation with the freedom of summer and missing times with friends. It became a great creative outlet for me just producing a product that really highlighted how the last year has felt , but i am also happy with my final film from its technical aspects. My first ideas came from a few different amateur student films i had found online about quarantine experiences such as ‘Numb’ by Liv McNeil and ‘Quarantine Perspective’ by Myles Dean. From these i chose a few specific camera shots i wanted to reflect in my footage, as well as the time-lapse idea from ‘Numb’. Through the initial ideas i developed them during the editing process to add my own style, deciding to create the isolation time-lapse, but layering it over chosen videos from summer to show the extreme contrasts in a single shot sequence – which overall i think created a really impactful ending to my film.

Filming: Overall i thoroughly enjoyed the filming process for my project. My film was split into three different sections, where before each shoot i had fully planned each individual shot to make the filming process easier and precise. The first section is all based in my bedroom, focusing on the struggles of online learning. I kept this section basic, using simple shots and minimal audio as i wanted it to allow the space for a build up throughout the rest of the film, and slowly introduce the main themes of the film. I used a quick and simple time-lapse sequence to show the unproductive passing of time felt during quarantine which would then link to the dramatic ending sequence in the film, and introduced a few short archived videos from summer to initially show the feelings of missing times of freedom. The second section was the most enjoyable and fun to film. I was very lucky when it came to the day of filming, catching a beautiful sunset which made all of the shots look stunning naturally. I had a friend help film this, using a high tech stabiliser for a phone, directing them through what angles i was looking for, and discovered that if you held the stabiliser up high, it created an aerial, drone looking point of view which i thought was a really unique angle (inspired by shots from Myles Deans short film). I combined different shots of me walking through fields with a few skating shots for some diversity, switching between third and first person perspectives, with the overall aim to create a general visualisation of ‘freedom’. The final section of my film was about creating a lasting, impactful message that encapsulated my whole idea of contrasting the stagnation of isolation to the feelings of freedom and missing the fun times during summer. At first i was planning on filming each section of the time-lapse everyday after a few weeks and filming later in each day to capture the slow decline with light, but instead realised it would be much easier to film it all at once, ensuring my tripod wouldn’t be knocked out of place and the composition of the camera would be the exact same. So between each shot i changed clothes, moved a few objects around my bed, and once i was halfway through, used my blinds to slowly control how dark the scene looked. This allowed the editing process to be much easier and i could choose which background archived videos would match up with the footages lighting.

Editing: The editing process for this film was quite long as i had many specific sequences and transitions i wanted to include, as well as a very clear idea of the way i wanted the film to flow throughout. I have multiple blog posts on the detailed editing process of the three sections, but there were some key points i think came out well. With the filming process as well, i knew i wanted to have certain footage that would act as transitions themselves and lead into the next scene, so i made sure especially between the field and time-lapse section, i had a a separate clip of me physically leaning into the time-lapse to clearly link those parts well. I made a fair few changes from my idea of the time-lapse to the final product when editing, as once i started i saw lots of areas for improvement. I changed the length of each clip from one second to just less than half a second as found the sequence to be too short, and then actually used the other half of it and added it somewhere else to make the time-lapse longer to have time to fit in more archived videos. Last minute i also decided to edit the time-lapse video to grow every few clips to take over the screen until at the end it had fully covered over the background videos, which i thought added some dramatism to the sequence. This grew with the background music, which i had slowly brought in during the second sequence, however edited the audio of all the field and background videos during the time-lapse to varying levels so it seemed as though the dramatic music grew even more throughout the film than it originally had. I also used lots of gradual and continuous fade transitions throughout the film, mostly to transition between archived videos. I was most proud of one gradual fade that i used at the end of the freedom section, to switch from ‘live’ filming of the field to the video playing on a laptop screen and slowly moving back to a wider view. I think this turned out really well and was effective in creating a hybrid of both the main themes in one shot.

Final thoughts: Overall i felt my short film was successful and i am very happy with how it turned out. I think this project really helped develop my technical skills needed for editing on Adobe Premier Pro, as well as structuring a short film in an effective way to tell a narrative. After uploading my film to YouTube i received lots of positive feedback from viewers, with the video now having over a hundred views, which i think really helped solidify my confidence in the outcome of this project. The inclusion of different filming styles such as the time-lapse sequence and experimenting with different filming technology for the drone-like footage allowed me to explore styles i don’t normally use and i think brought a unique aspect to my film. If i were to change anything about my project i think i would expand my research of a few more artists and bring in their styles to my own, to help experiment with a few more underlying themes and develop my narrative skills. To conclude, i’m very happy with the outcome of this project and put in a lot of effort to try and reflect the shared experiences of the past year in a way that allows many people to identify with, as well as express my own perspective in a rewarding and creative way.