Concept
This was my first project so to speak that was full on entertainment, unless we count the channel I made at 12 years of age - which you can see here: My Personal Youtube Channel
It was made for a course in my 12th grade. The concept was simply to create a short (1-2 minutes max) with the theme being books.
Thinking of this as an extremely exciting opportunity, our group asked if we could go over those two minutes, to which we were granted permission!
From there we went straight into the concept of entering books, physically and mentally and wether how that could affect a person ...
How it went
We had no budget, limited time for shooting it and editing it so it was mostly done in three locations near us, with one scene having to be completely cut due to lack of time. However we pulled through and delivered a video which made the whole class laugh (in a good way) and surprised at the effort put in (most groups just had someone sitting somewhere reading a small passage from a book with some underlying meaning - not to knock them, they were all great!).
Throughout the process we made all the mistakes, wrong angles, losing footage, and not being able to reshoot any of it since we only noticed in the few days we edited it ... Then even more mistakes while editing, namely after showing it in class, going back to edit it again to add bloopers, only to not notice we cut and compressed the footage so much we cut out so much of the screen in the uploaded version on Youtube.
To add to that, after uploading it initially to youtube, and saying we would go back to it again, we lost the original file, so what is up is what remains of it.
Lessons learned
You may wonder why I have this up here in my Portfolio, you may say it isn't entirely relevant to what I'm currently doing now is it? Well partially yes, but this was the first time I found that doing something creative brought me fulfilment and joy, although I tend to enjoy more technical challenges alongside it now as well.
It also taught me that rushing something just to get it ready isn't the best idea, and that scoping out a project to the allotted time is one of the keys to success, no matter what you do. If you look at the first "in-book scene" you'll see clearly had more time devoted to it, before we realised, oh hey, we have one week to finish shooting and editing! But hey, if nothing else, I managed to sneak a bit of my favorite childhood game franchise in there!
To check out the full short (in the low quality in which it still survives) watch here:
P.S. As a side note, one of the members of the cast (and crew - it was the four of us throughout!) has since passed away, and the mere existence of this always brings me joy, hope it brings some joy and laughs to you as well!