The Movie

Let’s just say the movie is nothing like I thought it would be, especially because some of the people I thought would be in it wasn’t. Another thing is that a lot of the things that were described within the script was not included in the film. Sometimes the directors would put their own spin on their movies and that’s their decision. I think the movie turned out fine, as fine as it could be without breaking the structure of our original ideas. Do I like what came out of it? Honestly, no. I feel like the movie wasn’t even close to what I had in my mind. It became some branch universe that probably happened at some point of time but not what was in my mind.

The Script

Writing the script actually wasn’t that hard, we’re taking scenes from the book anyways. We chose a scene that involved burning but wasn’t too strong in theme, we wanted something with burning(because it was very important to the book) yet not let it be a person who burned.

We couldn’t.

Most scenes with burning involved a person being burned alive, so instead, we just edited out and changed the scene so that nobody got burned. Honestly, if we just let someone get burned, it would have been a lot stronger, represent much more. There’s something about darker themes that really just requires darker content to help bring out the true feeling of dread.

Storyboard

We weren’t that good with the storyboard, mostly because we weren’t really good at drawing and we were a little bit too lazy while doing it. We had a few too many things going on while that was happening so I guess we didn’t try to go 100%. Thankfully, the storyboard didn’t do much in the project, I ended up just telling my partner how I want the part to look and she just took my word for it instead of looking at some paper with some drawings. I think that is the way things should be done, storyboards should just be a small outline and shouldn’t be considered too heavily when actually filming the movie.

Thoughts on the Project

The funny thing about this project, these are all actually the redone version for the original ideas. In the beginning, we were doing another book and another scene, but that scene was deemed too mature for 15-year-old teens so we had to rewrite everything. Here I realized something, not everyone understands literature as it is, sometimes certain mature content is necessary to make a scene truly beautiful and…well some people can’t take it. Not that I don’t understand their point, I do, but I just don’t agree with them. I like mature content similar to how I like my free speech, unfiltered and in its original form. Darkness requires dread to come to pass, and today it will not be suffered.

A big problem I realized when I saw clips of filming was the casting, and the emotions that have to be brought out by the actors for a successful scene. My partner sends me clips of the progress for the filming often and I take a look at them to see how things are going. Not saying anything about the actors, but it’s hard to really describe these emotions within a paper of white and words in black. In a way, I knew that a part of the actor would become the character, the personality, flaws, and feelings of the actors would be integrated into the presentation of the characters. And when I saw some of the performances of the actors, I kept saying the same thing to myself:

“this isn’t what I thought of, or even what I wanted. I can’t tell myself whether this is better or worse, but it is what the character is now.”

Sometimes you just have to accept the things that happen, it’s not that I can take their bodies to act out every scene myself. My partners and I knew that we don’t want everything to get frozen up during the filming process, so I guess we just sorta let any small imperfections slide.

But most importantly, I was fortunate enough to have worked with a partner that I enjoyed working with, making this experience a lot more enjoyable than it could have been. All the grades, work, and academic classes cannot win you the trust of a friend. But it can bring you a person to meet, as it did for me, as it did for my classmates. The project wasn’t fun, the work wasn’t fun either but the partnership was, it was always the point of the project, wasn’t it? For us to work with people that we aren’t familiar with, new people that we may hate or love, people that we have to work with no matter what we feel for them.

“Teamwork Makes Dreams Work”- John C. Maxwell