One Word Film Reflection Essay

One Word Film Reflection Essay 

By: Sharmeen Shivji

    

    This short film was a very learning and exciting experience. The concept of only using clips that we shoot, of no dialogue, and of expressing one word just within 2 minutes was something interesting to take on. The word we based our film on was “stress”, we felt that this was something that every student has gone through and could relate with. By only filming in school, we felt that our word with fit perfectly with our setting and it helped convey our  word better to the audience.

    To be completely honest, my partner and I came up with this word within minutes of being assigned this film, we really felt that this word would not only be easier to convey (I mean it was so hard) but also we just have experienced stress so much recently it was like a match made in heaven. The reason we chose to show a math test countdown, specifically, was because we both have the same math teacher and lets just say math isn’t the easiest right now. This film is basically our lives at least once a week. Anyways, towards the beginning we had a basic idea of what we wanted to do, however we had to figure out all the technical aspects. We started by spit-balling ideas of what shots, angles, and movements to use and then we started to weed out the best ideas on a piece of paper. During the same class period we had a very “coordinated” plan and we started to film right away, to be honest we knew we had a basic idea and we felt we would build it up as we go.

    We started off by filming the small ideas we knew we wanted to include so then we would just have to put it all together at the end. We started our short film off with an establishing shot of our school to set the scene and to show the audience where the film would be taking place.

    We then filmed my partner getting out of class to set the tone that it was that specific class that was causing her stress. We also wanted to add a scene where while the character was doing math problems, the numbers would be coming off the paper, however, my partner and I aren’t that advanced in editing so we decided to use a candid shot with a blurring filter on instead.

    To add on, we set all the scenes to a low saturation to set the emotion of somber and to set a dull and grayish tone to the characters actions. By using low saturation we felt that we could get the audience to feel the sadness and stress that the character was feeling through the screen. 

    Additionally, we were having trouble capturing “stress” through sounds and music as we weren’t allowed to use any dialogue. All the searches that were coming up for “stressful music” were “How to relieve stress”, which as you can probably tell was exactly what we didn’t want. After 15 minutes of continuous searching we found a sound that induced paranoia and stress which was perfect for our film.

    In the end, we used a variety of different shots, angles, and movements including high angle, POV shot, over the shoulder shot, medium shot, tracking movements, etc. I really enjoyed doing this project as it was a new area for me to explore and it made me think outside the box. Also, Sophia and I worked really well together, as we were continuously bouncing ideas off each other and we worked very well together. I'm proud of how our “One Word Film” came out and I hope you enjoy watching! 

One Word Film