Project Reflection

Reflecting a little bit

I wanna start by saying that for my last year of high school, in my senior year I really wanted to take a class that I would never see myself taking (this class) but I have to say that I learned a lot this year, this class made me think in such a creative way that not all of the classes allow you to.
Now, this project was a rollercoaster of emotions. It is true that more 3 heads think better than one, since the beginning at brainstorming the ideas for the movie to the final touches, I noticed that I'm not very quick at making certain decisions because I tend to be a perfectionist. In a lot of moments, I had to ask for my friends' opinion and then reassure what I was thinking, or remake it. On the other hand, with this pandemic, I know that for many of my classmates and I was really difficult to continue with the project, either because of time management of just things that happened and made the production process more difficult.
There were a lot of inconveniences along the way, the title, for example, it was a process of two days. It was a long list of possibilities that varied according to the genre, to Brandon's mental illness, to Thomas and Brandon's friendship, and the internal problem that was happening in Brandon's head. After a lot of consulting and list-making, I was able to decide the perfect movie title.


I wanted my movie idea to be something related to the health field since I'm really passionate about it and I want to become a health professional. I decided to represent a character that you don't see in many films, a mental illness person with schizophrenia. It also involves that self-doubt and lack of self-reliance. Since my character is a person who is emotionally dependable on someone else, who is not even real, I wanted to include the dependability and lack of emotional freedom that a person gets when they are so attached to someone and suddenly that person leaves. It does just leave, that person takes away the feeling of comfortability of the emotionally dependable person. I based this idea on a personal story, it is not the case that I have schizophrenia or that I was emotionally dependable on someone, but that when I was little I had a friend who was so attached to me that I never realized that she was missing her freedom of feeling whatever she wanted, she would ask me if something was right or wrong and depending on what I would say, she would follow that idea. One day I just left and started to talk less and less to her and realized that I was doing her a favor.

Fast forwarding the situation, I had to change completely my film opening because of the coronavirus pandemic. The week that I was going to record, people started to self-quarantine, I got sick, and was home alone without a ride. But that didn't stop me from thinking of a solution, I created a whole new opening with the same characters and same plot, but I created the pictures and the mise-en-scene.
The editing process was I think the most difficult part, it became a routine of staring at the screen trying to make the problems fix themselves, to editing and deleting a lot of material.

In the end, I can say that I'm really proud and passionate of how it came out and wanna thank everybody who had to put out with me these long weeks of process. Also, I'm really happy that I got to learn all these techniques and be able to apply them not just to a WhatsApp video that my mom asks me to edit, but to a project that got out a lot of my creative self.