RIVERBANK: A Tale of Sophomore Video Tragedy

VIDEO FINAL:

"RIVERBANK"

By Drew McCall

A tale of tragedy, wallets, time constraints, improvised acting 
and a whole lot of beef jerky.

The Beginning:

There once was a sophomore video final...

It didn't seem like much to my group, the assignment seemed like any other project we were assigned. The idea was simple: create a short film using what we've learned in this class. Write the script, plan it out, film it using the six shot sequence, and edit it together into one nice package. To Tanner Daniels, Diego Astorga, Bryce Prichard and myself, this was just another project, just another group. The only things that set this project apart for us were these requirements:

1). You must include a water bottle.

2). You must include a hat.

3). You must include a purposeful source of light.

4). You must include the words, "Lights Out".

So around these requirements we formulated our story about a group of guys that go camping in the woods. The guys find a book packed away in one of their bags, which tells the story of a camping trip (much like their own) that takes place in the woods.

The group in the book disappears one by one until one person is left: the killer.

Everything that happens in the book begins happening to the real camping group, and the guys begin to turn on one another in fear of who is the killer. 

In the end, the killer is the one that put the book into the hands of the group: a creepy sociopathic teen that was bullied by the members of the group.

It seems so simple, right?

We wrote the script, blissfully ignorant of what was to come. 

What seemed so simple turned out to be as tragic and surprising as the story we set out to create.

The Middle:

Our troubles began early on, when we were still writing the script. Due to the busy schedules of everyone in our group paired with the length of our script we lost precious time to pre-production. We ended up being one of the last groups to start filming. The final script, after several attempts to shorten it to fit our 3-5 minute time constraint ended up being 11 pages. This was our first mistake.

MISTAKE #1:

Script was too long.

Unaware of how ambitious we were being with our storyline, we set out to film the first few shots with our actors. We wanted to film with actual theatre people, so I called up my friends in the theatre department and improv troupe (take note of this, it will become important later on), and we decided to start filming on a simple Tuesday night. 

With the element of hindsight, we should've stopped while we were ahead.

When talking to Will, the captain of our school improv team and E-Comm video nerd, he said that we needed to get some high quality audio equipment, otherwise we wouldn't be able to hear the actors. Since our script relied almost solely on dialogue, he reasoned that high quality audio was essential. This leads us to mistake number 2.

MISTAKE #2:

Our script required us to utilize equipment

we didn't know how to work.

Here's where the real mistakes begin.

So after buying some beef jerky for our actors to make it look like a camping trip (which later became the only thing that kept our morale up as this video went to crap), we gathered our four actors together and began discussing schedules...

MISTAKE #3:

We used actors that had busy schedules before we 

realized it or cared to ask them about their time commitments.

We found a date that would work and asked them to meet at a wooded area outside of Bryce's house....

MISTAKE #4:

We wrote the entire film to take place outdoors just days

before a low pressure system would cause it to rain during our

time that we planned on filming.

We asked our actors to film from 5-8....

MISTAKE #5:

We wrote the script to take place at dusk so we only had a

few hours each day to film.

We also asked them to film in a park down the road to film a few more scenes in a few days...

MISTAKE #6:

We planned on filming in two separate locations.

The list could go on, but I like to stop at 6 because it's the number of the devil, and it felt like he was trying to sabotage it from the beginning.

So here's how the dominoes fell.

We didn't film all the shots since the script was too long.

We lost time on location since we were operating a boom pole to capture audio.

When we were able to film all our actors had schedule conflicts.

When everyone was able to film it rained outside.

When we actually filmed we only got a few minutes of footage since we only had a few hours to film.

And finally, we didn't even get to filming in the second location.

The End:

By the time we started filming at the second location, we had 1 minute of film to show for our 2 weeks of work. And the project itself was due in 2 days.

So what did we due? Well, after EVEN MORE complications that drove everyone to the edge (I'm just going to skip over this part so that I don't suffer more PTSD), we ditched it. Threw it out. There was nothing left to do. With little more than a few hours, half as many actors as we needed and tired and hungry people all around, we were expected to make the cinematic masterpiece that we had formulated in the writers room, the same one that seemed so simple just a few weeks ago.

Needless to say, we had to do something else.

Here is where our actors come to the rescue.

Since my theatre friends that we cast were all in improv club, they were experienced with making stories up on the fly. We threw some ideas around, and settled on what may be the roughest outline of a story ever:

2 guys in the woods find a dead body with a wallet full of money.

Conflict ensues.

On this super SUPER SUPER SKETCHY plot outline, we began filming. 

What you are about to watch is the result.

We made it all up.

In an hour and a half, we made our video final.

Am I proud of this? Yes, in a way. I was shocked at how well it looked despite the fact that we made it all up on the fly.

I learned loads in this project about teamwork, filmmaking, scheduling, friendship, and so on and so forth. But if I were to sum it up in just a sentence, it would have to be this:

DON'T BITE OFF MORE THAN YOU CAN CHEW.

That's it.

I'm done.

Please enjoy.

Thanks for a great sophomore year.

Here's to bigger and better films that will be made in the future.

This one, however, will be seen only in record books.

THE END