The real story behind REEL STORIES. I stood on a rain-soaked red carpet, so cold my body had gone numb. From the front of the stage there was an inaudible announcement, and, before I could process it, I was being guided to the front of the stage where someone handed me a deceivingly heavy glass object. REEL STORIES showed a total of six student films and gave out four awards, two of which we were lucky enough to receive.
Last semester, as I sat in my capstone class, I found myself looking around the room at my peers, trying to decide which of them I would be able to work with for an entire semester, or, rather, which of them would survive the fall after being forced to work with me. (Ask anyone who has ever been in a class with me, and they’ll tell you that I don’t take schoolwork lightly.) Somehow I managed to find a group, though, and before I knew it we were starting pre-production on a 12-minute film that would take us four months to make — now I know why we have to wait another year for part two of “The Hobbit.”
I didn’t really know my partners that well; I had a class with a few of them, but I wouldn’t really have called us close. But this was the starting point for all that was to come. We spent the next four months casting, scouting out locations, shooting, editing, sound editing, color correcting and even more editing. We fought, we laughed and we hardly slept, but most of the time, we loved it. Making a film even as short as ours is a lot of hard work, so when it came time to hand it over for REEL STORIES, I felt like I was giving away a piece of my soul to the judges.
Friday night was bittersweet for my group. We were truly amazed and humbled at winning, especially Audience Choice (thank you for that by the way), and yet we were all sad that it was over.
The truth about REEL STORIES is that you didn’t really get to see our “real story.” What we put on the screen was carefully crafted and edited to perfection, or as close as we could get, given the Jan. 12 deadline. The real story was everything that happened during the process — the arguments we had via long-distance phone calls and the nights we spent deliriously locked in an editing bay until the wee hours of the morning. It was the table we sacrificed for the sake of something we call art and the long days we spent driving around LA.
Wendy found in Peter Pan the same thing the five of us found in each other: friendship and adventure. This experience taught me that a film is a collaboration of talented people who may become your best friends or your worst enemies. It also taught me the importance of having a first-aid kit when filming a scene where 12 guys bang their fists on a glass table, because that is a surefire way to break it.
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