Describe what you did over the winter break (use at least 5 words from Vocabulary Lesson 10 in your paragraph)

 A little backstory for this, in my fifth period I have the class Audio Video Tech and Film, and we as the name suggests, study to make films. On Monday, we had to turn in a film for the Dekalb Film Fest but it went just horribly wrong. My group and I started out with a zombie type film, and spent about a whole month of time preparing and filming. Then our director gets moved from the class, before we had even started filming yet. We try to press on. I had to organize every meeting and coordinate, which is crazy because I can barely organize myself on a good day. There were so many phone calls of just me having to importune my group mates, just to make sure they would show up. 


However, without an actual leader, everyone sort of does their own thing. I tried to organize it but no one was listening to me at all, which was frustrating. The deadline doesn’t really feel imminent at this point, which likely contributed to the shortcoming we experienced. I am the assigned editor so when the time comes around for me to edit, there is absolutely no continuity, the camera is blurry in some scenes, the audio is not great in others, and the dialog is corny. Our teacher tells us to commit or scrap it, there is only two weeks left before the deadline. Before the break, we agreed to just scrap it, but problems arose. 


Another group wanted to take our LEAD actor, so in the end we compromised that over the break my group would get Monday, Tuesday, and Friday, while they would get Wednesday and Thursday. Another thing to note, actors don’t get credit for acting in the class, they have to have an actual technical role, and our lead was screenwriter. Previously, he did not make the script for the zombie movie, so I told him he had to do his job. At this point I had basically become the director, seeing as I was organizing everything. What he gave us was not great to say the last. So on Sunday night, I had to make a script. However, of course it wasn’t finished, I was quite literally burnt out and stressed about it, but at least we had something of better quality to film.


Monday of the break rolls around, I text everyone and make sure they are going to show, ect…


One hour before we had planned to shoot, The camera guy says he can’t make it because he had work. Which would be completely understandable, it’s work, however what made it ignoble is the fact he didn’t even tell us himself, the audio guy told us. Plus the fact he wouldn’t be going the whole week. 


We worked around it, the old director became our new camera. First day we film the beginning, Tuesday we film the end. Now we just needed the middle on Friday. Friday comes around, and I call our lead to make sure he remembered. He says he can’t because the other team hadn’t filmed on Wednesday or Thursday, so he had to film with them today. The lack of communication is astounding, we could have filmed. I had to call up the other director and I went to his house. Without much detail, the other group had an imperious attitude with me the whole time, but we took our actor and our equipment, finally finishing filming. 


By this point, this film is impinging on my friendships with my classmates and I just wanted it to be over. I had been the director, screenwriter, cameraman on one day, and not to mention I bought the props and did all the scheduling. I’ve quite literally put a lot into this, and I still had to edit, since that was my actual job on paper. It really felt like if I didn’t take up all these jobs and did everything myself, I couldn’t trust any of my teammates at all to do it.


A teammate offered to help me out by editing. I put that feeling aside and trusted him. So for a day, things looked up and I could take a deep breath. The deadline for the film was literally immutable, he knew this, yet he made the poor decision to edit the night before. I had given him all the footage three days prior too. 


So here I was after putting my trust in this person to help get some of the workload off me, and he's got me stressing harder about it in the end. I stayed up the whole night on call with him to make sure he was doing it. When it hits 5 am I, again, trust he will finish, deciding to get at least one hour of sleep. I woke up to my alarm at 6 am, came to find he hadn’t finished, and his computer was acting up. 


The whole day impaired by a lack of sleep and month-long stress for what? It wasn’t able to be turned in on time. Not to mention the work I put in. I was ready to immolate and or impale someone, I'm not even going to lie. What baffles me is the fact that the most help I got was from people from outside the class, not even getting a grade for this thing. 0/10 filming experience I’ve ever had, and the worst break by far.



In class on Monday, we started our comic strips. I actually really liked this assignment because it let me be creative in how I used the words. Plus I like drawing



(I forgot to publish these)

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