I was extremely excited to work with film as it was something I had never before had the chance to experience. Yet it was also a very daunting task to undertake as we had one minute, and one take to get our shot absolutely perfect. Since the camera was in my hands, it was probably one of the most stressful projects I have been a part of since coming to UNCW last year. My group chose to make a one minute monster movie. Think about Monster Quest, but without a budget or sound recording and you'd have our concept. As we were shooting on high contrast B&W film we felt that playing off an old-time news interview would be the best route to go. Matt M. was the person who sighted the "monster", Levi played the reporter, while Stanford was left to be the monster with me behind the camera. After checking, triple checking, and running through our script multiple times we were finally ready to roll the camera. Everything during shooting went absolutely perfect. Everyone seemed in focus, timing was perfect, and the "monster" got right up to the camera with "blood" pouring out of his mouth. Then the camera falls to the ground and dies. Perfect. Great. Wonderful.
But that is where the good ended. We returned to the darkroom only to open the camera and discover that our film had jumped off the sprockets, or some equally devastating tragedy. About a third of our film had wrapped around the daylight spool. The rest was folded tightly throughout the body of the camera, bent to the point that it developed with thick, black lines across it. We also lost the climax of our film where the monster murders the reporter and camera operator. Disappointment struck full on. To the point we even considered a reshoot.
In the end we chose not to reshoot and instead work to use sound to recover what footage we did end up with. Although the film is not yet entirely finished, I cannot wait to see what happens to it in postproduction. It is going to still be awesome, I'm sure!
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