One Word Film Project

Hi there, welcome back!

For our One Word Film project, we had to work in pairs to create a short film of at least 1 to 1/2 minutes to represent a specific word. The word my partner and I were assigned was “appreciative”. The story could not be a montage, no sound was allowed within the production, and everything needed to be filmed in the school setting, so we had to find a creative way to illustrate our assigned word within the 60-90 seconds time frame. This project allowed us to illustrate our creativity, ability to use different camera shots, angles, movement, and editing techniques to create a specific emotional reaction within our film and to convey the meaning of the word accurately to the audience. To include and edit all of these techniques together, we used “Adobe Express” as our editing source. 

When brainstorming our project, we thought about a story in which it would be easy to represent a symbol of appreciation within a school setting and among teenagers. We chose the story of a girl showing appreciation to her friend during her birthday and the birthday girl showing mutual appreciation to her friend for always being there for her. We thought this scenario would work well because friendships are a very important part of teenager's life and we usually care a lot for our friends and our social life, so we concluded that symbolizing appreciation within a friendship would be a beautiful way of representing our word. During brainstorming, we also thought of editing techniques that would help us achieve our desired tone of positivity. We included cuts to change character's perspectives, POV cuts to make the audience feel like they are a part of the story, and inserts to provide details of specific scenes that we wanted the audience to pay attention to. Here is a picture of our brainstorming sheet: 

We also had to draw a visual storyboarding of exactly 15 frames to help us visualize our story and project. The storyboard helped us to get a better idea of ​​the story's sequence of events and plan which camera shots and angles to use in advance to represent the word without dialogue. It also saved us time during filming because we already had a “map” to follow, making it easier to pre-visualize the emotions we wanted the audience to feel in each shot. Here are the pictures of our storyboard: storyboard:

When analyzing our project, I think we did a good job of capturing and symbolizing the essence of what being appreciative means. I think that my partner and I used specific shots, specifically POV shots, in a way that could bring the audience closer to what each character was feeling during the film. If we were to improve,  I would focus on developing more  movement techniques  to make the film more dynamic. While our story worked well, a greater variety of movement could have added energy and made the film more engaging. 

Here is the link to our One Word Film project: 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wPK0itqGpBJY6ArOS7yDfmXHPdeov7sx/view?usp=share_link