Monster Genre Haunts Video Production

Justin Seligman’s Video 1, 2, and 3 classes have been working on projects called Creature Features since late November. “These are monster movies. They’re based off the 1950’s movies called ‘creature features’,” Seligman said. He explained that the students completed filming and finished editing this week and will be showing their work to classmates.

For the project, Seligman transformed the video production room into a spooky scene with props and costumes from the science department.”This whole place was set up with mad scientist laboratory and then we had 13 giant costumes, from head-to-toe costumes, monsters. And they were used as part of the movie. All the movies involved, like, ‘Bring it to life!’ Sort of like a Frankenstein,” he said.

Seligman added that his classes haven’t done the project in the past year. “Last year we didn’t have enough budget to do it,” he said. “We bought new cameras last year, and we rent the costumes and there wasn’t enough money to rent the costumes. But we’ve done it before, the feature project, for probably a few years. And kids tend to really enjoy it.”

Junior Ryan McGill said that he liked working on the project. “All of [Video’s] projects are fun,” he said. He said that he likes the editing part in particular as “it’s sort of like a creative outlet.”

McGill explained that the groups are given a set of rules and form a story around around it. “Some go for more serious tones, some are geared more towards making people laugh,” he said. He added that they don’t storyboard for their films. According to sophomore Kyle Wu, a member of McGill’s group, “The group had some ideas, I had some ideas, we threw some stuff together.”

McGill also said that for his group’s project, they used a special camera called the “Jib,” for the first time. “It has an axis and the person who is controlling it has the display in front of them. It’s basically this really long arm so the camera stays level, so you can go high, you can go low, and do all these fancy little shots,” said McGill.

Senior Chris Fleming said that he’s helping some Video 1 students with their feature project. “I’m Video 4 and I’m in a class with Video 1, so I actually have to help them out,” he said.

“[It] was a bit rough,” said McGill about the project. His group had technical troubles with exporting their project. “We’re working with what we have,” he said.

McGill hopes the project will continue next year.

The Creature Features are Video Productions’ 2nd big project. Other projects include a promotional video for Autoshop’s Car show in February.