Video Production 3 and 4 brought junior Rachel Lin’s script “Screening Room 5” to life on March 4, when they filmed the complete movie at the Rheem Theatre.
Filming took about 7 hours.
For 4 months now, video production has worked on Lin’s screenplay as an “over-arching” project. Video production teacher Justin Seligman asked Lin to come up with a good movie idea, so that they could test their new CL-100 camera.
Lin attributes her selection the craft the story to her recent success in screenwriting. “I’ve made other successful narrative films in the past, and he’s taken an interest in my ability to write solid scripts,” she explained.
Lin’s creation, known as “Screening Room 5,” is a narrative film about a girl named Alice who works at a movie theater. One day, while everyone is cleaning up after closing hours, Alice wanders into one of the screening rooms where she finds an old man trying to commit suicide through a drug overdose.
The film will be approximately 5 minutes long.
The class has been focused on “pre-production” up until a couple of days ago. Pre-production included finding actors and equipment, organizing, finding a location for shooting, and finalizing the plot.
According to Lin, the class chose Rheem Theater as their shooting location because “it’s local and easy to access.”
The class showed up at Rheem at 8:00am on Tuesday morning.
At 8:30am, they performed the first shot. The video production class spent the rest of the day filming. “We were on a very stringent schedule. We didn’t have much leeway,” chief audio engineer Jonathan Rowland said.
Lin gave credit to senior Nolan Englund. “The director [Englund] did a really good job managing everything. He was really respective of everyone’s creative perspective,” she said.
This was the first time Lin did not direct a movie she had written.
Lin felt that “it was strange to not step in, and become passive” while the movie was being shot because she normally serves as the director and screenwriter.
For Lin, “Screening Room 5” was not only about bringing her script to life but also a learning experience.
Rowland described movies as “basically taking an idea and then taking that and abstracting it to another person’s perspective of that story.”
“I also enjoyed it because I got to spend a day with people I don’t normally talk to,” Lin said. “It was sort of a bonding experience.”
