Stranger Things Studios: Debut Film

Stranger Things Studios's debut film is an untitled short about a ghost that invades someone's home in search of sustenance.  It finds it in the form of an apple, only to be repeatedly thwarted in its attempt to seize it.

Final Stats:

Hours on Set: 6

Hours of Postproduction: 5
Cost: $4


Director’s Notes:

Being my first movie attempt ever, it was not only a challenge in and of itself, but I learned very quickly that four years of film school - hell, four weeks of the basics - would have been helpful, if not vital.  You’d think it was simpler.  Point.  Shoot.  Crop.  Paste.  Done.  Right?

Wrong.  You have to have every single second of the movie planned out; figure out how to pull off every angle you want to do.  Come up with the angles to begin with.  Hope you’re in frame the whole time.  Etc. etc.  Like I said.  The basics.

Filming done, you just crop it all together, like paragraphs in a word program.  But what program?  What format?  What format is footage on the camera?  What format does each program support?  How do you get it to run on iTunes?  YouTube?  DVD?

And most importantly, how do you do it without spending money?

I made it work, somehow.  I’m sure I went about it all wrong though, because my methods strike me as nothing short of convoluted.  My digital camera saves its files in a format no program recognizes.  I had to convert the footage twice during the process.  But that’s the price one pays when one doesn’t want to pay the price to own a better program.

Technology aside, two other challenges arose during the process.  Foremost was I was filming solo.  For anyone who has ever taken a photo of themselves, you know how it goes.  Point.  Shoot.  Check the result.  Restart.  Point.  Shoot.  Check.  Nope.   You screw up the exact same way over and over again because no one’s there to correct you.

The other challenge was consistency between shots.  I was well into the editing stage when I discovered that I had to re-film three or four shots, because there were blatant discrepancies between them.  A light is suddenly on in one shot; off the next.  The camera got bumped.  Items appear out of nowhere.  Disappear into thin air.  In one shot in particular, I had a second apple sitting out just in frame, right next to the ghost.  What’s the point in chasing down the guy if there’s an apple right there.  Sigh...

Yet in the end, what matters is that it worked, and that my simplistic movie turned out the way I planned it.  For a first try, I am quite pleased with the end result.

~Jonathan Strong