Film Class

In August, Sandra and I enrolled in a film making course at Pellissippi State Technical Community College. The course was called Guerrilla Film-making and as the name implied dealt with making movies that were not funded productions. Our text was even titled DIY Film Making. Sandra and I are not exactly newbies when it comes to film making. We have been, and still are, working on a documentary/biography project (more on that later). However, the more we learned the more we realized how much there was to learn. Plus, we thought it would help our film project to work on the class projects with a team. Also, we hoped to meet some additional film makers that might lead to future collaborations. Oh yea, and learning more about something you love together made for an interesting regularly scheduled date night.

Our first project was a story was about a homeless man who hops off of a train and walks along until he meets a little girl who was looking for some pennies that she had placed on the track. We went through the process of pitching the story, writing a script, creating a shooting script and shot list. We scheduled our first shoot out at the old Concord Village near Farragut. Sandra was the shot list supervisor, and I was the still photographer and technical advisor. Here are some of the stills from the first shooting day.

Pennies on the track

Audio Field Mixer

Prof Paul (hat) giving instruction on using a boom mic.

Prof Paul using the reflector to bounce some light in the actor’s face.

Sandra getting dirty helping with wardrobe.

Speeding train roars by during on-set lunch break.

Sandra closely monitoring the shot list.