The Process of Creating a Short Film

Everybody loves movies, right? There’s nothing better than sitting down with a blanket and a bowl of popcorn to settle in for two hours of laughs, scares, emotion, or maybe even deep thought. One of the most traditional American forms of entertainment, movies are a huge industry in our nation, with the film industry having brought in an unbelievable $35.3 billion in 2019 alone. But have you ever considered the process of making one? I hadn’t fully considered this until I received my final project in Digital Media Productions I this past spring at the University of Northern Iowa. This project was to create a short film of my own.

The process of putting this short film together, from an idea in my head to a finished product on the tv screen, took a lot of time and effort. The first step was, naturally, to write the script. On the first day of class, our teacher had given us a sheet to fill out. It was full of random, at some points seemingly nonsensical questions. Its purpose was to begin brainstorming ideas for our films. One question on this sheet asked us to describe the dream we had the night before. Seems random, right? Luckily for me, I had happened to have a very vivid and very memorable dream the night before, so I wrote it down and moved on to the next question. Little did I know at the time that this dream would end up being the topic of my short film.

A couple of weeks after filling out the sheet from the first day of class, the professor went over some answers he found interesting with each member of the class. When he got to me, he was very focused on my dream answer, and really encouraged me to go with this topic when I eventually got to writing my screenplay. Ultimately, I followed his advice, and I very much liked how my screenplay turned out. By this point, I had no doubt that this was the direction I was going to go with for my short film.

After everybody had completed their screenplays and listened to classmates read them aloud in front of the class, it was time to begin making our films. My professor partnered me up with two other classmates, Brandon Crawford, who ended up portraying Dr. West as well as being a big help throughout the filming and editing process, and Colman Foreman, who wound up being our lead cameraman and also was a big help in the editing room. My professor recommended to us that we work on my film in particular because it was the most doable, price-wise and time-wise, for three college students.

Without giving too much away in terms of plot, my film revolves around a young man receiving terrible news during a trip to the doctor’s office and ultimately having to make a gut-wrenching decision. Because of this, I was able to film in two simple locations; my dorm room and my dorm floor’s lounge. My dorm, simply enough, served as the room for my main character, Alex, and the lounge served as the doctor’s office. A week before I planned on using the lounge, I sent an email to my floor’s Resident Assistant, but because he had inexplicably up and left the University a couple of weeks prior, I never heard back. That, however, is a story for another day, and everything worked out in the end because both times we filmed in that room it was empty.

Filming had its fair share of hiccups, from faulty microphones to awkward camera angles, but ultimately we got everything we needed. The editing was much of the same, especially since we all had extremely limited exposure to Adobe Premiere Pro before this project. Despite this, we did figure everything out in the end and our film came out of the editing process looking somewhat professional.

This whole process was very time-consuming. I’ve always been a fast writer, so the screenplay didn’t take more than an hour, maybe an hour and a half. However, the filming took roughly four hours over the course of two days, while the editing took at least that long if not longer. All of this was to produce a film with a total run time, including end credits, just north of five minutes. If you take this process to make a five-minute film and multiply it by 24 to make a two-hour feature-length film, you’re suddenly in for months upon months of work. Of course, big films have crews of professional actors, directors, and editors as opposed to three inexperienced college students, but still, it’s a massive endeavor.

While this process was a lot of hard work and had some seriously frustrating moments, I am very proud of how my film turned out. It’s very imperfect, a little corny, and would never win a film contest, but I am proud nonetheless. So, without further ado, here is The Operation. Enjoy!