This is my final project video “The Meet”. I was going for a mob themed short video, probably from watching too much Sopranos. This was only my 2nd video I’ve shot, the first being the P5 video. I started with trying to think up ideas and just started drawing out a story board, slowly adding frame after frame of what I wanted to happen next. I drew the storyboard up to the meeting and thought, “what if it’s not really what you think?”

The planning process was a big part of the video’s success. I had to find a time when I could get enough of my friends to fill all of the parts. One of my friends in the video lives in Portland, and the other two U of O students, so the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend was the only time I could get us all together. I used my suits for the costumes and had to get cigars and liquor for props.

Another thing was finding a place to film, a place that would be okay to smoke a cigar indoors. I ended up using a friend of one of the actor’s place. Luckily he wasn’t working that day and I used his garage as the meet setting. He was playing video games in the same garage with somebody and we had to keep asking them to be quiet without being bossy.

Another difficulty encountered was the outside lighting. I wanted to film the outdoor scenes at a dusk-like setting. Only once it started to get dark, it started to get dark really fast. I had to hurry up doing outdoor scenes and it ended up getting too dark for me to film the piano transaction scene. I had to go back to the same place the next day during while the guy who lives there was home on a work break. I hadn’t filmed the scenes of putting the keyboard in the trunk and driving away and wanted the location to be the same. I finished the drive away scene and then the same problem from the day before happened. It got dark really fast.

We started the piano transaction scene and decided to film it in the house’s driveway. It was getting dark and only one light above the front of the garage worked. I had my friend back his car into the driveway for him to open the hatch in the video and had my other friend face his car toward the garage with its lights on for more light. It wasn’t as bright as I thought it would be, but it was enough to just see what was going on. I guess they were in a dark alley or something. As soon as I finished filming the last scene I needed, I was going to suggest maybe trying it one more time when the car whose lights we were using died. We had to jump the car while it was freezing cold and dark outside while trying to hurry to get the person who lived there back to work. We got the car running, loaded up all the props in the car and were on our separate ways.

Even with all the difficulties encountered and the overall stress experienced through the process of planning and production, I had a really good time making this video from beginning to end. Its really cool to see just an idea of mine actually manifest into something that I can enjoy watching. It also helped that I filmed with people I’ve known for a long time. I am looking forward to making future videos and hope I can just get better each time.