Get Your Game On! is a narrative short film about a gal who goes to her local game store to play her favorite card game.

When she arrives she walks along the aisles, filled with other game shop customers, while looking at what’s in stock (which is a lot). Our Gal eventually finds her way to the gaming area and initiates a game with another player. They take out their things: game mats, deck boxes, and such, and are ready to begin their game.

We fade away, coming back to the middle of the game where our protagonist begins her turn and plays a hydra, one of her favorite cards. She’s proud of the play, but is soon met with the equally proud response from her opponent who plays a card that gets rid of her good play. She’s hurt and stressed, not knowing what to do, when she spots a card she already has on the table, and attacks with it!

This video took quite a lot of pre-production time to make, with story boarding and shot listing playing a big part in judging how I wanted the story to go. Because of this being my first foray into this sort of film-making there were some bumps along the way, but the general gist of it got taken care of.

I had initially written a scene where our main character walked up to a pairings board and found themselves – and their opponent – by name, allowing our characters to be introduced despite the lack of actual dialogue.

Another scene that was cut, due to time constraints (and a depleted battery) was the after-game scene where the main character would mark down her win against her opponent, and her opponent would storm out as a sore loser. I ended up leaving this scene on the cutting room floor because we had already abandoned the previous pairing board scene and made this game seem like a friendly game between the two rather than a competitive one.

My overall favorite piece to edit during this was the game play. Cutting back and forth between the character and her cards, and then the reactions of the player sitting across from her all while keeping continuity was interesting, and in the end could have been done better if I had a way to sync up the footage during production, instead of eyeballing it during editing. I was able to make everything work, but it was definitely a learning experience.