Film has always been a passion of mine for as long as I can remember, so when we were given the task to make a short film I jumped at the opportunity. When our professor first announced the final project at the beginning of the term, I have been coming up with ideas on what I wanted my short film to be about. As an avid fan of the horror genre and interests in psychology, along with my recently developed interest in surrealism, I set out to construct a film that combined those interests. During the end of my years in high school, I had developed an idea centered on a psychologically disturbed individual which I had titled Dark Minds and which I characterized as a “Dark Drama”. Over the years I reworked the idea, changing it so that it delved deeper into the mind of the main character and re-titled it  A Brief Glimpse into a Disturbed Mind which is the current title of the short film.  Since the original idea was supposed to be on a feature-length film, I had to condense the idea significantly in order to fit the parameters of the project. In order to accomplish  this, the idea went through another revision to what is shown in the finished product.

Since mankind has yet to delve that deep into the mind of the mentally disturbed, I had to intemperate what might be going on inside their heads, which was very fun to do. When filming began, I specifically sought out friends and family to be the actors in my film in order to prevent issues arising from people not showing up when I needed them. Filming and performing directorial work was an exhilarating experience, during the duration of filming I experimented with lighting, and camera position/angles in order to find out which shot worked more effectively. At times, filming was an exhausting experience, as some of the actors would not perform in the way I had coached them to do during the shot, forcing me to reassign them to a different role in the film. When it came to editing the film, I had specific ideas on how I wanted the final shots to look like. For example, two of the shots of the actors either reaching towards the camera or stretching out their arms I wanted to look like an emaciated shadow, which would give it an unsettling effect. However, during editing this proved to be too timed consuming so a different effect was used for the shots. Similar issues arose during the editing process, forcing me to change their look in ways I felt were less then satisfactory. Very early in production I had my idea on what music I wanted for the film, the vocals from 2001: A Space Odyssey I felt conveyed the right mood for the film. In order to make it more unsettling, I overlapped the music with a low key piece of music that enhanced the overall effect. Working on this project was both an exhausting and exhilarating experience, and I am proud of the final result even though some things didn’t quite go as planned.