My original idea was to make a short film. At that point, I had already prepared a script, found actors, and locations, and timed everything, but at the last minute, I got sick with covid. I had to shoot at home, and it was quite difficult because it was not easy to find unusual and interesting subjects. To change the atmosphere at home, I used different colored lights. I also shot a lot of the scenes with the lights off in the dark so other objects would not be caught in the shot.
During the course of the project I was watching a movie called “Taxi Driver” and I was very inspired by it. I loved the angles, the color work, the atmosphere of the film, and the music. In the first half of the video, I tried to recreate that atmosphere by adding noise, warm colors, and calm jazz music.
In the second half of the video I experimented with color, and I got the idea to shoot the same video with rotation several times, using different colors to make one video out of them later. While cutting the video, I was looking for black frames to make smooth transitions between videos. It didn’t turn out as smoothly as I would have liked, but the result was still satisfactory to me.
There is no message or concept in this video. I tried to create an eye-catching image and experiment with the equipment. I also wanted to try and create footage without any post-editing that looked like a montage.
I originally had no expectations for the project, so I’m kind of happy with the result. Thanks for your attention!

I had a lot of fun while recording for this project! My sister agreed to help me by being my talent for my story. While I was filming, my parents were actually watching TV in the living room. I didn’t want to bother them, so I did not care about the sound that was happening while I was working; I ultimately was going to mute everything. To combat this, I decided to recreate all the sound effects. I had some experience from my previous audio production class, so I enjoyed doing that. I used my phone to record my audio and took a look at my film to get the timing just right.

Filming the ending with my cat was kind of funny. As soon as I staged the food scattered on the ground, he immediately started eating. He is a very food motivated cat. After I did that, I tried to capture some audio of him purring. He is always very happy when he’s around people. He started to rub his head on my tripod while I was filming.

If I were to re-do this project, I would’ve liked to experiment with lighting equipment. I felt that some of the darker scenes didn’t look as smooth as I’d like. I was filming in the evening, so I was not able to get enough natural lighting.

The experience of making this movie has been extremely fun. Choosing a subject that I enjoy (my cat) was definitely the best thing that I could have done for this project. I was able to just “do” my homework by filming my cat at various points throughout the day and it would literally just be beneficial to the making of this project.

The plan definitely wasn’t perfect. The original intention was to have the movie read like an episode of The Office. I wanted it to be more of a comedy that included lots of talent and cut scenes that involved interviews and things such as that. Unfortunately, most of my talent got Covid-19 in the time that I was going to film their parts of the movie. This obviously made it difficult to complete. This made me make the difficult decision to turn the footage that I had into more of a vlog of Figaro’s life, as if he were a YouTuber.

The one last minute decision that I made was having my best friend Victoria actually be the voice of Figaro. She recovered speedily and was able to come over today (6/4) right before I finished editing everything can gave me that final piece of audio that I needed for me to be completely happy with the way that this movie turned out.