International film festival

Day 1

The day started at 9, when we had a meeting exercise to meet the new students and mentors. After the meeting exercise, the mentors split us up into two groups. I was in the older group with seven more students. We talked about what movies we liked and what do we expect from this movie workshop. Our group had three mentors, which would help us during the process of making a movie. After we talked about ourselves, we started writing a story for the movie. It was a bit hard at first, since the movie would last only 5-8 minutes, but we've figured out a story. Next part was creating a script and characters in the story. The mentors told us how to make a script, what mistakes are common while writing and how to improve parts of our story. Sadly we didn't finish the script in one day, and had to continue tommorow.

Day 2

The 1st thing our group still had to do is finish the script. It took us some time, to make up an ending but after some time the 1st draft of the script was created. Now that we had a script, we could prepare for filming the movie tommorow. The mentors told us what our job during shooting the movie will be, and I had the role of sound engineer. I would hold the long boom microphone and record the sound. Another role I played was a part of the movie, where I would wear a gas mask. Other roles were: the director, the director of picture, assistant director, secretary,  stage designer, costume designer and actors. Now that we have the story, we needed to find places to shoot the movie. Our group went scouting for locations and after half an hour we finished with an idea where to film the movie. There would be outside shots nearby the Pionirski dom and interior shots inside the Pionirski dom. Mainly, we would be filming in the big hall. The next agenda on our list was to create a storyboard and a list of props/articles of clothing needed for the movie. So our group split up into two parts, one was working on the storyboard, the other on making the list. I was a part of the prop/costume design team, so we made a list of items which every character would wear and every prop we would bring to filming tommorow. After I got home, I also changed some dialogue in the script and fixed some errors we talked about, meanwhile the director finished the storyboard.

Day 3

1st day of filming.  We went to our filming location, I put on my costum and we filmed a couple of shots there. After that I was designated to film the sound using a boom mic. We shot scenes outside of the Pionirski dom, and inside of it. There was a problem of not enough time, but in the end we completed what we wanted to.

Day 4.

We continued filming, and this time we would film mostly in the big hall. We had everything necessary to continue filming, and we filmed throughout the whole day. Again time was our biggest enemy, and we didn't finish everything on time. There was still some work tommorow, which wasn't planned.

Day 5

It was the last day of the film workshop. We still had some shots to do, but it wouldn't take the entire day. All of them were interior shots and at around 11. the movie was officialy filmed. We took a break and talked about the process of making this movie. After that we were shown the raw material, which looked a lot more promising everyone thought it would be. Our director of picture volunteered to edit the movie, due to his prior experiences. Currently the movie is still in this process of editing, and it premiers on the 21st of September in the Pionirski dom.

I would like to thank my group and the mentors for showing how to create a movie. It was a really pleasant experience, and would love to do it again.

Sergej Novaković