Film Projects 2021-2023

In 2021, my friend Peter and I decided to take on a student film project of sorts during our Senior year of high school. This would be our first foray into filmmaking. For a more detailed write-up on the project and to view a ton of related media, including the final project, check out the embed below.

In the spring of 2022, Peter and I decided to take on another film project, this time spurred on by a competition by YouTuber Joel Haver. The concept was to, instead of watching the Oscars, make a feature film during the runtime of the Oscars. This means you only have about 3 hours to shoot (ideally) 40+ minutes of content. By necessity, this also means you end up with a lot of first takes, rough cuts, okay-at-best acting, shots, etc. It's filmmaking for the love of filmmaking. We didn't end up with a full 40+ minute feature film, but we did get a solid 28-minute short film, though. It's rough, though, again, almost by necessity. Peter and I agreed it was a good next step toward our goal of proper short filmmaking. We called it: Quirky Lil Pyramid. 

We filmed just about everything between my Pixel 5 and Peter's GoPro. I purchased 2 Rode wireless clip-on mics to attempt to get decent audio without having to worry about constant setup and take down. We enlisted the help of our friend Michael for the roles of not one, but two characters, along with Peter's pastor for the role of... well... Peter's pastor. We just barely successfully got every single shot done in the 3-hour time limit.

The end result can be found on Peter's personal YouTube channel below.

In the summer of 2023, Peter and I embarked on our next project, this time along with our friend Ian (and help from several other friends). The idea we landed on was what can best be described as a Top Gear parody meets music video for "Highway Tune" by Greta Van Fleet. The benefit of this particular idea was that there was pretty much no writing necessary. The downside was that there was no way we were technically getting permission to use any of the music we wanted to use. Thankfully, YouTube has a pretty good system for that.

Between me being all over the country on a weekly basis for work and everyone else's fairly busy schedules, the filming process ended up being a lot of long weekends over and over again. Things got especially tricky once Peter had to go back to school in the fall. He ended up needing to drive several hours each way back and forth just about every weekend. We started filming in July and finally finished at the end of October. Another complication was that Peter, Ian, and I were the "stars" of the film, as well as the ones doing most of the behind-the-scenes work. Our Friend Logan ended up being a stand-in driver for me in many scenes, as I was almost always the one behind the camera (or the drone remote).

Our main goal for this project was more or less just getting some fun, good-looking shots. I'd say we were successful at that (and then some). The film naturally doesn't have much of a plot at all, but it's a fun, quick watch. We ended up calling it A Symphony of Scrap Metal, or more accurately, that's what ChatGPT decided on. We were pretty much creatively dry by the end of the editing process and had zero ideas for a title. We decided the title ChatGPT had come up with was... good enough.

Here's the end product:

Retroactively, Peter, Ian and I would end up considering ASoSM as the first film production of our curent overarching project: Whimsy Studio. Find out more below!