Roles: Director, screen writer, editor, director of photography.

One of the papers in my third year of Creative Technologies, was an external elective, and I chose Digital Cinema Studies from the Digital Design Faculty. The class grouped up into teams of four to plan a short film.

The roles were divvied up and my main role was to be the DP (aka cinematography). The group came up with a story (I'd like to state I had little to do with that part, though I wound up writing the script), and we worked out the details of getting actors, and fleshing out the story, working with locations etc.

It turned out that our group had a destructive force in it, one of our group members was a bit of a prima donna who'd assigned herself as director and took all control over every part of the film and sent us down a path without the planning that at least two of us would have otherwise liked to have done. Our first day of shooting was a waste of time.

Up until this point I'd sat back and played along because I was older and aware of potentially unfair power dynamics, but the footage was rubbish and the remaining three members had not had a great deal of input. When I mentioned this our director started to sabotage further work. We displaced her and planned the rest of the shooting. We only had a weekend to shoot and edit by this point.

The remaining members appointed me as director and myself and the producer assembled a storyboard, a shooting plan, and organised the movie. We shot it in one day, and we edited it and colour corrected it the next day. We were not able to secure a lighting rig (or transport it) on the short notice which made footage later in the day a bit softer and noisier but we managed to pull the project through and get an A. Under very tight constraints.