The Gamer is a narrative, 5-minute short film I created in a team of four for a film class in 2016.
The film centers around a gamer who wishes to escape life through a video game and finds her wish granted by being sucked into the world of The Sims. There, she discovers that being a video game character is not all what it seems...
Narrative writing, directing, camera handling, sequencing in Adobe Premiere, color correcting in Adobe After Effects, leading, and strict time management.
Our narrative film had a large scope, with many different scenes and 5 total locations (with 3 being near each other). Since the course was an intersession course (a 2 month course instead of a 4 month course), the project required a large amount of work done in a very short time span, requiring strict time management skills in order to complete all deadlines and have a good quality film.
The main plot and characters of the short film were discussed by my team and I, and I was responsible for transforming our decisions into a working script. The script went through many iterations over the course of 3-4 weeks, throughout pre-production and filming. The original narrative was quite weak with no theme or character development, and with a tight deadline, a new script had to be written within two days in time for test filming. Parts of the new script were rewritten once feedback was received from our instructor. On our last day of shooting, due to location contraints, I decided as the director to change two of the ending scenes without changing the script as the original scenes were impossible to shoot, as the location we were at was unsafe.
Click on the image of the script below to read the full script.
We created a storyboard for the initial two revisions of the script. I drew the second half of the first revision of our storyboard, and my teammate Annie Ho redrew a refined version (shown below) later on. However, due to time constraints, we were unable to create a storyboard for the final script, which is quite different. The storyboard, despite being outdated, was still useful for some scenes, as it helped us envision how the angles would look. However, it was mainly used for the first two drafts and mostly unusable for the final, due to actions and locations being too different.
Click on the storyboard image below to view the full storyboard.
The very first test draft was done using ourselves as actors, with very minimal color correction and few special effects. I shot a large majority of the test draft, and although it is low quality, it was extremely useful in showing me the difficulties of shooting, such as shooting in dark shade on a bright sunny day, or how long it would take to shoot several angles per scene. This helped prepare me for shooting the actual film.
The video of the second draft above showcases half of our film, with the scenes being shown mostly being their final versions. Although it is missing special effects and color correction, the style of the video is apparent through the sequencing, as well as how some scenes are filmed. I was responsible for shooting, directing, and sequencing all scenes in this version. We received feedback on this version of our draft and completed the rest of the scenes, as well as the special effects, pacing, music, and transitions, with suggestions given by our instructors and peers in mind.
We shot many different takes of each scene, resulting in hundreds of video clips. It was my job to organize them, pick the best shot to use from each batch of similar ones, edit the chosen clips, and put them together to form a cohesive flow and narrative. I chose to edit clips based on dialogue timing and whether one action could smoothly flow into the next clip's action. All sequencing was done in Adobe Premiere.
I color-corrected each scene separately in Adobe After Effects. My goal was to create a vibrant film that would mimic the colorful world of the Sims. I balanced out the red, green, and blue values throughout the film and also removed spots of color that clashed with the rest of frame using masking (such as extreme redness in faces).
