A stopwatch, a stone from East Rock and a tube of lipstick: Each of these objects was the creative impetus for its own short film.
The three films, “Lost & Found,” “Faster” and “Two Kinds of People,” were filmed in and around Yale’s campus. They were screened in the Jonathan Edwards College theater Sunday night in an event organized by the student filmmakers and Bulldog Productions, Yale’s undergraduate film production group. The shorts — three minutes, six minutes and 15 minutes in length, respectively — were conceived of, produced and edited entirely by Yale undergraduates over the course of the fall 2014 semester. The screening was almost canceled after technical difficulties caused a 20-minute delay. But students involved in the films said the mishap was emblematic of the college filmmaking process as a whole.
“Production is always a bit of a mess, and even the most well-planned and thought-through screenplay can easily go awry on set,” said Emily Murphy ’17, the director of “Lost & Found.” “As students working on making campus films, we are in the unique position to have a lot of low-risk fun … We have the chance to develop the skills necessary to one day succeed in that ‘real world’ environment, and BP has been a great supporter of everyone having a chance to do work, gain experience and have a good time creating work.”
“Faster,” written by Brian Li ’16 and directed by Jackie Ferro ’17, is a six-minute romantic comedy about a teenager named Alastair, who is lovesick for his friend and running partner, Clarissa. Out of shape and intimidated by Clarissa’s faster friend, Scott, Alastair decides to train in order to outpace his rival.
Ferro said that much of the filming for “Faster” took place at East Rock, where weather conditions complicated the filming process. She explained that the script mandates that the characters run during their summer vacation — a difficult visual to execute in late fall in New Haven.
Students who worked on “Two Kinds of People” said that while the overall production process went smoothly, the crew also faced a few technical challenges. Cyrus Duff ’18, the film’s director, explained that the film’s lead actress, Michaela Murphy ’17, had to dye her hair purple partway through shooting for her role in the Yale Dramatic Association’s fall mainstage production, the “Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
The biggest difficulty the film crew encountered, according to Duff, was in ensuring that the sounds recorded for the film did not contain background noise or other distractions. Even after extensive post-production sound editing, he said, the film’s audio track still had a few irregularities.
Geny Decker ’17, the director of photography for “Lost and Found,” said she has faced similar audio difficulties when filming in the past. She described the task of obtaining an effective microphone as on-campus filming’s “eternal challenge.”
But Emily Murphy noted that the production team of “Lost & Found” did not encounter such difficulties because the film contained no spoken dialogue. Written by Shelby Daniels-Young ’17, the film follows a girl who leaves a stopwatch in the library and returns to find it replaced by an umbrella, which she takes outside and uses to shield herself against a falling paint can. Over the course of the film, the theme of objects unexpectedly replacing one another is repeated several times until the girl rediscovers the stopwatch at the end.
Murphy said she was drawn to Daniels-Young’s script because she wanted to work on a film that contained elements of whimsy and playfulness, adding that she thinks the film is more experimental than the typical college short film.
“I think a lot of student films often feel a need to be serious or prove that they are about something ‘bigger,’ and while I do think there is a wisdom in the original screenplay, we definitely adapted it to have a sillier tone,” Murphy said.
Of the students interviewed who worked on the featured films, five highlighted the importance of post-production editing in the filmmaking process. Decker said that she was interested in more technical elements of film, adding that she hopes to pursue post-production editing work in her next film project. Evren said that he found editing “Faster” to be great fun, and that the experience was “very similar to painting, but all of your brushstrokes are these full, nice shots.”
BP produced two other films this fall, “The Players” and “Home{sic},” which are currently in post-production.