Fire Escape Films
Fire Escape Films is a filmmaking student organization that I was a member of during my time at the University of Chicago. The organization enabled student filmmaking through a variety ways. The two examples below are results of different methods. Birdman was produced as part of the organization’s 48 Hour Film Festival and Adelfa’s Ador was selected as one of the organization’s quarterly projects. Every academic term, the organizations would field script submissions from the members and the organization’s senior members would select the best submissions and provide funding for these projects. The newest members joining each term were assigned to these quarterly projects to give them a hands-on crash course in filmmaking before they were allowed to submit their own scripts.
Adelfa’s Ador
A close friend and classmate who was a frequent creative partner during our shared time in school had her submission chosen as one of the organization’s quarterly projects. She served as the writer and director for her project, Adelfa’s Ador. I worked with her on the project as a producer and assistant director. My writing assistance was reviewing drafts and providing constructive commentary on the plot of the film. I helped direct the film by providing opinions on the blocking and composition of shots, and serving as director for young actors of the film using my experience in teaching to connect with the actors and deliver the direction in terms relevant to them. I assisted in the edit process by sequencing the raw footage and providing second opinions on editing decisions.
Birdman
Birdman is a film that I completed for the 48 Hour Film Festival. The rules of the film festival are that filmmaking teams are given a single sentence prompt, and from that point they have 48 hours to write, shoot, and edit a film to be judged against submissions by other teams. The prompts for this competition were the titles of Best Picture Award winners and our team’s prompt was: Birdman.
When we received our equipment for the competition Fire Escape Films tries to equally distributes the organization’s film equipment for the competition to prevent a technological advantage between teams. But when we received our equipment, the microphones we received were broken and our team was forced to improvise and use the voice memo recording feature on our personal smartphones to record the audio for our film. Our technological limitations also put the team in the position of writing a film with limited dialogue, so we wrote a script that takes place in a library to adjust. We were not given any official approval to film in the and guerilla filmed in a campus library and were ultimately satisfied with our creative product.