Just a couple weeks ago I saw a sign that read, “Can you make a five-minute film in a week?” It was an advertisement for a nationwide competition called Campus Movie Fest that gives college students full creative control to make their movie dreams come true, with free equipment! And, oh, did I make a film. Whether it was a good one or not is totally subjective. But, if you don’t like it you’re wrong.

For almost as long as I have known her, like (two-ish years) my friend and I have been brainstorming the greatest movie our little college educated minds could conceive. Not to give anything away, because it is still in the works, but noodles, Harry Styles, Angelina Jolie and the zombie apocalypse are all involved. This obviously could not all happen in a week, so we had to start somewhere else.

There were, however, a few hitches along the way.

The main problem was probably with the way we think about stories and ended up shooting our movie. What I mean is, there is no real story line. It’s just filled with all jokes, things we think are funny, and no planning. We centered our movie around one single joke. A whole three-minute video with hundreds of dollar’s worth of equipment for a single line. And, while we obviously thought it was hilarious, it just did not make sense to others not in on the joke.

Another problem we encountered was one we had anticipated: finding people to star in our film. Originally, there were five characters. Unfortunately, we had to cut that down to four, and half of those characters were played by my friend and I; both of us are directors, writers and masterminds, but we are most certainly not actors. With these setbacks, we ended up short on time, and were forced to film until 3 a.m.

Then came the editing. Now I’m not sure about you, but I have never used a video editing program in my entire life. Everything we learned about the software came from a single twelve-minute video. In the end, our film ended up super choppy and without any background music. The music thing was more of an artistic choice, but ultimately, a bad editing decision on our part.

If you ever get the chance to shoot your own film, I think you should take it. Our film may not have been an award winner, but that is not going to stop me from being proud, and embarrassed, and forcing all my friends to watch every second of it. Check out this beautiful train wreck here!

Featured Image: Retrieved from here.