I Have No Idea What I'm Doing - The Movie.

I knew this post would have to written one day, if for no other reason than for the awsome title alone...

One of my classes this semester is an introductory course in video editing. As with almost every course, we have group assignments and this class was no exception. In fact, EVERY assignment for this class needs to be done in some sort of group. The project I recently finished involved those folks I wrote a letter to not too long ago when we were going through some... um... compatibility issues.

Anyway, we got through it and managed not to kill each other (even though some very angry words were said between one or two members of the group). The assignment was supposed to be a short film but since a local film company just happened to be holding a short film competition around the same time, the lecturer gave the class the option of making our movies for entry into that instead.

And they voted to go for it.

The rules were simple. The movie was supposed to be max five minutes long, be along the lines of one of the themes provided and, most importantly, shot with either a smartphone or tablet. No professional cameras - or any, for that matter - allowed.

As I said, our group had issues. A few slackers and one busybody who didn't really do much but provoke everyone else to argue left the bulk of the pre-production work to two of us. Eventually, when it was time shoot most people got their acts together. I co-produced and acted as cameraman, since it was my phone which served as the camera for the project. Busybody did some acting and one slacker helped carry stuff (I believe in making the best use out of my resources). In the end we managed to pull off something decent.

You'll forgive me for not sharing what we did since my real name's in the credits and I'd like to at least pretend my half-assed attempts to keep my real identity (mostly) a secret on the blogosphere have been working. Allow to maintain that delusion, will you?

We submitted out film on the deadline day but, to be honest, I wasn't very optimistic when we viewed the other groups' projects in the following class. We had choppy sound due to the high winds during the shoot, my phone's camera quality was okay-ish at best and the final editing was rushed. I didn't think we had a chance in hell of our movie getting selected over theirs. And that was just when I compared what we did with the other groups in our little class. This competition was open to the whole country.

Then, a week ago, we found out our movie was the only one from our class to make it into the competition, in the People's Choice category.

While the others were good, one of our in-class competitors was disqualified when that group went over the time limit, while the other had audio problems that couldn't be overlooked. Still, we were proud (and shocked) that we at least made it that far. During the last class, our lecturer casually mentioned that a newspaper also wanted to interview us. That's when the other producer/director of the group fainted (not really but she could have).

I checked our standing against the other movies in the People's Choice. With two days left before voting closes, we're nowhere close to having enough votes to win. Still, we never even expected to get this far.

You never know.