By Edzelle Peña
KALIBO, AKLAN — Last time I checked, it had over 7,000 views on Youtube, almost all of the viewers expecting to see a naked Katya Santos. Yet a few seconds into the film, they hear droning crickets, fast heart beats and howling coyotes — definitely not the opening scenes to a sexy movie.
“Sukdulan” is a three-minute film shot with a SONY HDR-SR11 at the Bhakawan Eco Park in Kalibo. Yet again, it is one of those films produced out of no plans at all. Let me share with you the back story.
We were walking along the mangrove forest when we decided to take the time to create a film. Quickly, we built a concept and started the camera rolling. There were only three of us there, so Izah (Morales) and Alex (Villafania) played actors and I was the videographer/director.
Shooting the scenes took us roughly an hour. The shots, camera angles and story were built as we went along with the shoot. Arguably, that’s the beauty of creating a film with no scripts, you can easily change anything as you deem necessary.
Having only one camera, we had to redo actions to vary angles. Neither did we have artificial lights so the inconsistencies in lighting were pretty obvious throughout the film. There was nothing much we can do as we depended solely on natural light.
We banked on two or three takes to save on camera battery and finish the sequences on time. We didn’t even get to review the shots because we needed to go back before dusk. This posed a lot of problems in the post-production.
As I was editing the movie, I found a lot of lapses in the shots. In the scene when the camera rotates around Izah, a portion of my hair was caught in the frame. See if you can spot it there. Also, because we didn’t have artificial lighting, some scenes were too bright that even using a lot of filters could not even them out.
But what proved to be most problematic (and a lot of people noticed this) was the final scene. Izah told Alex there wasn’t any water but when the camera closed in on Alex, behind him was the tail end of the river. Now that was just a spoiler wasn’t it? I tried to hide it by putting a vignette but the water was still pretty obvious.
Editing this three-minute sequence took me two days to finish. Sound effects and musical scores — accounting for five to six overlapping tracks in my timeline — were all from iLife and Soundtrack Pro.
As proud as we were, we even entered the film into the experimental category of a small film competition, the 180 Microcinema Film Festival. Unfortunately, we lacked enough votes to make it to the semifinals.
Nevertheless, no amount of money or award could compare to the joy of creating a film of our own. Even if it’s not as polished as it should be, what truly matters is that we had fun doing it and we were able to create an art piece to remind us of our crazy, little adventure in Aklan.
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