Film
I’ve always loved movies, but in the past few months, I’ve been watching and thinking about them more than ever before. Growing up, I often watched the big-budget movies at the theaters with my family. I was a huge fan of all of the action movie series - I remember gleefully watching the entire Dark Knight series on my 15th birthday (that’s nearly 8 hours). In the past 5 days, I’ve watched 8 movies, and it’s been incredible.
At some point, I started caring a lot about different components of movies rather than simply how entertaining I found them. For example, when I started getting into photography, I began noticing how important cinematography was to the film. When I started listening to music constantly, I discovered how certain film scores drove the action and pace perfectly. I began to explore media that dug into films more.“Every Frame a Painting” is one of my favorite Youtube channels and it showed me the beauty of production design, directing, editing and other aspects of film that I hadn’t considered. I knew that one day I would want to be involved.
This past semester, I had the incredible opportunity to be a part of two film-related class. One involved studying films and creating video game cutscenes based on the principles we learned. The other was a video production class, where we went through the standard processes of filmmaking to create two short films. We were given scripts written by our peers in a screenwriting class and cast actors in an acting class. It was everything that I could have ever wanted, and I had the opportunity to explore. It took so much more time and effort than I could’ve ever imagined, but at the end of the whole experience, I worked with great teammates to create something that I was really proud of. You can check out my final film, a sci-fi film about a mysterious object from space,here.
If anything, the experience reminded me how rewarding the creative process can be - this time, in the context of a film production. The filmmaking process is incredibly technical, requiring a variety of specialized skills that can make or break the film, from writing to directing to acting to filming and editing. Going forward, I think I just want to explore some of these roles more, mainly writing screenplays and editing.
Drops of the Week
where I *drop* recommendations of cool things this week
Longread
“Estonia, the Digital Republic” by Nathan Heller - immensely fascinating piece about the technological advances that Estonia is making to simplify aspects of life. Who would’ve thought that a small European country would be creating some of the most cutting-edge applications of technology to everyday life?
Playlist
december 17 - it’s the last week of December of the last week of 2017! Here’s my final monthly playlist, eclectic as usual.
Web Project
Hiiistory - a museum of web design! It’s an interesting dive into how websites have evolved throughout the years.
Thanks so much for reading! If you have any comments/concerns or fan/hate mail for me, you know how to reach me (links below). Feel free to forward this newsletter to your friends too! :~)
Love,
Nikhil