A day in the life of an amateur filmmaker

It’s not all red carpets and fame: although it may seem fun, being an amateur filmmaker takes lots of patience and creativity.

I’ve always had a vivid imagination. I would spend days out of my weekends and summers living in different worlds, pretending to be different people who had different lives. If I couldn’t sleep, I’d make up stories in my head to help me sleep better. Even in my sleep, I would have storylines playing in my mind. Eventually I started to write them out, having more than a hundred stories in my notes, google docs, or notebooks. I soon found a love for filmmaking and got four of my closest cousins to act in my stories. Now, I spend every weekend at my grandparents house making videos with my cousins. It goes a little something like this.

Saturday

10am - I wake up and check my phone. Sometimes I write down the dreams I had if they had an interesting storyline. I check on my grandma and ask her if we can go eat breakfast. She tells me to wake up my cousin, Sara. I grab my nerf gun and quietly walk into her room. Most of the time she can hear me coming down the hall and already has her nerf gun pointed at the door when I walk in. We shoot each other a couple times and get dressed to go eat breakfast.

11am - My grandma, my papa, Sara, and I get to the restaurant. Most of the time, we eat at Lizards Thicket, it’s my papa’s favorite restaurant. Sara and I talk about seeing our cousins, John and Kate, later and what video we should make next. Sara, who goes to Busbee, said “I think it’s really cool how we can joke around and end up making something awesome.” I have several different shows but none of them I could’ve made without them. Most of my ideas for videos come from my cousins. The made up country, Dumbmend, that all of my shows are set in was a word my cousin John came up with randomly. Once we finish eating, we head back to my grandparents house.

1pm - John and Kate come over and immediately ask, “What show are we making today?” We all gather in my room and brainstorm what to record. We’re never serious when trying to make this decision, so our brainstorm usually ends up with us all wearing funny costumes and making up new characters. Sometimes this can be frustrating because I can’t come up with a good idea. I have to take my time and think out of the box to think of some interesting ideas.

2pm-8pm - We spend most of the day recording and taking small breaks in between. None of our videos have official scripts, so sometimes it can take lots of takes just to get one good scene. John and Kate are young and extremely energetic. They always want to record all night even after we finished the show. They really enjoy acting, but it can get tiring running after them when recording. Eventually John and Kate go home and it's just Sara and I again.

9-10pm - Sara and I get into another nerf war but this time with my grandma, she always wins. I look over some of the footage and star the good scenes that I want to keep in the video so I can easily find them later.

10pm-2am - I edit the footage from that day. Through research conducted by myself, I’ve found that the best free editing application to use is Splice. The footage that is kept in the video usually is 30 minutes long, so I’ll have to cut down a lot of it to keep the video shorter and easier to watch. When I edit, I have to hear the same clips over and over again, it can make some clips sound different when I watch the video all the way through. It can easily get annoying, but it’ll be worth it when the video is done. I add music, text, easter eggs, and more to my videos to make it look nice and add comedic effect. I stay up late to finish editing the video because I know that if I don’t finish editing that night, I won’t want to work on it throughout the week, which can keep us from making more videos on the next weekend.

If I finish the video, I’ll show it to my cousins the next day and we either record another show or we just play together. Lots of my friends here at Airport say that my family is “so funny and creative.” I think that's because of our imaginations. I really like that I still have such a vivid imagination after all these years. It’s showed me something that I really enjoy and that my family enjoys being involved in. This schedule that we have on the weekends always inspires me to keep creating. I can’t wait to do it all over again next week.