Life ain't nothing but pitches and lighting...

I met the beginning of week 2 with a bit of trepidation. You see, the first night of class we had a pitch session for our first short film. Up until two days prior I had nothing. Nada, nathan, zil, zilch... Then I read an article in the paper about some loud "booms" awakening people in a San Jose neighborhood and based a short story on that. I took the beginning and added a more sinister story and viola, my first pitch. I was still nervous about it. Little did I know but we green-light our own pitch as a group. The group was moderated by James. We would present our pitch, vote as a group whether or not it should get the green-light to be made into a short, and if it doesn't then we vote whether or not the idea of the story could be worked into a short.

Our pitch had to be presented in both sentence and paragraph form. Here is my sentence pitch:
In the middle of the night, a woman must fight for her life against a madman who just smashed his way into her bedroom.

Nice & simple right? 2 characters, 1 room. (notice the 2 girls 1 cup set-up I just left you...) So what did the group think? I got the green-light! Not without notes of course. As it was, there wasn't much character development, just a plot driven story. Woman wants to survive encounter.

This brings us to the next class which was Screenwriting. This was an excellent class which taught us the basics of a screenplay. We take that knowledge and couple it with our short-story and make magic happen. Sounds easy enough...

A writing lab here, a camera review there, then boom! Lighting lecture and lab gets dropped on our collective asses. I really don't think my pen left my pad for hours. I took 12 pages of notes over lighting for film then we took said knowledge and set up lighting 6 different ways: Rembrandt, Short Loop, Broad Loop, Split, Rim/Backlight, & Paramount/Glamour/Butterfly. But do you want to know what I really learned today? I have no desire to do lighting for a living.

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.