Conscience

I have been working on “Conscience” since my second year at college. I created my script that summer but it never felt completed or good enough to produce into a film. I had intended to create this with my friend Sky who was the cinematographer for my first film “Leave a Message…” but he left before I could finalize the script. Over time, I just put the script off to the side and slightly revised it without putting much thought into it until my fourth year. In my fall semester, due to the limited number of students in the graduating class within the film studies discipline, I took the Humanities capstone class where we had to choose a topic to research and write a paper on. My paper was about the accurate portrayal of mental health and illness in movies and how in the past it was often villainized and in modern times it now seems to be glorified. I then decided to use my script that I have been working on for my senior thesis film in the spring semester linking it to my research paper from the fall semester. For actors, I posted some casting calls on facebook and I had received various replies but when I contacted some of them back, I didn’t get any response which meant I had to find other people for the roles. Additionally, it was hard finding crew to work on set since we started filming over spring break and most people were gone. It was very frustrating not being able to have easy access to people who could work on the set but it forced me as a filmmaker to learn how to adapt to these obstacles and work around them. Filming took longer than expected due to scheduling issues, reshoots, and just general uncontrollable aspects of the filmmaking process. Despite all that, filming was a very fun and enjoyable experience that was primarily due to the cast and crew that I had by my side. If I could start the process over I would allow myself more room to be flexible with change as well as having a more concrete vision for what I wanted from the film. I plan on continuing to work on my film’s sound design. I wanted to make a film that you could watch three different ways and still understand the whole story. First, without the audio, second without the visuals, and lastly with both.