On March 10th the TDSB had their annual skills challenge. This year, the challenge was to create a 30-second PSA. The judges gave us the topic a week before the actual competition. The topic was “How does respect enhance soft skills?”. If you aren’t familiar with what soft skills are here’s the definition. At first my partner and I were stumped and had no idea what to do with the topic. Eventually, we came up with the idea of a boy in an abusive relationship and that you need to respect yourself enough to remove any negative influences in your life. By doing that the world around you will open up to positive opportunities. We were only allowed a certain amount of equipment to use, a camera, 1 tripod with no dolly or sliders, no artificial lighting, and only 1 wired microphone. In addition to that no altering of the clips was allowed; this included no color correction, and no special effects, only transitions and cuts. We drew up a rough story board which allowed us to shoot and edit everything relatively fast compared to the other teams. We had until 2:00(this doesn’t mean anything because we don’t know when you started, maybe try, we only had 5 days to finish everything, etc.) to finish everything and hand in our video. Once we had shot and edited all the footage we did a final render and handed the PSA in to the judges. You can take a look at the video below.
Here’s how the day went: we arrived at the competition around 8:30, and set everything up. The
competition began at 9:00. The first scene we shot was the transition at the end of the PSA. We were looking to get a really sunny shot of the street but unfortunately the day was cloudy and we ended up with a really flat looking shot. To achieve the transition for the final scene, we had to cut while the whip pan the camera and cut during the middle of the pan, and cut again when turning back to the original scene. This gave us a really cool effect, without having to break the rules. When shooting a turn like this be sure to keep the shutter speed on your camera at a slower speed to get a better motion blur. When shooting at a higher shutter speed the video may seem choppy. The purpose of this scene was to show that if you are in a toxic relationship you always have the choice to leave if you decide to. When we filmed the pan towards the Abuser, we shot it in the hallway of the school. Since we weren’t allowed to use artificial lighting we had to make do with what we had. The lights from the ceiling created really harsh shadows on the face, making the scene look really dark and scary.
Then we shot the first scene where we see the abuser walk up and hit me. We shot this from a first person point of view. We did multiple takes so it would give us more flexibility in post-production. Similar to the turn scene we used a lower shutter speed to create a more cinematic motion blur. We did decide to have my partner, who is a female, play the role of the abuser, because society tends to overlook the fact that victims aren’t always female and that anyone can be a victim.
Next we shot the bathroom scene with the mirror. Here we had our main character reflecting on his relationship. To shoot this we mounted the camera on a tripod and simply tilted upwards. Next we shot the ripping of the photos and replacing it with the new photo. This was used to symbolize that our main character decided to get rid of the toxic relationship that he is in.
Overall this competition was a really great experience. Both meeting other people who were also interested in video, and getting to compete with them was really fun. I learned a lot from this challenge, it has taught me how to be more resourceful, creative, and the importance of planning. Since we won gold in our quadrant we are now moving on to the qualifiers at Humber College.