Haunted High School! Halloween at Arts!

It's Halloween at Arts and the Media majors have decided to get into the spooky spirit with their own ghost PSA videos! For those who are unaware, PSA stands for Public Service Announcement. Normally, a PSA is about a topic that someone wishes to spread awareness on and inform the public about. Usually a public service announcement is non-fiction, but it doesn't have to be!

Image from the short PSA of the Food Stealing Ghost

In the spirit of Halloween, every Media major was divided into groups of three or four and assigned to create a public service announcement about a ghost haunting the Arts Academy. For my group, I was assigned to work with two amazing Juniors, Allei Floyd, and Savanna. We decided to take a more comedic approach to the challenge, and created the funniest and creepiest demon you'll ever watch on screen. A demon that steals your lunches and candy bars!

In this blog post today, I'm going to take you through the process of how the following short film was made. As well as all of the effort and time that this group has put into this project.

The day the challenge was first given to us was like any other normal day in the Media Department. We had all walked in to do our journal work for the day, but instead of finding a prompt for our journal entries, we found our names scattered on cards at each table. I had found my name along with Allei and Savanna's who were already sitting at the table waiting for me. Mr. Riffel had announced to us we would be making a ghost PSA and that the names on the tables were our teams for the assignment. I immediately felt bad as I was leaving my major that day for instant admissions to Erie Community College.

When I came back about half an hour later, Savanna and Allei were already deep into the production process. In media, we always start with the Pre-Production before moving on to actually filming. This process involves things such as a shot list (what shots we would want for the film), and the script.

Savanna was our editor, so she had created the first draft of the shot list, it was a broad copy open to interpretation, and we sat together discussing how to narrow it down to extreme detail. We finally had it, we would create a film of a demon who would steal people's lunches, and his favorite food to steal would be people's candy bars. Allei was our director, she had come up with the small script and exactly where we should shoot the scenes, making her set design as well.

Now I know to a non-media major this would sound boring, but it's actually one of the most important parts of filming. Without a shot list, storyboard, and script, very little work can get done as their is poor communication and planning, leaving people to guess what they are supposed to be doing. So after we got the shot list down to a shot for shot list, we jumped right into the fun part, filming!

Masala in the scene where the ghost has stolen all the food from her locker.

When deciding on the cast for the film, we figure there was no one better for the role of the main girl than Masala, her emotion was amazing and really brought our ghost to life! In the filming process, I gladly took on the role of camera person. Okay that was a bit of a lie, Savanna and I kind of fought for it a bit, but I won! Sorry about that Savanna. Normally we use our major's professional cameras and lights to film, but in this case the challenge went even farther than the topic of the film. Almost the entire PSA was shot on our school laptops!

At first, Savanna and I agreed that this was way more trouble than it was worth, it was terrible at focusing on Masala, the lighting was awful, and attempting to move files to edit them was beyond a pain. But despite this, because our shot list was so detailed and we managed our time so well, we finished almost all the filming within just one day.

But of course with only two periods with the juniors, Savanna and Allei would have to leave for their 5th period class, leaving me on my own. Since I was the only Senior in the group, it became a solo project when the clock struck 11:10am. Once my team would leave, I devoted all of my time to editing the footage we had and figuring out how to improve on it, this is where I found the first huge bump in the road. Corrupted Footage.

In editing, there are times when the computer doesn't do what you want. This was one of those times, the footage we had filmed of Masala and Allei for the scene where they finally see the ghost was corrupted. The video was crystal clear, but the audio was static and cut out at parts. It was completely unusable and needed to be re-shot. Let me tell you guys, you could hear the thump of my head hitting the desk in frustration. I decided to skip over that part for the time being and shoot the final ghost scene with Olivia Myers, alerting Allei of the issue the next day. We then spent about ten minutes the next day re-shooting all the corrupted scenes, this ate into our editing time for the piece.

By this time in the project, the group was starting to suffer. Allei had left for a couple days for her own personal reasons, leaving our group down to two people. On top of that, Mr. Riffel had also taken a sick leave for a couple days. We still needed an audio track for the project, but Savanna and I had no prior audio training and was relying on Mr. Riffel to teach us. We didn't have the time to wait for him, we needed to figure it out on our own.

That day after Savanna had left, Miss Murray and I spent the entire 5th period with me in the audio booth practicing using Logic Pro X and the equipment in there. When Savanna came back the next day we spent all of our time in there creating a creepy underlay track from different sounds and instruments inside of the software.

By this point, we were trying to decide on a name for our film. We had it all down, the footage, the audio, even the smallest detail down to light and special effects. But we were missing the name at the very end. I sat in career and financial, another class Miss Murray taught, I was lost in thought about what to name it. My friends had noticed my spacing out and asked what was on my mind. I explained to them my situation of the name hunt for the PSA. One of my friends, a very creative artist, had suggested the name "Eat Your Heart Out". I pitched it to Savanna and we both agreed we loved it, so now with a name before the credits, we were excited and ready to present our work to Miss Murray and Mr. Riffel.

Masala when she discovers her locker vandalized 

The film was complete and in it's final stages, Post-Production. At this point the only thing being done to the film was touch ups and double checking for any errors. The editing was done mostly by Savanna, she had taken the footage I organized and added color overlays and special effects, as well as title cards. We both found it to be a hilarious film with a creepy undertone. Finally we put the end credits on it and sent it to Mr. Riffel for review.

After Mr. Riffel gave us a couple quick notes and suggestions, the video was finally in the very last step of Production, Publishing. Well, that's what I'm doing right now right? So obviously we are at that step. If I had to comment on the project and it's process as a whole, I had a lot of fun. The film itself came out great and I had a lot of good laughs while filming it. Despite the bumps in the road Savanna and I managed to work our way around them to create this amazing piece. It had emotion to it, which is all I could ever ask in a film I created.

In conclusion this post Arts Academy, I wish you all a Happy Halloween! Enjoy your candy and spooky parties! Especially Night of the Living Majors. And I hope you enjoy everyone's ghost PSA videos, since we all put a lot of effort into them for you guys. Be sure to come to the Halloween film party the Media and Communications Department is hosting on October 31st right after school! Remember to keep the scares up this amazing spooky season.