MIT Film Club Kickoff: “6 Fingers”

MIT Stratton Student Center

My friend Rajesh Nair recently organized a new MIT film club at the Stratton Student Center. To kick it off, he wrote a 1 page script with storyboard to have attendees shoot during the first day of class. The script wasn’t the most developed story in the world, but the intent was to give people something to work with while getting a quick and dirty feel for the filmmaking process (more depth would be covered in future classes by guest speakers).

Since the film club was targeted at people who had no film experience, Rajesh invited me to lead the exercise and give everyone an overview on how to break the script down, organize the production, develop a shot list, plan the shoot, learn some basics about framing and composition, a few things to consider to make your footage editable, some continuity guidelines, as well as different ways to convey an idea or story point. All of this was done during the 3 hour class, which I conducted as an active teaching/learning exercise. Needless to say, everyone was surprised how much goes into the whole process!

There were 6 students total, and everyone took turns shooting one of the shots using a Canon 7D I had set up for them. After the class, everyone was given a copy of the footage and encouraged to edit it together so we could screen their work during the next class. For fun, here’s the version I put together using the footage they shot. For more info on the new MIT Film Club, visit the Facebook group page.