Follow the Yellow Brick Road: Indie Filmmaking at Tufts
Noah Brown and Nicole Cohen

Follow the Yellow Brick Road: Indie Filmmaking at Tufts

Noah Brown (A19) and Nicole Cohen (A19), Indie Filmmaking production class (Fall 2019)

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At the beginning of the fall semester, fourteen eager Film and Media Studies students set off on an adventure to make three short films. These films would not be your typical student films. Instead, these films were to be shot using professional equipment most of us had never seen before, including the Arri Alexa, a camera that is used on most modern professional film sets.

 

Where most of us had come from the world of shooting amateur student films in a weekend, this class gave us the whole semester. While we would typically shoot with a crew of a couple of our friends, each of these films were fully crewed, with each student filling out a particular role on set. One student could be the director on the first film, a boom operator on the second, and a grip on the third. We were truly not in Kansas anymore.

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This process did not come without its challenges: for one film, we had to shoot in a small diner late into the night, and for another, we had to shoot all of our exterior scenes during one particularly cold weekend in November. We powered through and came out the other side, unscathed and with a series of wonderful little films under our belts.

 

But this was only the beginning. We successfully completed the first half of the class - the second half will be completed in the spring semester when a whole new group of students get to work editing each of our films together. Next stop: the editing lab! Do you have a design in mind for your blog? Whether you prefer a trendy postcard look or you’re going for a more editorial style blog - there’s a stunning layout for everyone.

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