I spent a year in film school, learning the ins and outs of screenwriting. During this project, I was given the opportunity to bring my knowledge of film to a new arena. Starting with the premise "a movie discouraging academic dishonesty" and the basic style idea of "in the vein of a cheesy '70s after-school special," I pulled up Plotbot, a free online screenwriting program and dashed out a one-page script. Since I was familiar with how to "imply" shots in prose, we didn't need to work up a storyboard (though I'm sure it would have helped, had we more time), and we shot things quickly.
As has always been the case for me, I overwrote, and we had to cut a lot of stuff out in order to bring it down to 40 seconds (bargained up from 30). This was the part of the process I was unfamiliar with, having done very little video editing in my time, generally leaving that to people more skilled. However, since our goals were simple and easily achieved, it was fairly easy and fun (though it required a lot of fiddling to get the shots and transitions to fit EXACTLY 40 seconds).
A fun and worthwhile project, and it was fun to get a chance to utilize my film experience in a new context.
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