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CAS Blog
Luciana Pun
Pier One
"Pier One" is a movie directed by Marcelo Arana, one of the students in Markham College. In his final project for Film IB, his group had to shoot a short film, where actors where needed to play the main characters. Along with two other friends, we volunteered to help out and act in "Pier One". This involved learning the script, going on location to act, repeating scenes to get them perfect, having to go back to reshoot scenes that had gone wrong and more. We got 10 hours of CREATIVITY and SERVICE from this activity.
The learning outcomes of this activity will be:
LO1: Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth
LO2: Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process.
LO5: Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively
Preparation:
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I was asked one week before the filming day if I could act in the film called "Pier One", which was going to be filmed in the location of Regatas Lima, Barranco. This was perfect for me because I swim in that club everyday so it would be easy for me to act and swim on the same day. Later on I would discover this was almost impossible but it did not matter because I had a great time.
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The day we were going to shot, I had to prepare my bags with the appropriate clothes for my character. I was going to be a teenager who is killed by her best friends because she wants to steal my character's boyfriend.
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Shooting Day 1:
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Straight after school (3pm), we left the school with the editor of the film. The director and cinematographer had stayed longer as they had to bring all the equipment to the club. When we arrived, we changed into our clothes and began the make-up process. After this, we began rehearsing our lines until everything was prepared.
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Our first location was a restaurant in the club were we were celebrating my birthday and the audience could notice that my best friend hated me. We filmed this about 3 times and then we moved on to the most important scene in the film.
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This scene was when my best friend killed me and dropped my body into the ocean. Dropping my body into the ocean was something LITERAL. The other actress, called Bridget, was going to push me into the freezing ocean in the middle of Peru's winter. This means that we could only take one shot and it was the worst thing ever.
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The ocean was incredibly cold but the good thing is that I went to change directly into other clothes and the director, Marcelo Arana, gave a crepe with Nutella to warm up. Then, we went to film the shots were my character was dead and I appeared as a ghost to my boyfriend.
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For this they had to put a lot of white makeup on me so that I looked pale and dead. We finished filming the shots at 8pm! I obviously did not have time to go back a swim but it was a lot of fun.
Shooting Day 2:
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The second day of filming was much easier than the first. We only had two scenes that had to be filmed and one of them was a retake as it had gone wrong on the first day. The director also asked me to do some extra shots just in case the editor needed more angles to work with.
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At the end, it was very sad to end the movie as we had spent 10 hours together. However, I look forward on seeing "Pier One" in the film festival that will be held in my school next month.
LO1: I had acted before when I was little but I had not done it for a long time so I believe that I could have done a better job for next time.
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LO2: The planning was a little improvised and I received the text the same day but I managed to learn my lines even so.
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LO5: Filming a movie is very hard and collaboration is needed as the director, sound designer and cinematographer have to work together to create a good film.