This term, we’re studying an advanced level of digital filmmaking. Instead of doing projects individually or by pairs, we were put into groups where we all have respective roles.

For this certain project, we had to choose an event or holiday so we decided with “wedding proposal”. We had to incorporate it into our story but there was a catch. Our teacher Miss Rianne gave us “obstacles” to make our lives easier. Thank you miss! HAHA. Aside from making a story with a wedding proposal, we had to put these elements: the genre had to be horror or suspense and the twist to the story was a diary had to be found or else someone would die.

DAMN.

When we were brainstorming we thought of something like the manga Deathnote but it was too complicated for us and we didn’t want to be copycats. My groupmate Anya was assigned to write the script and the story she came up with was sooooo much better. Of course, like any script, we had to tweak some stuff not only for story reasons but for adjustments with our shoot.

One of the things I’m really thankful for are my contacts. Last minute, I once again asked my sister Lauren and my friend Mikael to be our actors. Since they’ve been in two of my films, you would’ve thought that I was pushing for a love team of some sort HAHAHA! But they’re always cool naman with acting for me. Passion nila yung eh. Naks. So thank you to the both of them!

That day was pretty tiring. Anya had to leave early because she had a shoot that afternoon so it was just Riel, James and I. We were lucky enough that we were able to recruit one of the freshmen, Skye to join in on our team. Imagine shooting a short film with only 4/5 men on your team! It was pretty crazy.

Editing was a killer for us. We started editing at 9pm and ended at 6am the next day. James felt like a robot afterwards and I had to go straight to work. I felt like a potato. We did have issues with audio because we forgot to turn off the electric fan a lot of our scenes (what dumbbutts we are). With the final edit, our scoring was too high so we decided to re-edit it and put sub-titles.

My mom called me the other day and told me she loves that I’m studying film but the things that I make are too scary! I told her to watch out for the music video that I made with my friend Saab. For the meanwhile, here’s our film, Relapse: