When I signed up for this class in the spring of 2005, I was super excited for it. I knew it was going to be my first college class I actually enjoyed. Because of that, during finals I couldn’t even think about the finals I had, I was already thinking of my first project for this class. For some reason the storyline to this movie just came to me. It wasn’t like a work in progress. I was lying in bed staring at the ceiling and the whole thing came to me. I laid awake for about two hours planning out every shot in my head and then eventually fell asleep. Over the summer I had other projects I was working on so I never came back to this one. Once the semester started I had kinda forgotten about the idea for this movie and was toying with a lot of other ideas in my head. It got to the point where there was only a week left before our first project was due and I had to pick something and run with it. I decided to go with the first idea I had and this was the result.

I had never done anything like this before so I wasn’t sure what to do. I can’t draw that great so I didn’t do a storyboard, but I did write out every shot. My roommate, friend, and classmate, Randy, ran the camera whenever I was in front of it. Between my filming and his filming, I was really happy with everything we had when I sat down to capture. Randy walked me through Adobe Premiere and told me to go for it. I remember Randy had told me “It’s going to take you about eight hours to edit this.” I laughed and said it wouldn’t because I had everything planned out in my head. Well, exactly eight hours after I sat down, my movie was done.

This movie, to me, is about how we have been conditioned to believe “monsters” are easily identifiable by how they look. For instance, if someone walks around in a hockey mask, we automatically associate them with Jason, the horror movie character we all know. On the other hand, if someone looks completely normal, we don’t expect them to be a monster. I believe this is largely in part to what the film industry has made us believe monsters look like. Basically, I took that idea and made a short about it.

This is the final cut from me sitting down in front of adobe premiere for the first time ever. I was going to go back and polish it up, but I decided to leave it exactly as it was so that in the future, I could look back on the first movie I ever made and see it for exactly what it was, mistakes and all. I’m happy with it and I hope you, whoever you are, enjoy it as well.



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"The Roommate"
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