I am not the reincarnation of Federico Fellini.

I learned that very quickly this week as I attempted to create a documentary for my Public Affairs class in conjunction with Campus MovieFest. For those of you who don’t know what CMF is: it is the largest student film festival in the country. If you participate, they loan you a video camera, Apple laptop, tripod and send you on your way. You have five days to create, shoot, and edit a five-minute video.

The first thing I learned? Well, relearned. When faced with a new situation, I have a small freak-out before I can settle down and focus on what I need to get done. It is just how I am wired. After shooting my footage (and discovering that some was unusable), I found myself lying awake in bed, wonder what the <expletive deleted> I was thinking when I signed up for this project.

But, as I lay awake in the dark, fretting, I finally came up with Plan B.

But back to what I learned about making this movie.

Lesson 2: The wind is not my friend. One person I interviewed on a windy day. I figured the microphone would pick up some of the wind, but I had NO idea how loud it would really sound (sub-lesson here, remember your headphones). It was so bad, I couldn’t use the footage.

Lesson 3: I can take good photographs of horses, but video? Not so much. I thought I got some good footage of the horses, but because they’re dynamic, active animals, I had a lot of trouble with the zoom. Minor lesson, but I definitely need to practice.

Lesson 4: Being a team of one is tough. It is really hard to worry about the interview questions, listen to the person’s answer, worry about the camera image, worry about the audio, and keep an eye on the time. In my past professional life, I’ve gone on shoots but I’ve had a crew to help me with the audio and video parts. I always appreciated how good they were at their jobs, but now I have a much deeper understanding of how much they helped me.

I could go on with the lessons, but then I wouldn’t have much to add to my class debrief… but despite the stress and some of the hard lessons, I’m really glad I participated in this!