Our film ‘LOOPHOLE’ showcases the struggle of an individual’s efforts to escape a never-ending loop of stairs after being impatient to take the elevator. The short film explores the idea of time being an illusion, one’s consequences for being impatient and the misconceptions of reality.

For the out of class exercise, we collectively chose to do an action sci-fi piece, knowing that we could rely on fast cut scenes and quick shots to tell a story, despite the lack of dialogue and poor acting.  During pre-production, we decided that the story would be all shot in one place and have one actor to save in time and effort in the production stage, whilst still have the main conceptual idea be an ambitious and creative task to produce – hence incorporating certain sci-fi genre conventions into the film. Exploring themes of time travel, we were able to apply similar shots in our film to convey the character’s inability to escape the endless stairway, as well as save production time in setting up various camera angles in between the shots.

As a result of this, a storyboard was drawn up for us to be able to visualize the sequence of events happening within the story – one of which that involves the manipulation of time within the character’s world, despite maintaining a traditional three act narrative structure. Having learned the concept of continuity editing in previous classes, I found storyboarding to be very helpful during the production process as it was my duty as both an actor and director to know every shot happening in the order it was planned to be. Though despite this, we did change a few things with the story when things did not go as planned with the shooting location as the location was either different or too small to achieve the desire framing compared to what was drawn on the storyboards. Furthermore, we had to cut down on some shots due to limited time to schedule shooting days as some group members were unavailable to meet up on most days of the week (unfortunately).

The production stage was an easy process, especially after filming majority of my shots, then losing all the footage due to an SD card corruption and having to re-film it all over again.  As frustrating as it was, I must admit it was a blessing in disguise, for the sole reason that I had a chance to learn from my mistakes by preparing for the worst next time I tackle such a project.