You should always be learning regardless of your age. Learning doesn’t always have to take place in the classroom. You’re going to learn a lot more from doing a project than from reading about it in a textbook. Here are 3 projects you can do in your free time.
#1) PSAs (Public Service Announcements)
PSAs are good projects to tackle because they challenge you to send a message, in a short amount of time. To start come up with a message you care about; this could be “don’t drink and drive” or “quit smoking”. Next set a time limit for your PSA that is less than 1 minute. After a minute your audience will start to lose interest. Keeping things short also helps to keep your message clear; you want the audience to get the message without having to spend an eternity analyzing it. Due to how quick they are it allows you to shoot many of them to test out ideas, and figure out what works and what doesn’t.
Here is a great PSA that dlivers a clear and concise message, in a timely manner.
#2) Music Videos
Music Videos are a little more time consuming, since most songs tend to be around three to four minutes. Start by finding a song you like, or create your own. Then find someone to perform the song. You could have a video without a performer, but having someone perform the song could make the video more interesting. Shooting a music video can teach you a lot about syncing audio, and working with performers. Working with an artist can be challenging; what you have in mind may not be what the artist wants. It forces you to work with the artist and incorporate their vision with yours.
Above is a music video I shot for a school project.
#3) Movie Trailers
Trailers are very fun to do. Cutting a trailer for a movie makes you analyze a film and pick out the main ideas of the story and put them in a short video that would tell those ideas, without spoiling the ending or twists. Once you’ve gotten the hang of cutting a trailer, try to cut the trailer to change the genre of the film. For example Rush Hour is a comedy, cut the movie up so it appears to be a horror movie, below is the movie up cut up to be a horror.
The CineMash team, did a great job making Up seem like a horror movie.