The counsel was written by Anthony Orji and directed by me. It’s subject matter was centered on addiction and the need to break from its shackles into the world of sobriety. It’s a film everyone should see. Now I want to ask a question “ how would you feel if you are gruesomely addicted to something that you can go broke just to take that or go a day without indulging in such thing”. I personally think there should be self control for everything one does. Take a look around you, you would find out that addiction has eaten deep into the bone marrows of so many youths. This is why everyone should watch closely what he or she does. When I first got the script for this short film, I was amazed because this is an issue I have longed to address. I started by going through the script thoroughly to develop a directorial concept. After that, I engaged my actors on proper rehearsals, though they were first time actors, I did everything humanly possible to get them acquainted with the script and to better understand their characters and give their best performance. I thought of drawing a storyboard, but I am not good at that so I made a shot list and some graphical representations of each scene in a way I could understand it. Then I called the actors and engaged them in an interrogation techniques, asking them questions in relation with the characters they are about to portray. I made arrangements for a camera and other equipments ( A canon 750d camera). But before then I have already made arrangements for the locations used. The counsel consists of two scenes,the first which is the meeting with the therapist and the second which is a flashback scene where Sam got a message from his mum to go see the therapist. The first scene was supposed to be at the therapist’s office but we didn’t have the capacity to light an indoor scene, then we changed it to an outdoor scene ( the therapist could decide to meet Sam outside). Then for the second scene, we needed a moody environment where Sam usually stays to smoke,So we got an area in a bush which clearly fit what I was going for.
THE DAY OF THE SHOOT
I Set out with my cast and crew members on that day to bring this vision to screen, it was a whole lot of experience. We did some rehearsal shoot to get the actors ready, to me they were not giving their best so we kept on rehearsing. When I started seeing the best performance, I called for an action starting with the master/establishing shot. If there’s one thing I learnt on this day it is to always go on set with extra batteries as not putting this into consideration could limit your creativity. I also learnt to not show actors how to act but tell them. By doing the latter,their creativity won’t be limited. Take a look at some reviews from my short film “The counsel”
POST PRODUCTION
During the post production, I got the music scores and folleys from Epidemic sounds. Epidemic sounds has varieties of sound effects and music to use for your films. During the editing, i learnt to edit sounds properly in premier pro. I wanted to get the best sound out of what I have, and I learnt so many new techniques of doing that. Thanks to YouTube.
CONCLUSION
I urge everyone here to please use the link on my bio to see this short film i have made. It’s just 11minutes and I would like to get a feedback of what y’all think as it would help me in my next project. Thanks y’all in advance.