A Ball and its Ball! (Final Project)

My partner Noam and I, worked together on our final project called, A Ball and Its Friend. We first made a decision of what it is we want to shoot; we both knew we did not want to do a documentary. We did not want to involve actors, because of the time constraint, so we decided on capturing a day in a life of a missing ball that eventually finds its way to his friend.

Noam wrote the script, and I put together the storyboard for our project. On shooting day, we tried to follow our storyboard as much as possible; to be able to accomplish each shot as it was imagined via our storyboard. On our first day we did run into technical difficulties, where we had to split camera time with another group. That did not stop us; we kept working on as many scenes as we could fit in one day.

We both wanted to accomplish a shot where the ball is getting kicked and the camera follows the ball. We wanted the camera movement to be smooth, from the point it gets kicked; to the point the ball rolls down the hallway. Our Professor suggested we bring in a skateboard in order to get that smooth, moving ball shot. A skateboard was nowhere to be found, and Noam and I put our heads together to create something amazing. I put Noam on a big plastic garbage bag, and slid him across the floor as he shot the ball being kicked and then rolling down the hallway.

Our sound to each scene was recorded separately, and we created our own foley for specific sounds of the ball. We collected room tone from each location that we shot in, so we would be able to layer it during editing.

We chose classical music for our piece, as our piece came together like a silent film. The two actors, Noam and myself, don’t talk, but we show emotions in the film and to the music. Being that Noam is a genius when it comes to classical music, the choice for a classical piece was a no brainer.

We both sat together as the editing process began and worked and reworked our mini movie. We added the correct room tone, foley and applied the right pieces of classical music to go with the emotions of each scene.

A ball and its friend2 from Dennis Khrakovsky on Vimeo.