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watch Quarantine Project - short film, ended up with the work I'm most proud of


Hey guys my name is Alex Kumph,
I spent my last two years of highschool working on this project with no budget or crew, I used my friends and resources from the town I grew up in. The script was truly awful, and the final film was essentially a cinematography showreel with immersive sound design, the story was not communicated at all.
I left for college, and spent a little under a year in LA meeting fellow filmmakers, actors, and interesting people from all around the world. I also worked with a few friends to produce our first documentary. The editing process of this doc was very challenging as my friend and I editing it had only ever edited narrative shorts, and docs are a different animal. However, it showed me the true power of how you can use editing to rewrite a film. Around the end of my first year, the pandemic started. My roommate at the time was an editor and I had done a couple projects with him. We enjoyed working together, so I brought up the idea of taking the old material I had shot for Prime Time, and making something new out of it. He was looking for something to work on, and over the next couple months, with no direction from me, he assembled the footage I had shot. I gave him a log line, there wasn’t even a script. I wanted to see what he would come up with having not been a part of the process of making the film.

He presented an edit to me, the footage in chronological order, with a few songs he liked as temp music in the background(all folly and atmospheric sound was added in post later on).

This allowed me to see the film from a different perspective. I could see how silly the story was, how flat the characters were, and because I over shot the shit out of the film, that there was room to change this.

Over the next several months, I rewrote the film several times, trying out different stories, and adapting the footage to these new concepts using what I learned making the doc.

The film was written through editing, but I did write a script from the edit for v/o performance and to get everyone on the same page in terms of scene intention.

Here is the script PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xoSMtPI4Q60uqanXtDcgHzkpueuCb18_/view?usp=sharing

We eventually got it to the place it is now, after about 5 months, throughout the pandemic. The film is far from perfect, but it is now something that I am proud of, and something that explores a strange concept in what I find to be an entertaining way. I could not have done this without my editor Richard Townsley who allowed me to see this project in a new light, from a new perspective.

Technical information:
Shot on: Canon 70D in MLV RAW, 720p
Converted to DNGs with MLV Converter
Upscaled to 1080p in AE.
I colored in AE using Adobe Camera Raw and the film convert plugin.
Edited in Premiere Pro, most sound was done in Pr as well, with some additional work in Audition.
AE was also used for VFX.

Light was 90% natural, with the occasion house lamp, work light, or in the case of the bar, 2 stage lights.

The dolly shots are a DIY setup made of 2x4s, electrical conduit, and skateboard parts.

The rest was shot handheld, on a homemade suction cup car mount, or a fluid head tripod.

Sound was mostly just mp3s ripped offline, but v/o and dialogue was recorded on the Zoom H5n, 2 cheap condenser mics, and the Iphone mic.

I will have more making of info up on my website https://www.alexkumph.com/ soon.

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions. Thank you to the team that helped me bring this project to life. Enjoy!
 
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