I wanted to experience each aspect of the process. An adjacent, secondary goal was to really familiarize myself with the gear that I already owned, and which is presented in the film. I always felt like I was using 1% of what those electronics were capable of. Hopefully, by this point I reached 2%.

Reflecting retrospectively on the whole process, my conclusions were not what I was expecting. I thought I would have a better command of each of the constituent areas of filmmaking, but instead I realized that I barely scratched the surface. And it is not about the gear! It’s all about skill and creativity, and those cost time, not money. In all honesty, I was not content with any of the elements that went into this short film when observed individually: footage is sometimes grainy, shaky, out of focus; camera movement is sometimes clumsy, music (which was fully improvised) is not very polished; sound effects came out weird; my narration is not great in terms of structure and my accent butchered words here and there and so on and so forth. Surprisingly, the end result was not as bad, which goes to prove the value of interdisciplinary endeavors – each element distracts from the imperfections of all the other ones. And that is what filmmaking is by nature – an interdisciplinary art form.

For writing the script and creating the shot lists, I used the online platform – Studiobinder.

For the video part I mostly used a Sony a6100 mirrorless camera with a 35mm, f1.8 Sony lens and a 16mm, f1.4 Sigma lens. Most shots were at 24 frames per second, except for the slow-motion sections which were at 60 fps. Some few shots were filmed with a Sony FDR-AX33 camcorder. For stabilizing some footage, I used a Ronin SC gimbal.

For the audio, I used several condenser microphones produced by AKG, Rode and Tascam. I also used a lavalier microphone for some of the dialogue and an on-camera small shotgun mic. For capturing the audio, I used my phone, laptop with a Tascam 2x2 audio interface, and a Zoom H4N pro recorder.

As for software, I used Adobe Premiere Pro for editing, color correcting and grading, and for recording most of the narration and sound effects. For the soundtrack, I used Ableton Live 11, paired with my Yamaha MODX8 keyboard and some VSTs from Native Instruments.

This project opened a whole new world for me as a musician – I am hoping to incorporate more and more of the visual arts in my concert pianist career. This will allow me to continuously grow my storytelling toolset, immortalize my work as a musician and obtain more means of sharing it with the world. I just need to remember to always add the word “yet” after the phrase “I can’t do it”.