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   At first, I decided to join the film making group because I’ve never made a film by myself and have always been curious about how to do it. It turned out that what I’ve learnt from this final project was much more than I expected. It was definitely a meaningful and rewarding project!

As a film making group, we decided to make the film in a vivid and lively way. Show how we, both as individuals and a class, evolved by making a comics. One the one hand, we can naturally record what we’ve been through; exaggerate some parts to make it dramatic and interesting. Even for the details that is hard to express by words. On the other hand, we thought it would be useful for future freshmen to choose their ideal ESEM classes.

The film starts by a series of black and white pictures with various themes, representing the diverse topics that we’ve covered in this semester. The pictures as well as the music accompaniment accelerates as time goes by, which represents we were more and more captivated by the topics, more and more involved in the discussion and the our finding of how the world exist become more and more unbelievable.

The second scene was about one of the unique characteristics of our class: the longest name ever. We wanted to show the complexity of the name, like what we told people in daily life when they asked about it, by messing up the names in various ways.

Thirdly, we took a scene about our reaction and initial confusion at the beginning of the class. It was awkward to ask people to do so because so many things have happened and changed during the last 3 months. While we can still see people’s constrain on the first day of the class from the video. Also, the awkward feeling that everyone experienced while shooting this scene was the best evidence of our evolvement and change.

Then, we captured another funny but real thing that everyone had gone through: finding Serendip. It took only 2 seconds for me to open this website just now, but at first, it really took like forever to try numerous likely versions of websites, eventually got to some weird ones and even became desperate. Since this is an important composition of our class and co-construction, we decided to make it as a part of the film.

After that come the most interesting and funny part: meeting with Paul in Park. By acting and shooting ourselves at Park, we wanted to show how confused the building was and how much effort we’ve paid to try to get to Paul’s office. We wanted to make it feel like a real movie so it was actually hard to be an actress. I could not redo what other people did and it was really awkward to hold a camera, crazily running in a confusing building while loudly speaking to myself. I felt so different when a video was actually shooting at me and it was even more embarrassed when I was eventually seen by someone who didn’t know what I was doing. While luckily, after several attempts, we were happy to see we did better than we imagined. This part was even better when music was added to show that time passed very quickly.

A series of questions that have been raised in the class were shown after that. Was anything real? How do we know? What influences change? Are we all just stories? Why are we like we are? What is purpose? Can we live without competition? How does our conscious affect our unconscious? Does everything influence us? What is the purpose of conscious? Is change all we have?

At last, we shoot another scene in the real class, indicating after many meetings, after taking deep thinking more than we’ve ever done, after finally reconciled with our brain, where are we now, how we are different from the beginning. We also made a dramatic scene about how students and Paul left the classroom at last. With the comparison between the second scene (we walked into an empty classroom) and the last scene (we walked out of the classroom), we wanted to show that after a certain period of time, the classroom is still classroom. We are just part of the story that existed in the classroom, existing in the universe.

It was really an interesting thing to come up with these ideas. Transform what we formed in our head into reality. In addition, I enjoyed working with other people as a group, trying various ways to work efficiently while getting to know more about each other. I haven’t really learnt about every detail procedure of editing a film on a computer now, but I got a general idea. Also, it was extremely rewarding to put it on Youtube and see the click rate gradually going up: it’s not only for the evolvement of individual, neither was it for our class. It was for the society and the world as a whole. And that is the theme of our class.