Adventures in Filmmaking: A Little More Personal

For my final film project my professor asked us to create a work that answered the question: what is the truth? Upon seeing this question at the beginning of the semester I actually had a lot of ideas. I was excited. It was so open ended, I could do anything.
As the semester went on I wanted to do something more. I really wanted to push myself to step out of my comfort zone as many others in my class have done this semester. For me, this means making films actually involving people, specifically my friends. The majority of the films I have made over my past few years in cinema have involved shots of nature or sneaky shots of people I have taken on campus while they were not looking (that is really not as weird as it sounds).
For this film, I wanted to do something very personal. I wanted to involve my friends. The thing is, I hate filming people I know. Or people I don't know. Which is weird seeing as I have always imagined myself to be a cross between Ryan Seacrest and Roger Ebert (or at least have a combination of their jobs, Ebert's movie critiquing and Ryan's event going to and general schmoozing abilities). I do not know why, but as soon as get a camera in my hand I get nervous and self conscious. I feel like everyone is looking at me because, let's be real, as soon as a camera comes out people are bound to notice you.
For this project however, I wanted things to be different. A lot of people, myself included, have been worrying about life after college. I wanted my film to reflect the fears that come with graduation, but I also wanted to contrast that with people's dream jobs. My professor wanted us to ask a question to start the film's conversation so the question I asked people was: if you could have any job regardless of how much money you would make from the job what job would you want to have? It is a question my friends and I have talked about  before so I actually knew the answers for some of them.
The video below is the result. The people in the video, for the most part, are my close friends. People I finally put my shyness aside for and let into my world. I like this video because it is so personal both in the actual people in the video and the topic itself. It is not as emotional or sobering as I hoped it would be (or maybe that's me since I spent so much time editing it), but I am proud of how it turned out because I finally stepped out of my comfort zone and made a film starring the people who are most important to me.
My professor said my film only scratched the surface on telling the truth and I agree. If I had more time to really delve into this maybe it woud have come out differently. Nevertheless, I am happy about my accomplishments and the fact that I tried something new.