Capstone: The Art of Creating a Film

Robert Lenza, Verrazzano Class of 2024, completed majors in Cinema Studies Production and Psychology 

When I was accepted into Verrazzano Honors at the College of Staten Island, I had no clue what I was going to do for my senior capstone project and what I was going to present at the Undergraduate Research conference (URC). I knew I had interests in film, psychology, and history, but couldn’t put together the picture of what I’d be presenting yet. Throughout my college years taking film classes, I was inspired to create many stories that I wanted to tell through the big screen.

One of those stories was Will, which tells the story of young man suffering from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) coming face-to-face with his disorder. What I love so much about Will is that it takes a commonly referred to and discussed psychological disorder and tells the story of the inner struggle of the sufferer in a unique way. The OCD is represented as a character within the film through an exact lookalike of the main character.

Being a cinema production major, I chose to have Will be the film for my senior thesis project. It was an ambitious, complex project, so I thought it was the right move in making it my thesis. I had the opportunity to work on new filmmaking techniques and methods, such as the dolly zoom, Dutch angles, voice-over, musical score, as well as lighting and editing experimentation that helped bring my story to life.

Once I decided on Will being the film for my film production thesis, it wasn’t long before I realized using it for my capstone project would be a great idea as well. Not only would it be a good experience for me to present at the URC, but it would also allow a wider population of people to experience a new take on expressing mental health through film.

What separates this project from the other projects I have worked on is just how many people were involved. Prior to this project, I had mainly worked on my films alone or with one or two people. With this project, the list goes on with the number of people that helped out, even if it was just for a limited time.

With that, however, came some struggles. Having many people involved in a celebrative project such as this, it can often be a challenge to stay organized, make schedules, and have a clear, full-focused mind on the goals in the distance. The reality of it all is that filmmaking is not easy, but it’s the experience you get from it that makes it worth it. Yes, there were some low-points, but I learned as much if not more from the low-points as I did the many high-points during the production. This project served as an eye-opener to what it may be like to do this kind of thing as a job one day.

Overall, I can confidently say that this project has better prepared me for the next project that I work on, and I think that is incredibly important because filmmaking is a craft, and there’s always room for improvement. I am grateful that I got to work with so many people, some of whom I had never met before until working on this project. I am really glad I got to make a film that means a lot to me, while also learning new methods and techniques of filmmaking through my technical film production goals.