Making Your First Short Film

It's week two of my class Making Your First Short Film and I'm loving it! I have to admit, last week was a bit overwhelming. I had just been told by UCLA Extension that I wouldn't get a one year OPT (optional practical training) after all once I graduate because I already had it 7 years ago, when I graduated from level one. That sucks, but I'm still going look into that because the laws might have changed since then.
Anyway, the class is really intense. Our first assignment was a whole list of specific things we had to shoot with different lenses, aperture set ups and shutter speeds. We even had to do a focus pull between two objects, create different depths of field with are lenses and shoot a scene twice using all of the above! Of course, my camera decided to die on me (by the way, for anyone out there who wants to buy a mini DV camera, never ever buy a Canon!), and I had to borrow my friend Jeremy's older Sony Digital 8, which turned out to be quite good. After we shot it all (I worked with three guys from the class), I edited it all into one big clip and burned it on a DVD.
The class is going thru every single step of movie making: learning how to use the camera, creating the perfect image composition for specific moods, writing the outline for your short and turn that into a script, learning how to cast, find the perfect locations, etc... While some of us in the class have made shorts before, the teacher, the excellent and funny AG Melkom, tells us to forget everything we know and to start from a clean slate. I'm loving it and I already have an idea for a short i want to produce in this class. I'll tell you more about it later, but lets just say it involves a pool ...