OK so. My name is Danny Reyes, I'm 18, I'm a senior in high school, and I am going to make movies. Not "I want to." I'm going to. I've known since I was nine and my dad let me stay up for a movie I was definitely too young for, and I sat there afterward not able to move because I'd just figured out that somebody DECIDED every single thing in it. Where the camera was. When it cut. What the music did. Somebody decided all of it. I wanted to be that somebody so bad I couldn't sleep.

This page is about applying to film school, which is what I'm doing this fall, which is terrifying, which is why I'm writing about it instead of doing my calculus. It's got the whole story of the short film I made this summer for my portfolio (all 8 minutes of it), how I shot it on my dad's Hi8 camcorder, how I cut it with two VCRs and a lot of swearing, the essays, and the part where I sit around waiting to find out if I'm good enough. If you're doing this too, e-mail me. We can be scared together.

I wrote it in June, shot it over two weekends in August, and finished cutting it September 5th at 3 in the morning. It's about a kid who's supposed to get on a bus. That's it, that's the movie. It's dedicated to my mom, who's in it, and who didn't ask why.

Here's the whole thing scene by scene. Yes, I know I'm giving away the ending. It's 8 minutes. Deal with it.

Is it good? I don't know. Some days I watch it and I think it's the best thing anybody's ever made and some days I watch it and I want to throw the tape in the pool. My film teacher (we have one elective, one semester) said the kitchen shot was "genuinely accomplished" and that the old man's monologue was "about 40 seconds too long," and I've decided to believe half of what he said and you can guess which half.

Camera: My dad's Hi8 camcorder, which he bought for my sister's quinceañera in '96 and which I have now used about a hundred times more than he has. Hi8 looks a lot better than regular 8mm or VHS-C, which is why I begged for it instead of borrowing my cousin's. It's still video, it still looks like video, but it's sharp and the color's good in daylight. I shot everything in the manual focus and manual exposure settings because auto-anything on a camcorder hunts around during a shot and it looks like home video, which, OK, it is, but it doesn't have to LOOK like it.

Tripod: $6 at a garage sale. One leg is shorter. Every shot in this movie is on the tripod except the tilt-up on the bag, which is handheld and which I did 14 times.

Sound: The built-in mic on a camcorder picks up the camcorder. I borrowed a little clip-on microphone from the drama department and ran it into the mic jack on the camera, and it's on Mr. Ortega for the whole bench conversation. You can't see the wire because it goes down inside his shirt. The bus sounds are real buses, recorded separately on my Walkman with the record button, and put in during editing (see below). The kitchen scene has no dialogue on purpose partly because it's a better scene that way and partly because I had one microphone.

Lights: The sun. Scene 1 is actual dawn, which meant getting Marco out of bed at 5 a.m. on a Saturday, which cost me a pizza. The kitchen scene is the kitchen light with a desk lamp bounced off the ceiling so it wasn't all orange. I read about "bouncing" in a library book and it works.

The bus: The bench is a real city bus bench on a road that doesn't get much traffic on weekends. The buses are real buses on a real schedule, which I got from the transit office, and which is the reason it took two weekends: you get one chance every 40 minutes and if Marco blinks, that's it, wait 40 minutes. The drivers were cool about it. One of them waved on the second take and I couldn't use it.

Cast and crew: Marco (Miguel). My mom (Mom). Mr. Ortega from next door (the Old Man). Luis (music, and he held the tripod leg that's short). My sister Ana (she made everybody sandwiches and said she's a producer, so, credits say "Producer: Ana Reyes"). Me: writer, director, camera, editor, the guy who apologizes to bus drivers.

Cost: Two Hi8 tapes ($14), a VHS tape for the master ($3), the tripod ($6), pizza (a lot), and a thank-you plant for Mr. Ortega ($9). About $60. I keep reading about guys who made their first movie for $7,000 or $27,000 and got into Hollywood and I think, I'm way under budget.

Here's how you edit video when you don't have a computer that can do it (and I don't; ours is a Pentium with 32 megs of RAM and a hard drive that's already full of my sister's stuff, and the video capture cards that actually work cost more than the camera).

You take the camcorder, which plays the Hi8 tapes, and you run cables from its outputs into the inputs on a VCR. You put a blank VHS tape in the VCR. Then: find the start of the shot you want on the camcorder. Put the VCR in record-pause. Press play on the camcorder, and at the exact right frame press pause on the VCR to un-pause it and start recording. When the shot's over, hit pause again on the VCR. Find the next shot on the camcorder. Repeat. Forty-one times, in order, from the beginning, because you can only ADD to the end of the tape. You can't move a shot. You can't make a shot shorter after you've laid it down. If you mess up shot 30, you go back to shot 30 and re-do 30 through 41.

I messed up shot 30. Twice.

Things I learned:

• Every time the VCR comes out of pause there's a little glitch, a flash or a roll, at the cut. The good VCRs with "flying erase heads" don't do this or do it less. My uncle's VCR has them and mine doesn't, so I did the final cut at my uncle's house over Labor Day weekend, in his den, with the door closed, and he brought me food.
• Your cut is going to land about half a second late every time because of how long the VCR takes to get going. So you start the camcorder about half a second early and it lands where you want. You get a feel for it after 20 tries.
• Watch the tape counter. Write everything down. I have a notebook with every shot's start and end on the Hi8 tapes to the second, and that notebook is the actual movie, the VHS tape is just a copy of the notebook.
• Sound: my uncle's VCR has an "audio dub" button that records new sound onto the linear audio track without touching the picture. That's how the bus sounds and the guitar got in, after the picture was done, by playing them off the Walkman and my boom box into the VCR's audio inputs and hitting audio dub at the right moment. The sync isn't perfect. Nobody's noticed. Don't tell them.
• The master is a VHS tape. Then I made copies of the master for the applications, and each copy is worse than the master, so the schools are getting a second-generation copy of a video of a video. I've made my peace with it.

Total editing time: I stopped counting at 30 hours. For 8 minutes. I've since read that a real editing system lets you move shots around by dragging them with a mouse and I honestly can't imagine it.

Every school wants a personal statement, and some want more than one: why film, why here, a description of a moment that changed you, a film you love and why, sometimes a scene you'd write. I have written the "why film" essay nine times. Here's what I've figured out from throwing away eight of them:

• Don't start with "Ever since I was a child, movies have been my passion." Everybody starts with that. I started with that. Eight times.
• They don't want to hear that you love movies. Everybody who applies loves movies. They want to know what you SEE. So the ninth draft starts with the kitchen window shot and why I put the camera outside, and how I figured out that not hearing the words was the point, and it goes from there.
• Be honest about what you don't know. I wrote a whole paragraph about how I don't know anything about lenses and I want to. My teacher said that paragraph was the best one.
• Don't list movies to sound smart. I had a list of like fifteen movies in draft four. Now I talk about two: one that everybody's seen this year, the one with the bullet time, because it made me want to understand how they DID it, and one that almost nobody's seen, a little movie in a foreign language that runs the same twenty minutes three times, because it made me want to understand why they did it.
• Have somebody who doesn't love you read it. My mom loves all nine drafts. My English teacher, Mrs. Halloran, has feelings about commas and said draft seven "sounds like a boy who read a book about how to write an essay." She was right. Draft nine doesn't.

The "film you love" essay I wrote about a movie from a few years ago about a guy who works at a convenience store, shot in black and white for almost nothing by a guy who worked at the convenience store, because that's the movie that made me think maybe you don't need permission.

I'm not going to list which ones, because my mom reads this page and I don't want to have the conversation about the out-of-state tuition again until I have to. But in general: I'm applying to five. Two are the famous ones, the one in L.A. and the one in New York, which everybody applies to and almost nobody gets into, and I'm applying anyway because you don't get in if you don't apply. Two are state universities with real film programs that don't get talked about as much and where I might actually be able to afford to go. One is the community college here that has a TV production program and real editing equipment, which is my "if everything else says no" plan, and honestly is not a bad plan.

What they want, more or less: the regular college application (transcript, test scores, recommendations), the essays, and a "creative portfolio," which for me is the tape of "Transfer," a copy of the script, and a few pages of a screenplay I'm working on. Some want a piece of visual work that isn't a film, so I'm including some photos I took and the storyboards for the bus scene, which I drew on index cards. Deadlines are between the beginning of December and the middle of January. I've got a chart on my wall. I look at it more than I look at the calculus.

Recommendation letters: my film teacher, my English teacher (commas), and Mr. Ortega, who is not a teacher but who wrote a letter about what it was like to be directed by me, and I haven't read it, and I'm not going to, and I'm a little scared of it.

Here is what nobody tells you: you do all of it, the movie, the essays, the forms, the checks your mom writes with a face, and then you put it in the mail, and then NOTHING HAPPENS for four months. The letters come in March and April. It is September. I have done the math on that many times and it doesn't get shorter.

So in the meantime I'm going to: finish the screenplay (it's about a bus driver, don't laugh), shoot something else, maybe something with two people in a car, because I figured out on this one that I like small and I like sound doing the work. Learn about lenses (library). Watch every movie the library has on tape, in order, by year, which I started in July and I'm up to 1953. Not do my calculus, apparently.

And if all five say no? I'll go to the community college, use their editing equipment, make three more movies, and apply again. I'm not being brave, I've just already decided. That's kind of what "Transfer" is about, now that I think of it. Huh.

9/22 — Draft nine of the essay is done. Mrs. Halloran said "good." Just "good." I'm framing it.
9/18 — Made four VHS copies of the master at my uncle's. Labeled them. Put them in a shoebox. Looked at the shoebox for a while.
9/11 — Showed "Transfer" to the film elective class. Somebody laughed at the cat that walks through the back of scene 4 (I didn't know about the cat until the edit). Everybody clapped, which they have to, but they were quiet during the kitchen scene, which they don't.
9/5 — 3:10 a.m. Done. Watched it start to finish on my uncle's TV in the dark. Didn't say anything. Uncle didn't say anything. Then he said "Huh." That's the review I'm keeping.
8/28 — Second shooting weekend. Got the bus-fills-the-frame shot on the third try, the driver was even looking straight ahead. Marco's face after the doors close is the reason to make movies.
8/21 — First shooting weekend. Dawn shot at 5:40 a.m. Marco was asleep on the bench when I got there, which turned out to be perfect, so we started from that.
8/14 — Mr. Ortega said yes. He read the pages once at his kitchen table and then said them back to me without looking and I almost cried.
6/30 — Wrote "Transfer" in one night. Eleven pages. Then cut it to seven.