Two students from the Wayne State College Communication Arts Department plan to unveil short films in spring 2019.

The two students, Ben Bjorklund and Anna Cole, worked on the short films as a project for Assistant Professor Michael White’s TV Workshop class. Bjorklund aimed for a lasting impact with his short film, “Three Breaths Underwater.” The film offers a firsthand glimpse into the life of a person struggling with social anxiety. Bjorklund believed the film would raise awareness on the topic.

“The goal of the film when it was written was to show how people with social anxiety deal with their day-to-day lives,” Bjorklund said. “I haven’t seen how people are going to react to it, but I hope [we accomplished that goal.]”

In contrast, Cole provided a lighthearted tone for her short romantic comedy, “Vacation,” which follows a couple that slowly falls in love before going on a vacation together. Cole felt she had succeeded in crafting a unique story.

“I think the biggest goal was creating a feeling of mistrust for the main character,” Cole said. “I really enjoyed the problem-solving aspects, whether it be asking myself, ‘How am I going to shoot this scene?’ or ‘How will I make this believable to the audience?’”

Bjorklund, Cole and their film crews learned firsthand that making movies comes with challenges.

“[My film’s] script was meant to be done as a play,” Bjorklund said. “So we kind of had to edit it for film because there was a lot more rotations in there originally. Our lead actor is only on campus once a week, so it was really hard to schedule filming.”

“The biggest challenge was location,” Cole said. “We changed the location of a scene where the two main characters were hiking because you could clearly see the fall leaves on the ground. We filmed a beach scene, but we changed the setting to make it appear more like it made sense with what we were trying to pull off.”

Although the two students have not decided on exact release dates for their projects, the students planned for the films to release in the spring of 2019.