Save our stories: Chapter 3

Since the beginning of our Erasmus+ journey we attended and implemented a lot of youth exchanges, some of them were very interactive, some more fun than others and in some we learnt more than we expected, but“Save our Stories: Chapter 3” was very different After years of experience we know that for a special youth exchange week – all of us have to run an extra mile. Well, this time young passionate and charismatic people decided to run an extra marathon.

“Save our Stories: Chapter 3” aimed to bring old Lithuanian, Macedonian, Turkish, Austrian, Bulgarian and Croatian legends back to life and to remember our roots looking back on our historical heritage. And it did. But how it did is the important part.

7-day youth exchange was designed as a film production in which all of its members find their strong sides and reach their maximum capabilities. After casting for actor roles, watching previous camera work done by camera guys, checking the brought equipment and talking with the director and scriptwriter about their

visions, we could not believe with how many talented people we are going to work during this week. After finding the suitable roles for all of the participants and forming the working teams we were only left with 4 full days of shooting. That‘s when we understood that if we manage to pull this off – we are going to make something extraordinary. Unpredictable Lithuanian weather forecast and very little day light made the movie shooting even a bigger challenge because of various and different external movie scenes in Trakai and Vilnius, which had to be shot in order to complete the storyline. Thats when we understood that we don’t have any favors in our odds and we will have to work as a professional team.

So thats what we did. We dressed up the actors, adjusted the cameras, turned on the microphones, flew the drone up in the air, yelled “Action!” and it was just a pure pleasure to see how everybody played their role in the filming production, doing more than we could have ask for. Getting up just a bit earlier to prepare the actors with make up, coordinating the flow of the day and sending people to the right spots on time, always rushing to prepare the upcoming scene, spending nights while trying to edit the footage on spot, to find the perfect shot and even driving to the gas station in the middle of the night to buy some wood strips in order to have a bigger bon fire in the shot. These kind of moments became usual and daily challenges, that brought us much closer together, more than we expected. Putting out little fires and solving problems together every day and even every hour, understanding that we have the same goal and we want to make it highest quality it can be, gave us that inner drive and pride about what we were doing. In focusing on every scene at a time, understanding that we are trying to make the impossible happen here, we found funny moments, friendships, challenges that others helped us to face.

Apart the emotional satisfaction and benefits it is sure to say that this week in “Save our Stories: Chapter 3” youth exchange was very intense peer to peer learning experience. All of us understood how many little details there are in order to shoot a movie, not only we learned how to break down a script into a realistic movie shooting plan with materials, actors, shot angles, flows and timings, but we also increased our technical capacity to a greater level. Starting from finding and adjusting the right and suitable lights on every scene, figuring out what kind of sound equipment to use in different situations, learning how to fly a drone, merging two or more different cameras, finding the right tools to edit the shot scenes, were only a few easier technical

things that we learned through out the week.
“Save our Stories: Chapter 3” had two sides: the chaotic one, because thats just how film production is, and the fun one, because that what youth exchanges are about. Chaos and fun can be very dangerous combination when you have an important and difficult task to complete. But not with these people – who put their whole heart into this movie.

So now we proudly present the short movie “Occult Stone” made during youth exchange in Lithuania “Save our Stories: Chapter 3” and we hope that you enjoy watching this movie half as much as we enjoyed making it for you.