I forgot how to do an update

#tbh it's been a hot minute since I've done a production update on here and I don't remember what I'm supposed to say so I guess I'll just summarize. 

Picture this. It's 6:10 am on a Friday. Not just any Friday. But the first day of spring break. And your alarm goes off. Just a grating, ugly sound going off right next to your ear. So you drag yourself out of bed to get ready for a full day of filming. Now, for what it's worth, I usually really enjoy filming. It's so fun most of the time. But once it's gone over 7 hours, then it kinda starts to suck. But anyway back to the story. Megan picks me up at 6:45ish, I had already dropped off the equipment the day before so I was only bringing my mirror for one of the shots and some books (again for a shot). We pick up Mariano and then go to Publix to buy a plant and some breakfast (we just ended up buying a box of croissants). We get to Megan's house at 7 and immediately start working. Megan works on getting the neck contraption on Mariano while I set up the lighting and camera. Apparently the molding makeup thing is not strong enough to put a part of a Playstation on someone's neck, so we had to try other not very pretty methods but eventually we were able to figure it out. 

We shot for a couple hours, I filmed everything, Megan was boom operator. Megan's friend who played the engineer got there at like 10. We had a short lunch break. The room that we were filming in was soooo hot cause there was 3 lights, 4 people, and we had to close all the doors oh my god it was horrible.

 

We were done filming at around 6:30ish I think, full 12 hours. We shot a good 80% of what we need, we're just missing likr two scenes which we're planning to film on Monday since Megan is in Vegas right now. But yeah I think it went really well! I'm usually really scared when I have to shoot stuff cause cameras scare and confuse me, but I got the hang of this one pretty quick. There were a couple problems that happened during production but to be honest it went as smooth as production can go so that's great. 

Photo Dump

 Group Meeting #1

    I really wish I could write more in this blog post, but unfortunately, we ran out of time right when I started presenting my ideas to the rest of the group AHHHHH. I did get a little bit of feedback on my lighting set-up (a research post on that is...imminent) which is one of my most pressing matters at this moment. I had originally planned to shoot the entire scene in red lighting, but one of my peers mentioned that it would look more natural if I shot it in a less stylist manner (I don't know how to properly describe it, but she meant to use flashlights and more natural lights to make it look like a casual get-together). She recommended looking into the scenes in Stranger Things in which the characters played Dungeons and Dragons in their basements for some inspiration.

Still from Stranger Things

    I really love this lighting set-up, I am a bit worried that since I am shooting on my phone, it won't be able to capture the footage well since it's so dark, but I'm definitely going to look into how to light a scene like this. Still brainstorming with this feedback, but I am thinking that we would open with one of the characters testing out this "ritual" and going fine and shooting this part in natural lighting. But when the main character tries it out, the lights go red to signify a tone shift; I am so bad at putting my thoughts into words unfortunately, but I hope this makes sense. Which brings me to...

The Script

    Before starting the group meeting, we watched Andrew Stanton's Ted Talk. He gave so much great advice for how to grow a story, but I'm particularly interested in two points that he made. He talked about building a character's spine, which is basically their motives, a story cannot move forward without the character's intentions and actions being made clear, right? I hadn't thought about this before, but now, I realize how absolutely essential this would be to my opening. What brought this group of teenagers together to do something like this? How did someone get ahold of this object? What are their relationships? Why would someone WANT to be possessed? So many questions!!!

    I'm still hoping to keep the dialogue to a minimum, so I want to express as much of the character's motives (acceptance, escape, etc.) through their actions and facial expressions. Andrew Stanton also said something in his Ted Talk that really resonated with me, "the audience wants to work for their meal, they just don't want to know that you're making them do that." Re-reading my first draft of the script, I realized that I was giving away too much frankly unnecessary, time-consuming information that could be better shared visually, for example, instead of outright saying the steps to do the ritual, I could just show them. Instead of developing the "villain" of the film, developing the characters would be crucial to building the rest of the plot. It would make so much more sense to show why the characters are doing this than rather having the characters constantly ask questions because frankly, narratively, why would they care? I'm going to create another, hopefully better draft of the script with the characters more fully realized (also, I need to create a "voice" for each of them, little quirks to the way they speak). I'm hoping that hoping that by fleshing-out the characters, their actions will feel natural, and the script will be easier to write. Getting to read my groups' scripts also really helped me gauge where I should be at at the moment. The main thing I got from getting to read the others' scripts is that I need the dialogue to seem more natural, like a group of friends at a party.

What I Still Need to Do

• Lighting and scene research. I have done some researching on seance scenes in horror, but I want to write a more comprehensive blog post particularly focusing on the production aspects of it. Fingers crossed this'll be done my Saturday. 
• STORYBOARD, I've done some general storyboarding, but the drawings are so bad that I honestly would rather just keep them to myself. Now that I've got a clearer plan of the scene, I hope to finish my final storyboard by the end of the week-early next week.
• Next draft of the script. This script will make me lose all my hair by the end of the year, but I'm beginning to understand that it starts to shape itself as time goes by, and this is still a learning process for me, so it can only get better (hopefully).
• Location. It's between my room and my living room at this point. My garage is a mess. I'll try out lighting and some of the shots in both locations and then compare.
• Plan out the 2 minutes...some of us *ahem* have a really bad sense of time.