Finishing Up The Therapy Scenes

    This is the third post of the four production posts. This post will highlight the rest of the filming done at the house before we moved to the next location. Since we had filmed Alice's and T. Jacobs's scenes already, we now needed to film Dr. Schultz's scenes. So let's talk about it.

The Actual Filming

    You know what, I have been keeping my group members' names confidential this whole time, and it has been hard to word some of these sentences so now I am just going to reveal them to make things easier (I also realized they were using real names as well today in class). I don't know why I have been keeping it confidential for so long since they are eventually going to be revealed anyway in the opening credits of our film opening. The members of my group and who plays who go as the following: Maiya as Alice, Rachel as Dr. Schultz, Me as T. Jacobs, and Grace as the mysterious caller. Yeah, that whole Willem Dafoe thing did not pan out. I mean it obviously had almost no chance of working in the first place, so let's just call it a phase and move on.

    Filming Dr. Schultz's scenes went pretty smoothly. I don't remember us having any notable issues, except with THAT ONE shot. I will elaborate on that in a little bit, but for now, let's talk about what we needed to shoot. Most of the scenes with Schultz on screen were either her speaking to Alice or reacting to T. Jacobs. She didn't really need to leave her chair, so most of the shots were focused on her dialogue and the delivery of that dialogue. The delivery is meant to be annoyed and apathetic, where the only time she shows any emotion is when she thinks she is making some sort of breakthrough. It did not take us too long to finish filming her scenes, and Rachel did a good job playing Dr. Schultz.

BTS!!! BTS!!!

    Up to this point of filming, we realized we hadn't really taken much behind-the-scenes footage for our blogs. That ended up turning into a protocol where we would yell at random points during the production "BTS!!! BTS!!!" and someone had to take out their phone and record what we were doing. We ended up taking a lot more BTS footage from this point on, and embedded below is some of the footage and pictures we took for it.

That Evil Alarm Clock

    Yeah, you read that right. Instead of using a cuckoo clock, Rachel ended up bringing a digital alarm clock which worked both as a clock and a timer. It was a prop that played the role of two. What a great thing, right? Little did we know what the future had in store for us. One of the shots really needed to utilize that timer capability, which is when Alice leaves in the second session because she is freaking out over the fact that she is in a time loop. The scene is meant to have Alice leave and Schultz call out to her because the session is about to end and the alarm goes off signifying that end, interrupting her. This shot was all about timing, so it was really hard to get right.

    Since we were using a physical alarm clock, we would have to manually set it back to a minute before it was supposed to go off in order to maintain continuity, and pretty much just try our best to estimate when it would go off in order for it to fit the dialogue naturally. The reason this was so infuriating was the fact that every time we would time the shot wrong, we would have to wait a whole minute before being able to attempt it again. After a bit (a lot) of trial and error, I think we ended up predicting that we would need to start our scene 50 seconds after resetting it. Even when we did start it at the right time for it to work, the pacing of the scene would have to play out perfectly. Every time we would fail, we would all rage, and looking back, it was pretty funny. After finally getting the scene right, we decided to declare the clock evil and move on.

    Speaking of timing, I forgot to talk about something on the first production post that I was reminded of today in class when we got with our groups. During the scenes where Alice gets called by the mysterious caller, it was actually my contact calling that Maiya renamed to make it look like a random number. Now I don't know if you have realized this, but apparently, there is a four to five-second delay between when you call someone and their phone actually ringing. I didn't realize this at first, and it took us a bit to get that phone call scene timed right. We had to do countdowns before each take because it was such a weird but consistent delay.  After a bit, we ended up finally getting it right in the end. It was not as bad as that evil alarm clock, though...

    That pretty much concludes this post, and the next post will detail how shooting at the next location worked out.

T. Jacobs: The Awakening

    This is the second of four blog postings focusing on the production process. For this one, I want to talk about my experience with playing the part of T. Jacobs. Now that I have gotten into character and have a good story for him, I have a personality to play. That personality is to be pretty chill for my 10-second part of this opening. Yeah T. Jacobs is not really an important character but I have found it fun to write all of this lore for him.

    

Changes to the Scene

    After Alice's parts were finished, we began to film T. Jacobs's part. Here is how the scenes with T. Jacobs were planned to go. In the first therapy session, he would interrupt the session without knowing it was in progress to deliver some files, and Schultz would ask him to set them on her desk. Once filming, we realized there wasn't really a desk because it was a therapist's office. There was only a small table next to the chair she sat in, which already had a digital clock/timer on it that took up the space. That left pretty much no room for Jacobs to set the files down without the scene feeling a little awkward, so we decided to change up the scene a little bit. Instead of asking Jacobs to hand her the files, we made it so Schultz just waves him off with an annoyed expression. He would then put his arms up in a playful surrendering motion saying "My bad" as he backs out of the room. This change further emphasized Schultz's rude personality and helped the scene flow a bit better. We also decided to not have Jacobs wear a nametag because we realized that would not really make much sense for someone who works there already. Also, we ended up deciding to shoot the same scene with different angles so we have more variety when editing.

I Am A Terrible Actor

    Yeah, we had to film for longer than I had liked for this small part of the opening since I just kept saying my lines wrong. The whole issue with this was that we needed to film the same scene twice with me interrupting the session. Since it is a time loop, I had to say my lines exactly the same with the same mannerisms and tone in order to maintain continuity with the plot. So that requirement combined with my terrible memory did not work together as smoothly as I thought it would. 

    Then, we realized that my shadow was pretty big on the door that I was coming from, so we tried a few things to fix it. At first, we tried to use a flashlight to make the shadow disappear, but then it looked like the door was glowing, so that didn't work. It also was blinding me because I had to face it in order to look like I was talking to Dr. Schultz. We then tried to have someone in the room I was coming from point the flashlight on the shadow area, but that ended up looking like I was walking in from heaven and ended up casting an even bigger shadow on the door. We decided to just suck it up and accept that I am a big guy that casts large shadows on things. We also realized about halfway in that it would be better if I held the files in my left hand so that when I did the surrender gesture it didn't block my face.

Here are a few bloopers:

We ended up finally getting a good enough take, so here it is:

    The only issue with this last shot is the fact that you can see into the room I am coming from. Since it was filmed at one of our houses and not an actual therapist's office, that room was their parent's room. We might just end up darkening that area so we don't see inside of it in post-production, so it is not too big of a deal. Also, the reason that this shot was filmed like this was so we could implement the credits onto the wall, while still keeping it true to the rule of thirds. That was pretty much it for my part, and the next post will detail the production process for Schultz's scenes.

All Quiet On Set!

    This is the first of four production posts that will demonstrate the whole production process. Since we filmed so quickly and in one day, I am going to go into detail from memory so I have enough to talk about for four whole posts. I might make a whole post focusing on my short appearance in the film, but I am not sure yet. For this one, however, I want to set the stage and describe the beginning of the production.

Getting There

    Before even leaving I had a few things I needed to figure out. The first was what to wear. I already spoke about the whole dilemma with my outfit in my last post, so you can just refer back to that to gain a little more context. The second was borrowing one of my parent's cars. I have my own license but don't have a car, and usually ask my parents a day or two before if I could borrow one of them. I may have forgotten to ask them though, so I had to ask them the morning of. I was originally going to take my mom's, but for some reason that I forget, they needed it so that just left my dad's car. I was a little bit worried about that since it is a Dodge Challenger with relatively low suspension, and I knew the path there had many speed bumps in the road since I have driven there before for the music video project, so I didn't want to damage the front splitter on them. I just ended up making sure to drive really slow so that didn't happen when I went over them and it turned out fine, so all that stress was pretty much in vain at the end. It took around half an hour to get there, and my group member let me park in her driveway. For the music video project there was a whole dilemma with parking, but that wasn't an issue this time.

All Quiet On Set

    The shoot at the house was relatively simple. We just looked at the script and shot it from there. The only thing is, we could not stop laughing at first. I don't know what it was, but the house was so silent it was deafening. You could hear someone breathe funny from across the room, so it was incredibly hard to hide our laughs. What made it even funnier was the scene was supposed to be serious. It would usually start out with us being dead silent preparing the shot, and then someone would chuckle and then everyone would break out into laughter. Then that would repeat for like half an hour before we could get our first shot.

    We had to constantly refer to the script while shooting, and I initially held onto it whenever we needed it, but then we came up with a genius idea. That was to just have the script on the clipboard that Schultz uses and pretend to take notes on it. This allowed us to refer back to it with ease while keeping it hidden in plain sight.

The script-in-clipboard strategy in play

    After the whole laughing fiasco, we finally focused up and were able to film a majority of  Alice's parts with relative ease. Oh yeah, the way we decided to film it was to shoot all of Alice's parts first, then all of T. Jacob's parts, and then finally all of Dr. Schultz's parts. After all of that, we would drive to the next location and shoot everything we needed there. Throughout this first shoot, I made sure to keep reminding the group about leaving space in the shots for our credits, so we could do that idea I have talked about before in previous posts. We also marked the parts we already shot in the script with a blue pen to keep track of our progress. The group member that played Alice had great acting and her parts were done in about an hour. That is not too bad when it comes to production. We sort of forgot to take much behind-the-scenes footage for this first part, but there is plenty later on. After finishing Alice's section, it came to be my part. I'll leave that for tomorrow's post though.

Last Planning Post

    Ok, so we have to do one last planning post before the ultimate quad production postings. The thing is, we already finished production over the weekend. We were surprisingly efficient and got it done in one day. We only needed to shoot at two locations after all... I guess I will speak about some preparations we made before the actual shoot, so let's get into it.

Preparing the Set

    I am going to keep it a hundred, I did not really help actually put together the set. That credit goes to the group member whose house we were shooting at. She sent us what she had put together the day before we shot it to the group chat, and this is what it was.

    I do not really have much else to add to this part, only that the blinds ended up being fully utilized so we don't see a backyard in a therapist's office, and we made sure to have a good bright white light (try saying that ten times fast) for filming.

When To Shoot?

    Once finishing the script on Friday, we were ready for production. The only big thing that was left was to pick a date and time for it. We were originally going to shoot it next weekend (so on the 1st or 2nd), but one of our members could not do it then. We ended up deciding to just shoot it this last weekend since we all were available then. We decided to shoot on Sunday at 1:30pm since our project required it to be daytime and we needed plenty of time to film before it got too dark. The only thing for me is my body loves to sleep for long periods of time, sometimes lasting 12+ hours. This combined with my terrible sleep schedule usually results in me waking up past noon on the weekends. This time I had to get my act together though, and I ended up waking up on time to get ready. I am really proud of myself since I woke up at 11am, two and a half hours before shooting began.

T. Jacobs Rebranding

    Hey, so you know how I said T. Jacobs would dress in somewhat professional clothing. That may have been a lie. The day we were going to shoot I opened my closet door to see absolutely ZERO business casual shirts to wear. That was the moment when we decided to rebrand him into a really chill guy. In my mind, the rebranding of his character went as follows.

    T. Jacobs had great success with his single, "Very Wild Thing" and got decently rich. He was then irresponsible with his money and stopped making music after being a sensation. He hated the absence of privacy in his daily life. He began to gamble his money away and get into drugs. That was before he found a good therapist who would help him through this dark time in his life. The therapist felt sympathy for him, and understanding his economic situation, offered to hire him as an assistant for the office. (obviously, this therapist was not Schultz, but another one working at the same office) This job helped him get back on track, and he left the drug use behind in search of a better future. Therapy really helped him, and this new job didn't really require any prior experience since it was just moving things around and delivering files across the building. He has a relatively calm personality now and has newfound happiness and complacency within his new life. Now that is what I call a character arc.

    With this rebranding, I now have some clothes that would fit this change of character. We thought to ourselves, "What would a chill guy wear?". Soon after saying that, it was like a switch went off in our minds, and we remembered a meme of a character named Chill Guy who went viral on the internet earlier this school year.

This is a picture of him for reference.

I immediately found something similar to this type of vibe and ended up wearing this for the shoot.

    This planning post was all over the place, but I hope it gave context to some of the problems and solutions we had in the unexpectedly short lead-up to production.

Mise-en-scene Part 2 + Finished Script!

     Welcome to part two of the mise-en-scene planning post. Like I said last post, this one will be focusing on the costuming and props. We also finished the script in class today, which will be included in the end. So without further ado, let's get right into it.

Costumes

    When it comes to costuming, you really want to think about how a character's costume reflects their personality. This is mainly done through color and the actual clothing items the character wears. For example, a rich businessman would not be wearing skater clothes, he would be wearing professional office shirts and pants with an expensive watch. If he was a villain in the film, then the clothes he would wear would reflect that, so maybe his shirt would be maroon red with black pants. Color in costuming can also be used to show character development. A perfect example of this would be the clothes that Walter White wears in Breaking Bad (2008) over the course of the show as he becomes a professional criminal drug lord.

 Here is a color scheme I found that shows what color he wears throughout the first two seasons.

    As you can see, he wears darker colors the deeper into the criminal world he goes. Obviously, we can't show subtle character development like this in our two-minute film opening, but I just wanted to talk about that because I thought it was pretty cool and shows how costuming can be used in creative ways.

    I talked a little bit about this in my post introducing Alice, but I feel like she should wear greys and darker colors. This would represent her troubled state of mind and life. I also think she shouldn't have too much makeup on and not look like she put too much effort into the outfit, which would also show off her state of mind. I imagine her wearing some sort of grey sweater or dark heavyweight shirt with sweatpants.

    For Dr. Schultz, I think her outfit should reflect her professional and apathetic personality. She should wear professional clothing, like a white button-up T-shirt and some sort of professional pants. The colors should be neutral, in order to reflect her corporate personality. I can see her having earrings and her hair being tied back. For T. Jacobs, I think just some sort of professional clothing will do. He works at an office building as an assistant. Color doesn't matter too much since he isn't too important as a character.

Props

    Props are items that are within the set design that characters are able to interact with. Since this is a therapy office, we obviously need to include the iconic tissue box on the table. We also want to have a physical timer that will go off when the therapy session ends. Surprisingly, T. Jacobs will have the most props for the opening, with a name tag/badge and some files with paper that he hands to Schultz. Oh yeah, and Schultz will also have a clipboard where she would write notes about our patient Alice. We also are going to need to use one of our phones for the phone call part. We would change one of our contact names to something else to show that it is a "random number." Either we change it to a random number combination or to UNKNOWN CALLER ID. We'll just have to see what looks best during production.

    Speaking of the mysterious caller, while brainstorming on who the caller was supposed to be, one of us joked about having a professional actor voice them. We then talked about who we would want to voice them, and Willem Dafoe popped up in the conversation. We then decided to email his publishers for the fun of it on the off chance that he would actually accept something like this.

Here is the email that we sent:

   

    If somehow we got Willem Dafoe on the project, this would definitely go down in AICE Media Studies history as one of the craziest casts for a school project like this one. It would be so cool to have the name "Willem Dafoe" appear in our opening credits and it actually be true. This is just a funny thing that we did in class that I thought I should mention, but if it works that would be so amazing.

The Script

We also finished the script today in class, so here it is below!

Sources:

- Síne Nic Ailín. (2014, December 11). Bad Pp. Pinterest. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/341499584219216075/‌

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