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.