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.