Writing & Directing
This week we had a few days head start as we noticed the next assignment was already up on Blackboard on Tuesday. Those couple days made a huge difference to the development stage. We were able to meet and talk about the idea as a group a couple times before Friday. My initial idea for the tone of the film was to be very corporate, minimalist. I think that was from watching too much Suits lately, (I was curious if Meghan Markle was a good actress) but that really isn’t my style. We went down to the prop room and like magpies started collecting a pile of random oddities and so the style of the movie evolved into a timeless fictional space. I started to think of the film Brazil and wanted to create, as much as we could, a sort of bizarre world for our characters to inhabit. I packed a suitcase of blankets and other adornments to bring from home and other group members brought their own oddities to set up the mise-en-scène on the day.
As I tend to rise to a challenge and immediately want something I am told I can’t have I wanted to find a way to get around the no music rule by recording mood music on our set in the very limited time frame we had. Overall, I am not sure this was overly necessary, but it did add a sort of eeriness to our film that was otherwise quite quiet in some places.
In the very limited time, we did well on coverage but did have some limited choices for certain takes and pieced together others in editing. The Cwtsh, where we filmed was somewhat limiting with one of the walls made of glass but overall, I think it worked well for the scene. It transformed very nicely into the Hypnotist’s office.
I really enjoy working creatively in a group. Ideas bounce back and forth, immediately taking form and developing into something better by the minute. Having a couple extra days for the preproduction process made a huge difference to how much we were able to develop the story and set the scene.
Lesson of the week: Not everything will work the way you think it will in your head, so get back up versions. I had a plan for a line for the hypnotist to say off camera while we are still looking at the Patient. I asked for it to be recorded with the microphone pointing away from the hypnotist, thinking it would sound like he was behind us. Once in the editing suite in just sounded like something had gone wrong with the audio and we had no other versions of the line recorded. Luckily the story didn’t suffer without it so we dropped it, it might have actually been better without it. But had it been really important to the story we would have been stuffed.
Diet Coke Productions 