Organising the Shoot

Since my last post we have all agreed that the best location for us to shoot is in building 9 as we all have access to that building for the weekend and it means that we are all familiar with our surrounding which we hope will make the shoot run much smoother. The next stage was to find our actors, we decided as a group that the best way to divide up the work was for each writer to find their own actor for their main character. This of course left me doing nothing so I took on the task of creating a call sheet for the days of filming. This involved a lot of correspondence! Working around a lot of people schedules both from the group and from the actors, we had to be really flexible because we weren’t paying or getting paid and people have jobs and lives that they can’t always put on hold. Eventually we sorted out the best days and the most efficient call times for the actors. It was also mentioned that we need to work in a lunch time as well as a rehearsal time, which made sense because we didn’t give the actors a lot of time to read the script!

This was a good exercise for me in learning to focus on other peoples needs and trying to work around them, when I normally work on shoots by myself or with my crew that I’ve worked with we tend to go with the flow and end up shooting for a long period of time and don’t necessarily worry about a shooting schedule or blocking in a lunch break. It is good to get away from my gorilla style filming and work on something a bit more legit. It will be interesting to see how helpful sticking to the call sheet and how easy it is to predict how long a shot will take. I do see some problems sticking to such a strict schedule but I guess this is generally the industry standard so we’ll see.

Here are the call sheets for the weekend:

Screen Shot 2015-10-22 at 2.00.46 PMScreen Shot 2015-10-22 at 2.00.57 PM

 

Locating the Shoot

Once we were all happy where the scripts were we then moved onto the next stage which was organising location. We had always kept location in the back of our heads when writing script so that we could envisage what the end product might look like. We knew we wanted to shoot at RMIT for several reasons: it was central for everyone to get to, we needed the setting of a uni (so what  better place to fit than a uni) and it meant that we could do a lot of specified location scouting to try and find the best possible place to shoot. We all tried to keep an eye out for possible locations during our time around the uni, we’d then take photos and report back to the group what we found and whether we could use it in our shoot. One such place that I found was an alleyway that I thought would be good for the horror genre, even though we didn’t use it, it was good to build up a catalogue of potential locations.

Here are some locations I found for the Horror Genre:

IMG_2583IMG_2592

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Building up a good catalogue of places around the uni is really helpful to map up how our shooting days might go. There were a lot of potential places however the problem that we’re finding is we need rather neutral spaces for our shoot as the location has to accomodate for different genres. In the pictures above they would’ve worked really well stylistically for horror but couldn’t accomodate for mockumentary or fairytale. So at the moment we’re thinking a classroom, or something that is enclosed so that we can control the mise-en-scene.

Struggles with Continuity

As Mentioned previously it was my job to look after editing all of the scripts and making sure the continuity was there between the difference episodes. Our original idea of sending all of the scripts to me and then me sending them all out separately didn’t quite work as there was a lot of explaining that had to go on to make sure that everyone understood where I was going with it. There were also a few times where I originally had hoped to change a certain occurrence in the script only to be told by the writer that it couldn’t be changed as it was crucial to the whole story and what they planned to film, so I had to make even more changes to other peoples script and all in all it was a bit of a mess.

At our next meeting we addressed this quite simply, it wasn’t working, what can we do to fix it and make sure that everyone was on the same page. We all decided, in the end, that it was far better for me to write down, what we called, a major story arc and everyone work off that piece of writing, rather than me trying to work off several pieces of writing. Our major story arc contains all of the common occurrences and meetings between the different characters and at what time in the story they occur. It was my job to create this major story arc as I had the best idea as to where everyone was heading thanks to my previous attempts to make things work. It was really simple, I only did dot points of what needed to happen and I tried not to over complicate things so that everyone could follow along easily enough. Then everyone was sent off to work on the scripts again but this time everyone would be basing it on this single piece of writing, which in the end gave all the scripts a nice uniformity to them and kept the continuity peeps at bay.

It was definitely a struggle for me at first trying to get all the scripts to work together because I’d never written many scripts let alone conduct a multi-writer marathon! It was good to collaborate with everyone and really interesting to see different styles of writing and how people were trying to convey their genre within their writing. I think for me, if I was trying to write a script in a certain genre I think the easiest thing to do would be to explicitly say it at the start of the script, because if there’s one thing I’ve learnt from this editing experience, sometimes the simple solutions are the best!

Here is the Major Story arc that I got people to work off of:

Screen Shot 2015-10-21 at 10.25.27 PM

Progress in Writing

As I mentioned in a previous post, I thought the idea of a script editor was something we should look into. My original idea was to have everyone write a script and then we’d swap them all around and edit them so that it was fair. The only problem is I thought it might not be too beneficial to the story as it would take a lot of swapping around scripts to ensure they all connect together well enough (like we planned in our original concept). With this in mind I then proposed to the group that perhaps I should become the sole script editor, I wouldn’t write a script but I would read and edit the scripts that everyone else had created, making sure that they would all fit together nicely. The group agreed and so this became my new job title in the pre-production phase.

Once the first drafts of the scripts were written up they were sent to me and I got to work. I read over them several times trying to get the main themes of each individual story, although similar there were things which didn’t quite add up when looking at them in unison. For instance there was an alliance that had to be formed between two characters, an unlikely alliance because they despised each other. In the Noir genre the alliance took place at the party; however, in the rockumentary that alliance takes place the day after. It was just little things like that which I had to look out for. When I did find something that needed to be fixed I scribbled some notes on the side of the script addressed to the writer explaining what changes needed to be made, that way they could re-write it and it would still be coming from the same voice.

Here are some examples:

Screen Shot 2015-10-21 at 10.01.57 PM Screen Shot 2015-10-21 at 10.01.27 PM

Screen Shot 2015-10-21 at 10.02.45 PM

Ideas from Other Presentations

It was really refreshing to listen to what everyone else in the class was doing for their Project. There is a real diversity which was nice to see, it seemed that genre was a key concept in a few group projects but others tackled ideas like specifically pre-production elements or character development.

One idea that I picked up from another group was having an editor for the script writing, someone who would go through the script, edit in and out different things, making sure the flow was there, having a more technical perspective to that of the main writer. I really like this idea and think implementing that into our plan would be beneficial. As I have figured out in this course, the more pre-production you do the better and faster you can work through the actual production, which in a time critical project like this is a big help.

At the moment we are all writing a separate script for each character, once we have done that, if we simply pass it to the left around a circle and the all edited one, marking up certain things adding notes, checking the flow of dialogue it might help refine some of the rougher points in each episode. It would also help us to take a step back from the project and analyse it from a distance.

Another idea that was proposed was to broaden the differences in the way that one goes about creating media. There is the classic Write, Shoot, Edit sequence that we are all going to be using in our project however some suggest that it would be interesting to change up the sequence. One might begin with shooting and then come back to the writing afterwards to piece everything together. Others might write and shoot at the same time. The problem with this is it might be a more disruptive work flow and may take a lot longer to shoot, which could be a major downfall in our tight schedule, especially seeing as we are working with Actors who are generously giving up their own time to come and work with us. But an interesting concept nonetheless.

A similar idea was brought up in the group meeting we had on Monday with our teacher. From this the idea is being tossed around that the Mockumentary genre should actually be filmed parallel to the filming of the other genres. I personally like this idea because it would easily give it the right stylistic elements, have a kind of behind the scene feel with the shaky cam and darting in and out of different locations fairly quickly. Then we’d film the interview segments at a later stage like a reality TV show like Master-chief or the likes do. This would change things up because then a script would be unnecessary for this character, taking snippets of dialogue from other scripts (the only thing that would need scripting would be the interviews to camera).

A few interesting ideas that are worth bringing up in the next meeting we have.

 

Presentation Reflection

For those who did not have the fortune of seeing our live presentation here are the slides.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1nl2Sv3JhhR2EdMWwuskxZ2gNM1rl410sOXnJ7S5E93E/edit#slide=id.p

I think that the receptions was really positive from our other class mates. They seemed to like the idea of exploring genre through different points of view and the whole story arc. I think the main concern was what we could produce in the small timeframe we have compared to the the giant task that filming the 6 part series would be. Because this was still under debate within the group it was hard to answer the question as a matter of fact, instead giving a few options that we’ve been toying with: either filming a series of scenes that we can then juxtapose together or create a short trailer. Although similar each have different qualities that could effect the experiment in very different ways.

In terms of what I noticed during giving the presentations: I’ve come to realise that context is going to be everything when it comes to actually creating the content. I came to notice this after watching the reactions of the different videos that we played for the different characters. All of the videos had people laughing, which is good because it was entertaining, however some of the genres that we want to explore aren’t necessarily meant to be making people laugh.

For example the Horror Genre with its character Vincent got a lot of laughs due to what he was saying, and I also found it amusing in this context. There are a few factors that would’ve contributed to this reaction, the biggest being the way that it was presented. Looking like an online dating profile isn’t exactly the scariest thing; this is obviously an easy fix when we get to filming it, because we will have a much more dynamic way of filming, not straight face to camera. Other contributing factors may have been that everyone knew who was acting, the setting of the presentation and the videos that had come before it.

Most of these aren’t a problem and will be ironed out fairly easily when it comes to filming the actual final product. The one that i’m most concerned about is the videos before it creating certain expectations for the audience, in this case to laugh. Different genres should be evoking different types of emotion from their audience if we are looking at them in their true form. This could become problematic for a few reasons. The first being even though we are working on characters separately they’re a part of the same story arc, which may connect the audience to certain motifs identified in other genres, so we’ll need to try and keep those separate from genre to genre. The second being trying to change the audience expectations halfway through a series.

Obviously this doesn’t matter too much for when we deliver the project but if we were looking at creating the full piece then it may become a big problem.

Other than that it looks like we’ve gotten the approval from our fellow students to steam ahead with our idea.

Screen Shot 2015-09-11 at 5.39.06 pm Screen Shot 2015-09-11 at 5.39.10 pm Screen Shot 2015-09-11 at 5.39.12 pm Screen Shot 2015-09-11 at 5.39.16 pm Screen Shot 2015-09-11 at 5.39.18 pm Screen Shot 2015-09-11 at 5.39.21 pm Screen Shot 2015-09-11 at 5.39.23 pm Screen Shot 2015-09-11 at 5.39.30 pm Screen Shot 2015-09-11 at 5.39.33 pm Screen Shot 2015-09-11 at 5.39.36 pm Screen Shot 2015-09-11 at 5.39.39 pm Screen Shot 2015-09-11 at 5.39.42 pm Screen Shot 2015-09-11 at 5.39.45 pm Screen Shot 2015-09-11 at 5.39.50 pm Screen Shot 2015-09-11 at 5.39.52 pm Screen Shot 2015-09-11 at 5.39.57 pm Screen Shot 2015-09-11 at 5.39.59 pm

Preppin’ the Prezzy

In Preparation for the presentation we had a group meeting the week before during the holidays to cement our project idea and to divide up the talking up. We decided that seeing as everyone had their individual character that they had been working on it would make sense for everyone to introduce their own characters. Early on in the discussion someone made the suggestion to make a little introduction video of that character, as a kind of, online dating profile. So it was up to me to introduce the characters as I didn’t have designated character. My job was pretty simple, seeing as we had a multitude of writing from our group meeting it was almost a case of copying and pasting the idea from that. My main problem was that I had to keep it all short and concise because we had 5 minutes worth of video that we had to get through in a ten minute presentation.

Because some of the characters didn’t match the gender of their writer I was asked to step in and do some acting as the Stoner/Class clown in the Teen comedy genre. Niamh, who was writing the short script for me, sent through a draft of what she’d like me to say in the video. From there I was able to figure what kind of character she wanted. Niamh gave me some creative freedom with this, she said I was free to throw in a bit of improv in if I liked so I put in a reference to finding Nemo and tried to make it seem as natural as possible.

Here is the video that I did to introduce the Stoner character in our group project.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3atcmZODt1UWHdjMmcxd3hIcEk

I think it was definitely a big help being a part of the creative team to really understand exactly what Kind of Character Niamh wanted. Being in the meetings and knowing exactly how he fit into the big picture, what he needed to be like, everything thing that wasn’t necessarily in the script that I was reading off helped me out tremendously on delivering the final cut. The problem with this revelation is how to convey that type of understanding of the character to an actor that hasn’t been there during the development stage of the project. For instance when the stoner is explaining his nickname he gestures with his hand which reveal a lighter and a jay. This wasn’t in the script but is the type of comedy that we’d like to implement in the character, so we’ll need to figure out how we can convey those types of actions that make the character. I’m thinking perhaps a separate character briefing that we can give to the actor so that they know some background to the character that isn’t found in the script.

Revelation in Collaboration

Whilst working on this group project it seemed hard to string all the ideas into one cohesive story. Once I thought we were all on the same page but then, after we kept talking, we still had very different ideas of how the project would go down. This was the hardest when we were trying to come up with the story arcs and relationships between the 5 character in order to create some conflict. In my original concept pitch I brought in the idea of 5 characters and a love triangle type idea that connected all the characters together with their separate traits. Since the original pitch some of the characters have changed but the concept would still work. So after two weeks of running through different ideas and playing with different concepts I suggested that we should try again with this Love triangle type idea, only this time, I had a secret weapon! A white board!

Being able to draw out the character relationships on the white board helped me explain the general idea to the rest of the group members on how each relationship would work. Who loves who and who hates who. After we had the skeletal structure that I had conceptualised then the group immediately understood where I was going with it and we all set out to fleshing the characters relationships out. Soon everyone was putting ideas on the board. This diagram definitely helped get everyone on to the same page and I think that it made life so much easier being able to see the relationship lines visibly.

Important lesson learned: when working on a group project, seek visual aids to help explain your concepts.

This was the board at the end of the day, once we had all worked on it together. It is fair to say that at the end of the day we were all really excited, seeing the potential for our project project.

IMG_2558

This picture was then created digitally so that we could all keep on the same page as to any changes that we might need to make in the future.

Screen Shot 2015-09-11 at 2.12.49 pm

 

 

Group Project Overview

So Recently we’ve been put into groups for our final project. The final Project is fairly flexible and allows us to come up with almost anything that we’d like to do. We have to come up with what we’d like to explore and how we are going to go about it.

In our first group meeting we all came in with separate ideas that we’d like to explore, some where story based concepts and some where technical based concepts. My idea was to explore genre through a scientific experiment sort of way, keeping most of the variables as similar as possible only changing the genre. I thought this would be a good exercise to do and luckily the group agreed. So we decided to use that as the base of our project. We also brought another members idea of looking at the same action through different characters perspective, combing that with the genre experiment.

Our second group meeting we tried to fine tune some of our ideas and figure out the overarching story that we’re going to have for all the stories. Eventually we decided that a love interest would be a good generic story arch that we could manipulate to different genres. We also decided on the Genres and Characters that we were going to use in our project. FairyTale, Horror, Teen Movie, Noir and mockumentary, with an individual character to front each genre.

The Storyline that we have decided on after various meetings is the following:
Based in a school, a school ball/party goes terribly wrong when the Punch gets severely spiked and hallucinations incur, creating damage to the school. 5 Students are brought to the Principles office, each with potential motives for spiking the Drink. From the Principles Office each student retells their story leading up to the Ball from their different perspectives, each set in a different genre.

We have decided to pitch this as a 6 part miniseries, 5 characters each have their own episode, plus an episode bringing all the stories together. What we will actually film for the project is a few scenes from different scripts that we have written for the story, juxtaposing them together to analyse the different tropes in use to create genre.

We have all agreed that we’ll split the work evenly, with every team member taking on a genre and character to write about individually. When it comes to filming we will also divide the roles up evenly, changing depending on what shoot we are doing.

All in all I’m really excited for the Project, i’m just disappointed that we don’t have the time or the resources to create the full mini series.