Story Finally Seems Pretty Settled

...and the professor even seems somewhat happy with it. Or, if not happy, at least accepting. I still don't think what we think the story is about fully matches up with what he wants it to be about. But at the end of the day, it's still our story, and I think he gets that... finally.

Oddly enough, we didn't even get through all the storyboards today. We didn't even see most of mine! We got up to about the point where Caitlin turns in the paper to the printer's with the infamous op-ed in it. After that the presentation turned into a big discussion about whether we were getting across the risk she was taking well enough. The teacher finally gave in to our firm decision to make the story about risk with a background of free speech and race, rather than being about the racial issue explicitly.

However, he (and the TA's) still wasn't sure we were getting the first risk across strongly enough. Our second risk, whether to apologize and save Mr. Ehrlich's job, or stick to her guns and let him be fired, was strong. But there was nothing to push Caitlin to make the first risk of running the article in the first place. In the end, I think we solved the problem by mostly re-arranging things. Now, when she goes to the printer's, we will then fast forward to after the paper runs. At this point, we are inside Cait's head, as she runs through what the consequences might be. We run through the rest of the movie as planned, maybe cutting a few corners, then snap back to reality as she makes the decision to run the article, fully knowing the possible consequences. This actually makes the initial risk much bigger, as it now encompasses our second risk.

I feel pretty good about this story.... though that's happened before. We shall see.

Making Storyboards

Everyone in the group got a different part of the story to draw up storyboards for. I ended up with the scenes of the newsroom after Caitlin comes back from the principal's office, when Ehrlich comes in to congratulate Cait on her article, and she stresses over whether to apologize while everyone else works on the next paper. I've seen some of the storyboards the rest of my group is drawing as well. The funny part is how varied our artistic skills/styles/abilities are.

This is going to make the presentation tomorrow kind of funny, as we'll be cutting back and forth between these different frames. The best are fairly detailed drawings, and the worst are literally stick figures with no faces, and often no arms and legs either! My own are somewhere in the middle, being very cartoonish, but at least getting the shots and angles across clearly. That is the primary function of storyboards anyway, so I think my style works pretty well.

We've also decided that we're going to stick to our guns more than usual tomorrow. In the past, we've hemmed and hawed over what our story was really about, and generally conceded to whatever the professor then told us it was about. Not anymore. We have a very clear idea now of how we see the story, and while we're still open to critiques, we're going to hold to the general direction we have now. At some point we have to stop radically changing the story, or we'll never be able to shoot and finish the movie by the end of the semester.

Forging Ahead

Supposedly this week we're supposed to have a "rough assembly" of our movie done. The professor said to at least have some edited footage, even if it was just a scene. Yeah... that's not going to happen. Last class we were again given a long list of things that we need to change, often in fairly radical ways. With so much writing still in flux, there's not much we could confidently shoot, let alone edit.

The constant tearing apart of our scripts and whatnot wouldn't be so bad ordinarily. If we really loved the project, we could just decide "they're wrong" and defiantly do things our way. Unfortunately for us, most of the time the class raises good points. Makes it a little harder to snobbishly stick to the "integrity if your art."

However, we do still think our story, at its core, is a good one, and deserves to be told. After conferring with Todd, the grad student edit-suite overseer-turned TA for our class, we have a fairly good sense of direction for the project, and from here on out, we plan to stick to our story, and not let the professor scare us into totally changing it around to make it about something it's not.

We're currently each doing storyboards of different sections of the movie. We intend to scan these into a computer, and put them in a PowerPoint presentation to show in class on Thursday. That will be our "edited" thing to show, and we'll accept feedback, but we're not changing what the story is about any more.

If all goes according to plan, "principal photography" will start this weekend.

A Little Worried

Things are not all rosy in TRF Project-land. The last class has left us more confused than we'd like about where we want the story to go. I thought we had the story down fairly solid, but a lot more is up in the air again than I'd like.

We didn't take out equipment this weekend, so our only chance left to shoot something is tuesday, during the time we'd usually have class. (We currently only meet on thursday. The other half of the class meets on tuesday only.) This doesn't help much, since we still don't know what we can shoot.

Courtney's freaking out a little bit. I can't exactly blame her. We've been pulled so many different directions on this project so far, I'm starting to feel a little lost. She thinks we should talk to someone else about our problems; someone not our professor. Maybe that would help.... I don't really know anymore...

That Didn't Go As Well As I'd Hoped

I know that our concept and idea for this project is a difficult one. It was before, when it was all about risk, and included jaywalkers and such. Now it's even more difficult with the new story we switched to, with sub-themes of free speech, racism, and integrity. Complicated stuff.

However, I thought we would at least be good on technical levels. I can shoot good-looking video - I've done it lots of times before, both here, in VPA Film, and way back in high school. However, the footage we shot of Dani "Before the Inquisition" got torn apart today in class.

Unfortunately, they were right, too! The lighting just wasn't very good. I tried for a low-key, edge-lit look on Dani's face, but my lights were very diffuse, very far away... and very drowned out by the ambient light that was naturally in the room to begin with! If I had given up on my edge-lighting idea, and moved the bare, un-diffused lights closer, I could have overpowered the room lighting and gotten some of the low-key look I wanted. Instead, the video just came out flat and boring looking.

Our story also got vivisected... AGAIN... But right now I'm just bitter that I didn't shoot better video, so I'll discuss the problems in that department some other time...

Footage has been shot! In a sense...

The syllabus calls for our first dailies, or "rushes" as their called over the pond, (or "raw footage" in layman's terms...) to be shown on Thursday. We're still finalizing the script, and casting is kind of up in the air. Little kids are hard to find when you need them for a scene! With all that in mind, we knew we weren't going to be able to shoot much. And getting the script done was a bigger priority anyway.

Even so, we needed something to show, so today we took an hour or so and shot... something. We decided to do the opening scene with Caitlin (the protagonist) sitting pensively in front tof the entrance to the auditorium. We've been calling it the "Waiting to Enter the Inquisition" scene. In any case, we got some decent-looking footage of Dani (our Caitlin) sitting on a bench in Maxwell outside the auditorium.

The script is also coming together, if in pieces. After we planned out the final direction, we each took a piece to script. The dialog is downright awful, but the direction and plot is there, so that's encouraging.

Trying to Cut Down the Story

Supposedly this coming week our group is supposed to have some early footage to show on Thursday. I don't really see how that's happening, since we're still finalizing the script, and have only started thinking about casting. If we get any footage shot between now and then, it certainly won't be much.

We have a better picture now of where we want the script to go. We definitely don't want to go quite as abstract and short as our professor was suggesting, but we know we have to cut our story down a bit to keep it from running into feature-length! So now our focus is on finding places to combine different scenes/events into one, or eliminate minor characters, and so forth. Basically, anything we can to still get the whole tale across, but do it as simply as we can.

Casting presents its own problem. For the sequence depicting the story in the protagonist's op-ed, we need a mid-thirties black woman and a young white kid. The racial aspect is actually pretty significant in the article, so we can't really deviate from that. And neither part can be convincingly played by a college student. It might pass for the adult, if the student looks older, but for the kid we definitely need a kid, which presents a problem. Hopefully that'll work out.

A Totally New Direction

After Tuesday's meeting with the professor, my group desperately tried to find a new direction to take with this project. The original idea had revolved around the intercutting of three storylines about people taking a risk in their lives, tied together by a nice metaphor involving a crosswalk. Basically, the three people in the different stories would end up at the same street corner, and their unwillingness to cross against the signal would reflect on their nervousness about the risks they each had to face.

It actually sounded pretty cool in class.

The problem was; we couldn't get three strong storylines together. That was the professor's main problem on tuesday, that the stories we had weren't strong enough, and were too generic. We tried over the last couple days to come up with new ones, but nothing was any better. Except for one.

Courtney dug up a real event from her high school that we all found very interesting. A co-editor from The Pioneer, the school newspaper, wrote a rather deep (for high school) op-ed piece essentially about race relations. To sum it up, (but not do it justice) it was about a moment in her own life where the horrible societal preconceptions that were buried in her own mind became blindingly clear, and how stupid they were. Of course, some people didn't get what she was saying with the piece, and took it the wrong way. The administration wanted her to apologize for even having written it, but she stood by what she wrote. Then of course it became less about the content itself, and more about her defiance. It sparked off a school-wide controversy, allegations of racism were slung around, the faculty adviser for the paper was fired... it was a mess.

We all thought this made for a great story, and a powerful one, with a clear message about how stupid it is that some very important topics are so taboo that one can't even speak about them
without people jumping to conclusions etc. In class today we got some really good ideas about how to make it work even better, and I think we may have something nice here. Now if only we had more time to work on it...

Hello!

My name is Mike Hanley, and this is my blog. This isn't my first blog, mind you. I have another one, but this one is for my IST 195 class at Syracuse University. I created this one separately simply to help make it different in my mind and discipline myself, since my posting on my main blog tends to be rather erratic.

Since I'm gearing up for my big final project in my TRF255 production class in Television-Radio-Film at Newhouse, this blog will mainly focus on developments in that department. Right now, my group and I are desperately trying to get a script together. It needs to be done by Thursday, and in a meeting today our professor pretty much tore apart everything we'd worked on up till now. So.... practically back to the drawing board.

I really don't think he's giving us enough time for pre-production. Looking at the syllabus, we've only had two weeks to plan this movie, while there's 4 allotted to edit it. Whatever happened to "measure twice, cut once." Hopefully this turns out well.