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.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Sunday, October 28, 2007
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.
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.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
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...
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...
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
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.
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.
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