"That's a Warp!" (Production Day #5)

I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR TODAY FOR A VERY LONG TIME. 

Today Jake and I finally got to yell at the top of our lungs “That’s a wrap!” Of course, it was a bit different than I originally thought it was going to be; we yelled it to an empty grass field and with two of our nine actors, but it gave me the same feeling of thrill I get when I’m done riding a roller coaster! Finally, months of work and planning had paid off; we are down filming. This is how our day went:

I woke up and got a call from Jake while I was still in bed, without wasting any daylight, we started going over the plan for today. Jake had woken up earlier (like most days) and wrote the script for the scene we shot today. On the call, we red-though the script and after I gave some feedback we made some small changes and corrections to the dialogue. In this scene, we imply future character development and we really prompt the audience to think about the premise of the short; thus communicating our message. It was crucial that we got it right, so we took the time we needed to make sure that happened. 

When we finished, we briefly discussed the game plan. I jumped in the shower and organized all the equipment to make sure I was ready for Jake to pick me up. On our way to the shooting location, we picked up Jakoob and Dani. This scene was originally meant to be filmed at our school, then at a local public park, but in the end, it was filmed at the community park of a neighborhood (The Ridges). This wasn’t necessarily our decision, it was just were Dani’s (Isabella) mom allowed her to film at, but it turned out to be great!


When we got to the location we found there was a perfect set up to construct the illusion of a big campus. The pool’s clubhouse was used as an administrative building, a vast grass field as a courtyard, and we even found a short exterior hallway. The building was closed at first so we couldn’t record Jakoob (Bryce) coming out of it after the scene we recorded yesterday. 

Suddenly I hear Dani go “There’s a man in there”. I suggested approaching the man, to which Jakoob responded: “I don’t know, he looks like he wouldn’t want to be bothered.” 

“Nonsense, I’ll talk to him,” I said, confident in the communication skills I have… or at least think I have. Effectively, I spoke to the man who was very nice and unlocked the building for us to film at! 

Following the recommendations of our local government and the CDC, we took extra precautions including distributing hand sanitizer at least twice during our shooting session. 

The first sequence we had to shoot was Jakoob having a bit of a meltdown. For this, I asked him to play it up a bit so that the audience gets the idea. As someone who has witnessed many panic or anxiety attacks, sometimes it can be hard to distinguish them depending on the person; you just get better at dressing them and spotting them with time. So I asked him to follow typical media conventions of such to make it easier on the audience in the limited time we have. In addition, I actually performed the actions first so that he could get an idea of what I meant. After he did it I figured it would be a good idea for him to exit the frame when Isa is watching him. We tried it a few times but Jakoob just sort of stood up and walked out and Bryce would theoretically still be very visually startled by the panic attack and seeing Isa. So, without thinking much about my word choice, my bilingual (and a half) brain said: “jerk out of frame”… Yup, those words came out of my mouth.

Of course, being teenagers, we all thought this was the most hilarious thing ever (well, more like they thought it was). There was a couple doing exercise near us and they probably thought Dani was some sort of stand up comedian because the girl just laughed and laughed hearing the comments she -Dani- was making. In my defense, a “jerk” is the right word for the body motion I was looking for and “out of frame” is the direction he had to perform that motion towards, so ethnically I’m not necessarily wrong. After they are up a little, we finally got on with filming. 

The rest of the filming went great! We had a lot of fun joking around and getting stuff done! And just like that, we finished filming! We’re still missing one picture of Zack but filming-wise, we’re done! On the car ride home, we planned to meet up with Zack for the picture. We did it. We wrapped in-spite of a global health pandemic, in-spite of scheduling and equipment conflicts. Now on to our next challenge; editing. Bring it on!

Signing off,