Marco & Micro. Editing not economics. (Post-Production Day #1)

I can’t believe I’m finally saying this, but now that we’ve wrapped up filming, we have to start post-production (mostly editing). Since we’re about a week behind schedule from our original plans, Jake and I have decided to waste no time and jump right in! Today we talked about setting up a schedule to virtually collaborate in the editing process. 

We first decided on what part to start editing, we both agreed that we would both be more comfortable starting well, at the beginning! Neither of us or our family is sick and we’re comfortable being around each other’s environments, but we still want to follow a certain degree of social distancing in line with recommendations from the CDC, our school, and local government. To edit online we’re using the online editing platform WeVideo. Though we have more than enough time to teach ourselves a different more capable platform, WeVideo allows us both to share the editing process by giving us both access to editing and sharing files via the cloud. We’re also both very comfortable with the interface so we are confident we can work efficiently. 

I suggested we broke down the editing process into editing sessions, Jake found that by doing so we could also break it down by scene. So that’s what we did, we broke down the editing process by scene. Longer scenes like 1 or 5 will take more time to edit and thus, we’ve scheduled two editing sessions for them instead of 1. 

Since Jake and I have worked with each other’s in the past before, we know each other’s editing style and strengths. Our styles are what I describe as Micro and Marco editing. Jake Marco edits meaning he is good at piecing together the scenes and setting up the flow. I Micro edit, meaning I tweak the details and go frame-by-frame if need be to figure out the pacing and make the scene’s flow smooth. Thankfully, our editing styles are complementary! Having and knowing how complementary our skills are helped us set up our sessions in blocks. Jake would go in and edit the macro for an hour and then I would go in and edit the micro for an hour (which is just me lying to myself because I’m sure I’ll take more time).

Just to make sure the quality of the piece is what we both want and we both have the ability to discuss the artistic choices in the editing, we’ve decided to set up two meetings to polish up the piece. We put our schedule on our shared Google calendar and we’re ready to get started! 

Signing off for tonight!

Student Life (Website Update #2)

As I continued to build the website, I challenged Jake and myself to think of the story we have created and the world in which it takes place on a deeper level. I find the most immersive experiences which provide the most amount of details forest story are often the best way of both promoting & coming up with a creative marketing campaign and hoping the audience -and to an extent, ourselves- truly understand the world that we are creating to tell the story. I am also extremely extra.

The first way through with we could develop and convey our message was through the text on the website that is meant to seem as if it was written by the school. It was evident that the tone, word choice, and topic of the school’s writing would have a huge impact on the way that site visitors both understood the film and perceived the school. So I was careful when writing to make sure I was conveying an elitist sense of professionalism and present information in a way that would certainly be distressing to hear as a student so that visitors could understand the pressure put on students by the school system represented by Stok High. 

The second way we thought we could develop our story at a greater level of detail was by presenting student life at Stok High. As a student, the person is involved in usually says a lot about them, so I thought it would be a really cool idea to make bios for the competitors so that viewers had the opportunity to get to know them at a “deeper” level; however, I stripped their bios from their humanity I only presenting statistics and a resume-style text. As awful as this may sound, it's often done an in the real world, it's been done to me; students are more than just a list of extracurriculars and numbers, but we're often reduced to that and I wanted to make sure I conveyed that in our website because it fits perfectly into our story. And making bios meant we could have some fun coming up with the clubs and activities that our characters would be involved in! Back when I introduce the characters I mention a lot of theoretical clubs I came up with while I was writing those bios, well I took to canvas.com and may designs for all of those clubs anymore, making obvious parities of real clubs and making up new clubs. This is also an incredible opportunity to include fun easter eggs for fellow High school students to find! Here are some of the logos I made:

I decided to make a page specifically for the by the Valedictory competition as I figured this would be a very big event in the school year, so the school would likely allocate entire page this beloved tradition; I would go one step further and argue that is clearly showing how glorified the idea of winning this competition is by having an entire page just for it. On the page, I included a description of all of the challenges found in the film and place the bios for all the characters. Inspired by my own school's TV program, I decided to include a "live steam" quote of the competition. I created a mock-up video on WeVideo that would give the impression of a live stream next to the announcement, The watch button would take site visitors to some sort of explanation of the film or maybe the actual film itself. 

The website has really come together, and I'm extremely proud of how it looks! I know that my familiarity with the software has been really helpful in increasing my productivity and the quality of the site, and I'm very glad that I got to utilize those skills for this project. I've been fixing and perfecting the site for a while now, I started the day I had the idea for the site’s concept and I'm going to continue to spend a little more time perfecting it, and developing it so that it presents itself as much more than just a façade for the fake school but rather as a valuable immersive, interactive, and creative marketing product. 


Go Mighty Mantis Shrimp!

Signing off,

"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, 

🎥Garage Band (Production Day #4)

Yup, you read that right! We filmed for our project today in the middle of a global health pandemic. Now that’s a quote for the history books! How did we do it? Let me share the recipe with you…

1 Box of Global Health Crisis Mix (COIVD-19 works best)
2 Best Friends
1/2 Cup of optimism 
1 1/2 Cups of determination
3/4 of a car garage 
3-4 Actors (We used the “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Broadway” brand but any brand should work as long as they aren’t in quarantine). 
1  Teaspoon of hand sanitizer (We used store-bought but apparently you can also make your own).

Combine all ingredients and mix. Let them sit for about 1.5 hours in 86° heat with light humidity and serve! 

Tina LIVE! 
On Monday we were all sitting around bagging our heads against a wall when from the heavens came a gift, Tina (Our lovely Cambridge instructor) sent us an invitation to join an online meeting of our media class! That’s right, not even a global meltdown can stop our little media nerd cult from assembling!

A few students and I joined the online meeting at 3:30pm. Tina talked about how we should learn to adapt our production to the circumstances we were being presented. As my classmates about their production struggles which varied from not being able to get equipment to having equipment but being unable to film anywhere or with anyone, I realized how lucky Jake and I were that we worked efficiently and I became really thankful for what we had. It was then when I realized that it was BECAUSE we had gone so far that we couldn’t stop, we owed it to ourselves, our cast, and to our story to finish it all despite the adjustments we had to make. 

So when the online meeting was over, Jake and I decided that we would go on full speed ahead, taking into account the delays that we already had. We knew that we couldn’t film at any of our locations because our school was closed, so we set out to create our own environment, and that’s when things got interesting… 

The Filming Day
Have you ever looked at your garage and thought…“This place has potential”? Well, most AICE media students have! I took one good look at my garage and knew exactly what to do to make things work. So I told Jake yesterday that we would record in my garage today. Of course, when I did that, I was hoping Jake would bring this backdrop, which would have made it infinitely easier to make up a set; however, he didn’t bring it. And thank gosh he didn’t! Because what we did was even better!

When Jake got to my house with Sebastian (Andrew), Jake suggested we build an L shaped backdrop so that we had some freedom in the kind of angles we could use. He remembered that I had done something similar for my project last year and that I had created the illusion of full room by having the object in the middle turn instead of the camera. Here’s a graph to help visualize what I mean (this is from last year, but same idea-ish):

I began to build the L off of black plastic tablecloths while Jake went out to pick up Jakoob (Bryce). There were a couple of holes in the plastic so I had to patch them up and paint over the tape we used to hold it up in case it accidentally came into the frame while filming. Once I was done I decided to test the composition with the camera (this time we were using Jake’s blogging camera since we had to turn in the old camera and Sebastian had let his friend borrow his DLSR). I noticed that everything I hadn't covered was clearly shown, so I had to use a very rough-looking plastic tablecloth to cover it up. Jake’s sister Kailey (Miranda) arrived just in time to help me! 

When Jake got back, we set the camera up and began to film! We set up a wide arrange of lights of different colors including blue, pink, red, and black light to get a really cool color light effect on the actors’ faces. Our light set up was AWESOME and it made the room look extremely futuristic, perfect for a VR simulation room! We recorded some shots of Sebastian and Kailey so that we could use it in the new ending we made earlier (You can read about it HERE). As usual, Jakoob broke character the moment the camera made the starring to record sound or whenever I said action. I don’t know what’s that funny about me saying action, but he finds it hilarious apparently. After we got through a few trials of him just laughing and one time he accidentally fell in the chair and kicked the camera, we finally got all the footage we needed. 

At the end of today, we took pictures in the cool light set up and Jake and I even took the chance to record a bit for our CCRs. Today showed us that we could adapt to even the craziest circumstances. Of course, we took all the necessary health precautions like handing out hand sanitizer multiple times during the session. I’m excited, tomorrow is the last day of filming!

 If I had a dollar for every time I’ve said that…

Signing off, 

A Wix Commercial you can't press "SKIP" on

When it came time to start building our website I turn to my trusted friend wix.com, an online site-building platform that I’ve been using and improving at for the last 5 years (I'm starting to sound like a Wix commercial only here you can't skip like on Youtube). On Wix you can choose whether you would like to build a website from scratch or whether you want to use a template; usually, I don't like using templates because I feel like it takes away from the authenticity of the website, however, building website from scratch can take months and an insane amount of hours of work. We don't have that type of time, so I decided to do what I most commonly do which is to borrow various elements from multiple templates to create a unique and original template to base the website and building off of. So I went on Wix and I searched for school templates, I didn't really like the template I found but some of them did have elements that are common things to see on school websites, so I decided to use some of their layouts and design patterns. 

The template I decided to use as the main base was actually the template of a church, I

liked the aesthetic layout, it was much closer to what I imagined in my head our website would look like. After combining some of the other school elements from the other templates I had a pretty cool school template on my hands! The first thing I did was change the site colors to our brand colors, precisely down to the hex code because I want to ensure consistent branding throughout everything created for this project. 

Once the color combinations were right, I started to work on the site’s homepage. Are use the pictures we took from the photoshoot to fill the website's homepage, as another form of an Easter egg Jake and I had already decided that we were going to make stock high and mighty mantis shrimp, so I figure the first picture that people would see when they came into the website was a picture of the student body president welcome them to the website and greeting the mighty mantis shrimp. From there I went to our own school’s website to see what sort of announcements, news, and other things were posted under the main running banner and tried to replicate those concepts. 


I also made a school near the section where Jake and I could have fun creating more Easter Eggs to put in the text, I thought it be fun if the school newspaper created the section so I

made a quick logo for the "New Stok Times”. This is one example of the many clever references, easter eggs, and inside jokes that we packed into our website because it's important to have fun when doing what you love! When writing the text for the website, I also make sure to emulate the exact thing that we wanted to stok high to embody. 

I also started to build the about us page, for which I decided to make a small informative video that uses incredibly vague language to describe the education practice is at stok high, something curiously found in many private, charter, and even some public schools’ websites. Thankfully from the second day of shooting and from the photo should we were able to obtain lots of content to help create media for the website so I jumped on WeVideo and created this quick video:

Neither of the pages is fully finished, and there is a lot of stuff to still go over, but they’re coming along great! I'm really excited to see how this website turns out! I like what I build so far and I'm doing it at a very good pace so I’m confident the end product will be something with quality and an incredible level of detail that I am proud to put my best friend’s name and my name on. 

Signing off, 

Its corona time! 🍻

Fuck.

[Cue “It's the End of the World as We Know It” by R.E.M.]

Well, its official, Covid-19 has closed borders, shut down cities, and most recently closed Broward County Public Schools. Just when I thought we were finally going to recover from our daylight savings incident, Murphy's law slapped me in the face.

For those unaware of what Murphy's law is, it's commonly expressed as “everything that can go wrong will go wrong”. And boy did Murphy really hit the bullseye on this one. Jake and I had to shoot the rest of the scenes at school; now that it’s closed, we’re not sure we're going to be able to film in it anymore. It’s not only our project, the AICE Media Studies A group chat BLEW UP; we’re all losing our minds over this. 

Because the close was so abrupt, Jake and I hopped on a call to discuss the future of our production. Nothing is going to stop us from finishing this, we’re far too deep into it. We both love this story and this class way too much like to give up on it or delay it. So we’re going ahead with filming, we have no idea how we’ll do it yet (that’s for another blog post), but we’ll figure it out. 

In the meantime, here's some PSAs about Covid-19 and staying safe and healthy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_066dEkycr4

Singing off for this weekend!

Crafting a new ending

Today Jake and I decided to change the ending to our script. You see, when we decided to have all the cast on the last scene, we knew scheduling was going to be hell, we were ready for the challenge but no one could have predicted the Corona Virus and how that would affect our scheduling or things like Zack’s (Z) sister giving birth. In an effort to make scheduling easier, Jake and I met with Tina (Our lovely Cambridge Instructor) to talk about reworking the ending. 

We settled on the idea of only having 3 changers be shown back in the real world, unlike the original which had 6 (and they all had lines). After a lot of discussion between Jake and I, we settled on one idea that we believe is actually a much neater ending to the film. So, without further ado, here it is!

The New End

Bryce takes off his VR glasses and throws them on the ground in frustration as he storms out of a room with a futuristic aesthetic. He opens the door and finds himself in a courtyard where he begins to walk past a picnic table where Isabella is sitting. He and Isa exchange an angry look. He walks past the table and out of frame. Walking in the opposite direction with a few other people is Garrett. Isa calls Garrett over and expresses her sympathy for being kicked off the competition so early and unfairly. Garrett reveals that he was aware of the rules and that he did it on purpose. Confused, Isabella asks what could be more important than being Valedictorian, to which Garrett replies “Literally anything”. Shots of Andrew and Miranda in the simulation are shown, juxtaposed with shots of them in a room similar to that Bryce was in. 

Isa and Garrett’s conversation expresses the purpose of the film and the audience has that realization through the eyes of Isa (as the character has that realization, so does the audience). Finally, the announcer VO is heard and the winner is not shown. 

—————————————————————————


I actually like this ending much more! Its a bit more simple but it's so incredibly effective and impactful! We are already behind on the critical path that we established early on, so we need to regroup and film soon (probably tomorrow!) so that we can get back on track!

Would you sign my yearbook?

This is a short post,

Since there have been so many re-castings since the first time I posted the cast list ( I didn't introduce every actor in that post because we didn’t know who would play everyone), I decided to make this pose to present the final cast list of “valedictorian.”

ISA: Daniela Gomez-Dugan

ANDREW: Sebastian Fishmatherin

BRYCE: Jakob Binnings

MIRANDA: Kailey Fretwell

RILEY: Ameerah Adetoro

CHARLIE: Cristian Velasquez

Z: Zachkary Jones

COURTNEY: Taylor Stark

GARRETT: Jake Fretwell

ANNOUNCER: Luis Lageyre

Since we took character pictures for the website, Jake has a brilliant idea that we could use it for the credits as well. And I thought of a fun way of introducing the cast of my blog by making a mock yearbook, which is a very fun way of visualizing who is playing who and as another level of detail to the story when we add it to the website.

Here it is:

Besides helping put a face to the characters, this yearbook also introduces the characters' last name, which is something we have not commented on before. Going into this level of detail would allow us to truly create an immersive experience on our marketing documents in order to execute a more effective marketing and promotion campaign for the short film later on. 

Signing off,

Child Birth, Standardized Testing, and Fake Headshots (Production Day #3 PRTII)

Today was our last filming day, we accomplished so many things that were crucial for our project and JUST KIDDING! Did you believe me? Of course, things didn’t go right today! As a matter of fact, we didn’t get a single second of footage for the film! Let Me explain why…

Jake and I were just going about our day when suddenly BAM! Zack (Z) text’s into our cast group chat saying he can’t record today because his sister was giving birth as we spoke and he was on his way up to Gainesville to be with her. 😳. What to do? NOTHING! There was a baby on the way, we couldn’t do anything more than congratulate Zack and go ask Tina what we could do to shoot around him late that day. So we decided to shoot everyone else’s lines but not Zack’s and to have a double stand-in for him pretending to be asleep. Problem solved right? NAE! All of a sudden Dani (Isabella) calls me and I was busy working on the project so I give it to Jake, turns out she was under a similar situation. No baby involved this time though, she just couldn’t make it. So we had to adjust again. And this was the start to a day off, well for lack of better words, insanity…

Early in the day, I went to the media center to ask for permission to let me record after school. The media center staff said it was totally fine and that I could start whenever I wanted. I was smart enough to check the school’s online activities calendar to see what activities were scheduled for the media center this afternoon, just as I suspected there was a mock test for Computer Science scheduled to test in there until about 4:15. We were going to start filming at 4pm so we figured we could wait 15m. Little did we know there was a booboo on the testing side which would soon rain on our parade. 

To kill the “free time”, I suggested we shot the scene of Bryce taking off his glasses (which is you recall is set in Mrs.Zocco’s room, conveniently located right next to the media center. When we shoaled up, everything was normal and I even began setting up. The out of NOWHERE a lady walks right to the door (If this was a movie she would have kicked it down) and tells us to leave the room because she was supposed to use it. At first I thought we were dealing with a Karen, but it turns out that the State of Florida does End of Course Exams (EOC)  makeups thought the week and it just happened to be that we were in the wrong classroom and the wrong time. As much as I love reading at 7th-grade level, and pretending to know Algebra, we did not stay for the EOCs. 

With both sets unavailable, we had little option but to sit and wait. What we didn’t know is that our testing coordinator had failed to start the exam at the scheduled time which meant that the entire exam duration was pushed back all the way to 5:50. Of course, we didn’t learn about this until we had been waiting for a while because how could we? They didn’t say anything to anyone or made any update to the schedule, they just extended it right into the 6 clock cheer meeting also taking place there. 

We were stuck. Jake and I just sat on the floor and stared at each other in disbelief that another filming day had been spoiled. As easy as it is to wallow in self-pity, we knew we had to make the best the situation. We decided to switch gears and bank on content for our website and key art instead. After all, our website concept is especially challenging because we have to create extra media as if this school really existed to properly execute the marketing strategy (made famous by the movie Monsters University). 

So we took everyone and started to take pictures of the cast as their characters. We took videos for the website, yearbook headshots, and pictures of them participating in Stok High’s social life. The day suddenly didn’t seem like a complete waste of time; plus, we were waiting for the EOC room to be empty so we could record in there. At last, that did not happen. The EOC finished and everyone left and we didn’t even have the chance to go in and film. Security wouldn’t open the classroom for us even when we had the approval of the teacher; c'est la vie. 

Here are a quick video and some photos from the photoshoot we took today! 

Uploading Everything

When I got home I began the uploading process. For editing, we’re using WeVideo, which is an online editing software that allows Jake and I access to the video through the cloud and offers the basic necessities for editing. I started uploading the clips and boy oh boy did they take long to make their way into the cyberspace! Thankfully, I’d been keeping the clips and photos organized on my computer since the very beginning which made it really easy to source through them. 

Once everything was uploaded I started to look over some clips, picking some at random like a quality control manager in an assembly line. I’d done this a few times when I was organizing the videos on my computer, this gave me a better idea of what we were working with. For the pictures, we took them on Jake’s SD card so we needed to find a way to always be able to share stuff with each other without physically being next to one another. Usually, we would use Google Drive where we have a shared file, but Jake’s space was running out and it was a lot of content to transfer. Instead, we used the business one drive accounts that our school’s provide us with and transferred the content keeping the quality pristine!

This was a crazy day. It was really an emotional roller coaster, between thinking we could film and then getting shot down to figuring out what to do with the cast who was waiting on us to tell them what the plan was, it was packed. We had to make some quick decisions which I personally think worked out to our favor. Now Jake is trying to find a day that works for the whole cast again, and in the meantime, I will hop back onto my computer and continue to build our website! 

Scavenging Through Our Closets (ft. Academy Award Winner Ruth E. Carter)

Let's talk about all things costumes!

Back in 2018, I had the pleasure of meeting now Academy Award Winner Ruth E. Carter at a conference. She shared some advice on how costumes can bring a character or a specific setting to life and how they could be used to progress a story. It was wonderful to hear her speak about the hours of labor-intensive research that she did to ensure that the costumes for the blockbuster film “Black Panther” were original and authentic yet “distinctively true to African culture”. As we approached costuming I had the same enthusiasm for costume design, ready to dive deep into the intricacies of creating an award-winning costume that can really bring an actor’s performance to life. Then I had to throw all of that out of the window and look at people’s closets so see what they could pull together to wear for the first day of filming. I had to remember that sometimes you can’t customize every minute detail and that doesn’t mean that it won’t work out in your favor.

We stared the costuming process around the same time we began the character development process. As you may remember, we made a character deck where we created a mood-board-style depiction of the characters and their costumes. For us, the costumes were key to make sure the audience could make a clear distinction between the characters and their marked personalities. This made the process of costuming infinitely easier and kept a level of intricacy higher than just asking our actors to show up with whatever. But like I mentioned, we didn’t have the time or resources to craft outfits from raw material or to design them to will, but we could match clothing our actors and ourselves already owned and use them to our advantage. We asked the cast to review their character slides and to piece together the closest thing they could to what we created with the clothes in their closet. Jake and I reviewed their photos and asked them to make changes, sometimes matching some pieces with clothing items we owned.

Dani (Isabella) had exactly what she needed for the role, her costume couldn’t be more perfect if Jake and I had personally gone shopping for it. She had exactly what we depicted in the mood board plus her shirt was dark purple, Stok High’s color. We also got lucky with Jakoob (Bryce) and Taylor’s (Courtney) costume; they had exactly what we were looking for. After matching the right colors and shoe combinations, their costumes were ready to go pretty quickly.


Jakoob is wearing an outfit that alludes to his character's raw material inspiration, Payton Hobart from Netflix’s “The Politician”. Taylor is wearing a modernized version of outfits traditionally used by characters like Sharpay Evans (from High School Musical) and Regina George (Mean Girls); her outfit was also inspired by that of real people that Jake and I attend school with.

Jake’s (Garrett) costume was also really easy to piece together. In Garrett’s debut on screen, he was wearing a yellow turtle neck and light teal blue pants. We figured that he would likely not be wearing the same outfit he did for a music video to school, so we decided to change it up a bit while keeping it true to the character. In this version of Garrett, he has grown out a bit of a beard (mostly because Jake had a show going on at the same time as we were shooting) and he is wearing a yellow hoodie with teal light blue shorts; keeping that iconic image.

Zack’s (Z) character was also easy to costume for since Jake had previously arranged for the costume a long time ago (even before Zack agreed to play Z and when it was originally Jack). Z’s costume is inspired by real people who have similar characteristics as him that Jake and I go to school with. His outfit is very characteristic of a particular group which is perfectly conveyed by his costume.

Andrews's costume was also easy, it was just a hoodie, some shorts we borrowed from Jake and light blue shoes which were also Jake’s. Very much like his description said.

Christian’s (Charlie) costume was also very convenient since he wears it almost every single day. You see, we didn’t need to search too far or wide for our Charlie; Christian is literally the character. No, we didn’t write it with him in mind, but the more you visualize the character the lines between fiction and Christian become unclear.

Kailey’s (Miranda) costume was mostly handled by Jake. We had a general idea of what we wanted Miles (the original character when he was to be played by a guy) to dress like, and I think we did a great job with Kailey’s costume choice. This was a quick decision because Kailey didn’t know she was playing Miranda until the night before so we definitely rushed into her costume, but for what it's worth I think it's a great outfit for the character.

And last but definitely not least, Ameerah (Riley). Ameerah’s costume was the trickiest one of all because we definitely did not end up with what we had originally envisioned for the character; mostly because apparently no on tin this planet owns an orange item of clothing. We searched for days for an orange hoodie, then we gave up and searched for an orange shirt, and finally, we conformed with a shirt that had orange in it. After we were done with picking her costume and filming her scene, I went out and bought an orange shirt, just because I felt so dumbfounded at the fact I didn’t already own something orange. Anyways, Ameerah may have the tiniest costume even for an audience member to realize what her character was, but thanks to her great acting I’m sure that won’t be a problem.

Well, that concludes my costuming post! I guess a voice in the sky doesn’t need a costume so I’m not getting fitted for one! After the incident we have another filming ahead of us, I’m excited about it! In the words of Ruth E. Carter, “This whole process is very rewarding and I wouldn’t trade it for anything”.