Script Amendments and Production Meetings
Today was spent with two production meetings for the Poppie film production and the Teacher Central educational video production, as well as a script read-through between Lynley and me for Poppie’s Café for Monsters.
After Lynley finalised the script over the weekend and created a breakdown of it for all of our crew to access, I sat down to read it through already yesterday. Since she felt she had turned text-blind, she asked me to give her some feedback on her script, so whilst reading it I tried visualising as much as possible as I went along. This ‘technique’ (for the lack of a better term) had already proven very helpful to me in previous script read-throughs, as I would usually find that whenever I had trouble imagining the described action, there was something up with the script or something had gotten lost in translation. Also, imagining the script usually helps me detecting minor mistakes such as e.g. crucial items that suddenly reappear or disappear
In this case, the story’s resolution had sort of gone missing amidst Lynley’s editing process: The witch, which had kidnapped the main character Benjie to perform a ritual on him and get her long-lost powers back, was defeated by the mere appearance of her granddaughter Poppie. Without a fight, without a word, the villain was suddenly surrendered and even compliant.
So I suggested that, befitting the rather light and comical tone of the rest of the story, Poppie could instead literally mute her grandmother by using magic, thus rendering her speechless and incapable of summoning and performing rituals. It would furthermore be a splendid opportunity to give more depth to the character of Poppie, as this would also be a splendid opportunity to show a more sinister or even intimidating side of her. Lynley liked the idea and took it into consideration for the second draft.
After the read-through and another minor annotations that I made, Lynley and I sat down and talked it through, which proved to be really helpful as she could answer a lot of questions for me and help me understand her idea and/or visualisation better. I then sent the annotated script back to her for correction and awaited the second draft of her script for another read-through, which would then come later this evening.
In the meantime, we had our production meetings together with our lecturer, project by project, in order to get a feel of where we all are, what issues we had to face, what needed to be thought of, etc.
Poppy’s Café for Monsters
Already on last Friday, our crew had a minor production meeting in which we settled the biggest questions, such as location recommendations and camera, sound, and editing techniques that would be needed. Regarding the locations, I suggested three different cafés/bars to Chloe, which would, each in their own right, serve the story and the purpose. These locations were the Juniper bar on Church Street, Chilli Cake on Church Square and the Coffee Rappor Bar on York Road.
Later that day and through a coincidence, I found out that a student from LVL5 Production Design is currently designing a magic shop for her module and might be able to help us out with the props in one form or another, which I also recommended to Chloe.
Today, however, it became immediately obvious that the casting as well as the production value would be the most intriguing issues on this production. Since the production value will be vast (compared to our level and the budget available), a lot of thought and planning would have to go into it to make it work.
The same holds true for the visuals and techniques that we wanted to use, as we were not only aiming to depict a shape-shifter on film, but I also imagined bravura shots for some parts of the script. Since all this will require a detailed and thorough storyboard, Lynley and I both decided on having the majority of the storyboard ready by the end of the week. I furthermore decided to have a reference library set up, discussed and locked down by Tuesday.
Lynley and I furthermore agreed that we would both storyboard the story on small sheets of paper that would allow us to interchangeably use the shots we designed. We settled on different colours so that our ideas and work would remain separable, but wanted to allow for ultimate recombination between our individual ideas of visualisation. This is where I proposed that we could use a sketchbook in which we would be able to stick our ideas in. Since I had one lying around at home, I offered to use it for this production.
After the official production meeting with our lecturer, our crew reconvened in the room next door and settled some more questions and issues regarding casting calls, budget, and the like. Since the production design and the creation of a prop list seemed to be a major feat, I proposed setting up a Kickstarter campaign in order to get more funding and support for the film. Since we are currently a female-dominated production, we furthermore saw another selling point in this for campaigning.
Teacher Central
Moving on to Teacher Central, we’ve learned that the initial idea for the project has changed slightly. However, since I had a rather big workload already, I was taken off the list for screenwriting which meant that I would be able to concentrate more on the work that I was doing in cinematography for Poppy and in editing for Teacher Central with their respective research and implementation of research.
With Teacher Central we then firstly learned that we would be much freer in our creative application as we initially thought we were. After we were given a quick introduction into the realm of educational video criteria and marketing strategies, we’ve learned that many aspects of story writing that would be considered bad taste in novels and script, such as cliff hangers, resolutions, reveals, etc. would not matter as much in educational videos as these are rather considered prompts and introductions into certain themes than a fully-fledged story.
With this newfound knowledge, it was a lot easier imagining this project coming to life. Since the story itself didn’t require as much work as we thought it would, we collectively decided that we would instead other challenges on board. One challenge, which our lecturer suggested, was the use of green screens (which I will need to research, explore and refine in editing). We furthermore decided that we would use humour to sell the story (which will require me to research comical cutting effects or techniques to be able to edit the story in a humorous and engaging way) and experiment with variety.
In addition to all that, and with the subject matter at hand, editing alone will allow for multiple purpose usage of the footage simply by edit variety, which will be a good practice for me personally. Also the fact that I will be learning to use After Effects for this project is a prospect I am looking forward to.
Better get started now!
References:
Café Rappor Bar (n.d.) Untitled [online] Image taken from: https://www.facebook.com/CoffeeRapporBar/photos/a.549726728402397/549727425068994/?type=3&theater[Accessed on 11 February 2019]
Chilli Cake (n.d.) Untitled [online] Image taken from: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-19mbDhxeQBY/VebVQBXYxLI/AAAAAAAADU8/rh4J6vAowhc/s1600/CHILLICAKE5.jpg[Accessed on 11 February 2019]
Juniper Lounge (2018) Untitled [online] Image taken from: https://scontent-lhr3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/45977251_289867174969562_6813034436129456128_n.jpg?_nc_cat=102&_nc_ht=scontent-lhr3-1.xx&oh=f6093b84ac0e27dbd121385ea995fa91&oe=5CE2A2A4
[Accessed on 11 February 2019]