Here's Jordyn! Today is the last day of spring break and, contrary to what one might believe of a student with a rigorous schedule like mine, I'm actually excited to return back to campus! While my group and I didn't do any filming today because we all wanted to enjoy the freedom of an unstructured, stress-free schedule, we did accomplish quite a bit in terms of the production of our opening. It was definitely an exhausting day to say the least, as I flew back to Florida from Las Vegas (a trip to see my cousins over break) during which I time-traveled from Nevada time, starting at 10:30 PM (1:30 AM back home), and after a grueling four hours made it back at 5:30 AM in local Florida time. After that, I only got two hours of sleep before getting up to arrange my set in terms of my storyboard.
Before I delve into that, I want to take a moment to express my appreciation for my dad as he, being aware of the fact that I would be returning home early in the morning, utterly sleep-deprived, and then would be filming the rest of the day, took it upon himself, completely unprompted, to clear out a variety of items from his closet that would've potentially obscured our shots. That simple act saved me a good hour or so of cleaning so that I had time to set everything else up. I began by putting up two of the four posters one of my teammates had left at my house about two weeks ago when we first began filming, opting to group the two anime posters I had together and put them up in the "original" version of the room. In order to hang up said posters, I had to use a stepping stool to get them high enough to not be covered by any of the room's furnishing. I made sure to look the stool's steps in place so that it would not collapse and had my dad nearby to prevent me from losing my balance and potentially injuring myself. Following that, I started to place more objects around the room.
Beginning from left to right, I first positioned two of my awards, a football MVP (most valuable player) trophy alongside a gold medal I earned for a Spanish competition (that being hidden as to paint the subject out to be an athletic, sports-oriented individual), on the dresser. In doing so, I was able to provide subtle clues to the audience regarding the personality and interests of our primary subject, both of which are important to establish in the exposition of a film. I placed two bottles of cologne on the mantle to illustrate the fact that our subject does care about his dignity and self-image, something that will come into question as after having argued with his mother earlier in the opening, he will call out to her for aid in his "darkest hour" as the end. Aside from those items, I also placed a pair of cargo shorts on top of the dresser and had a gray tank top hanging out of one of the drawers. On the nightstand, I placed a black speaker alongside the remote, which I purposefully skewed at an angle, and set down a half-drunk glass of lemonade (on a coaster, he may be a bit untidy, but he's not an animal), next to it. The half-filled glass can be interpreted as being a representation of one choosing to adopt a more optimistic view of life, to see it as half-full instead of half-empty, especially given the unfortunate circumstances being hinted at towards the beginning of the opening, with the high electrical bill, the "fake" apples the subject had to eat, and the sickness that his uncle was afflicted with.
Moving past that, I placed three articles of clothing on the bed, one Las Vegas Raiders (an interesting coincidence since I just returned from there, not sure that I agree with the everything "stays in Vegas" phrase very much now), one set of athletic shorts, and a pair of long pants, each of which was meticulously placed with complete disregard (rather contradictory I'd say), with three hangers scattered about and a football placed at the other edge of the bed to really drive the point of our subject being interested in sports home. This does deviate a bit from our original storyboard, but I ended up not being able to get a guitar, so I opted for my keyboard, which I propped against the wall, along with two speakers, to show that our subject isn't a complete jock, that he has a softer side tied to his love for music. The last four objects worth noting in the room were the laundry bin, from which I had draped a "dirty" tank top, the box of Jordan's located on a small shelving unit, which was included to establish the subject's stylistic preference, the backpack on the ground leaning against his bed, and the pair of shoes carelessly thrown next to it. I would also like to mention that all of the clothing in the film, mind for the cargo shorts and long pants, were provided to me by the courtesy of my dad. Additionally, he also retrieved some of the objects I mentioned above from storage for me so that I could focus on setting up the items I had immediate access to. Anywho, the intention behind doing all of this was to make the subject's room messy enough for there to be a noticeable difference later on once he reemerges from his closet. Once I had done that, I set up the dining room table as we had done on our first day of filming. By the time I had everything completely in place, all of my groupmates, with the exception of one who was home, sick, and our actor, arrived and we began.
We started off by refilming the apple being thrown into the trash can, we repositioned the electrical bill so that it would be more easily readable, especially since the shot occurs so quickly. Since we intend for the shot to cut to black, we used a blacked-out poker chip taped to the end of a red marker to act as a removable "cover" for my phone's camera that would allow us to transition to the next shot and create a more seamless cut between the two. That shot was the beginning of our shot-reverse-shot scene. We actually ended up filming our subject's dialogue all in one go, as to prevent the camera angle from shifting and looking inconsistent, so that when we meet again we can simply shoot the other half of the shot from the other perspective and maintain the consistency there are well, simply splicing all of our clips together during editing once we're done.
Before you start to think that all we did was refilm botched shots from our first go around, we did venture into new filming territory, as I hadn't set up my parent's bedroom for nothing. Due to differences in my home's arrangement and spacing (as I've said before, I live in a condo and my uncle lives in a house), some of our shots were different from what we had laid out in our storyboard. For instance, when our subject enters his room, the camera does not pan to be directly in line with the doorway, instead, maintaining its distance from the subject to create a detached feeling that creates a divide between our audience and the subject, an abstract division felt between him and his mother, and one that will become more literal as he leaves his reality and ends up in another. As the camera cuts to the subject entering his room, instead of just using a stationary wide shot, we chose to go for a hybrid shot, in which the wide shot was integrated into the trailing tracking shot we ended up using instead of the high angle tracking shot. Now, despite the audience being unable to see the facial expressions of our subject, they could still clearly understand the fact that he was upset because of the diegetic sound of his sighs and the dragging of his feet, as well as the thoughtless way in which he tossed his laptop onto his bed.
When it came to the next shot, we needed to change things up a bit, since my uncle's closet has a light switch inside and my parent's closet does not, so in order to simulate the effect of the subject attempting to turn on the light without turning the light itself on, we switched the camera's perspective and recorded the sound of the light switch before filming, allowing it to play over our shot when we started videoing. I do like the way that things worked out since we managed to obtain an almost, video game-like feel, where things aren't revealed until the subject is given the chance to experience or see them for themselves. This was only able to be achieved through the obscurity of the closet with the tracking shot behind our subject which then switches to a point of view shot once the audience has "caught up" to them. After having obtained all of those shots, we decided that it would be best to get all of the shots that required the room to be set up in the manner in which it currently was out of the way this weekend, and work on the new set up of the room next weekend. With that decision being made, we filmed a continuous shot that panned and tilted around the room to show that it had returned to its original state. With this recording in hand, we are not only one step closer to having all of our shots done, but we now also have a relative idea of the placement of the objects around the room, so that we can prepare to reorganize it in a different way next weekend.
Below I've included some production stills from when we filmed:
Overall, we had a very successful filming session and by the looks of it, everything is going according to plan as we have roughly half of our opening complete. After everything my dad did for me on Saturday, a stellar birthday gift is definitely in order! Aside from that, we've made some great progress so I think things are "...movin' on up(!)" (Ja'Net DuBois 1975).
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