The Big T

    One scene that took us an abnormal amount of time of was the meeting of our character T. Jacobs. Although, we were sadly not able to get the nametag prop in time, so there is no real way of figuring out his real name :(. 

Lighting Issues:

    When we first started setting up the scene, we realized that T. Jacobs cast a pretty noticeable shadow on the door, and we did not want this. We tried everything in our power to stop this and even brought out a very hefty flashlight to try and prevent the problem. However, this did more damage than good. The uneven spacing of shadows, the new shadow being cast, and the inevitable shining in the eyeballs did not help speed our situation up at all. We tried shooting the scene from another angle in hopes it would not show up as much, but alas, we just sucked it up and went through with the shot even though we did not expect the shadow. 

Multiple Perspectives:

    We also decided to film multiple angles of our shot at the same time. This not only gives us more footage to work with but makes it easier for the detail work for the time loop. This scene is the most prominent when referring to our time loop, and by shooting at multiple angles, it makes it 100% tat every movement will be the exact same, just at a different angle. We didn't want to use the same angle twice for our film opening, as it could seem repetitive and un-intentional. One of our perspectives (shot on a tripod), intended for after the time loop, shows our character Alice in the shot as well. This shows both the repetition of the scene and the expression of the confused Alice, who has now gone through the same interaction for a second time. 

Unplanned, but planned?

    The other perspective we had shot was handheld by me. We didn't want to have a handheld shot in this scene, but we had to make up for the lack of a second tripod. I happened to have to hold the camera, since everyone else was participating in a role already. Of course, I happen to have the shakiest hands in the entire universe, so we had to retake the shot a couple of times due to my trouble. In our last shot we did, it happened to still be a little shaky, but I was reassured that this slight shakiness could be easily erased in postproduction thanks to an editing stabilizer. On the other hand, this happened to be one of the shots we had most planned for. Keeping out actor on the right third, this gave a big empty space on the wall on the left side of the shot. This will be used for the credits in post-production, as one of our group members had the great idea to put the credits on the walls instead of just on screen.

Here is one of the takes we had. I don't know if this is going to be kept or not, but this is a pretty good idea of what it will look like!

Oscar Winning Acting

    The time has now come to illustrate our production processes. I've thought long and hard (10 minutes) about what I wanted to accomplish in my first blog post regarding this and have decided to make it a tribute to our acting.

Acting Pros:

    While I'd like to say my acting was okay, it didn't compare to my group member Maiya, who played Alice. She happened to have acting classes under her sleeve, and while I'd like to challenge this as unfair to be compared to, she did amazing. However, I'd say we spent about 30 minutes waiting for us to quit laughing over the seriousness of our tones. We needed dead silence for our shots to begin, to create an empty sort of feeling to our scene. This also gave room for the eerie non-diegetic music we want to put over the scenes in post-production. But yes, how could we all resist laughing when we are all staring at each other in dead silence, we aren't professionals okay?

    Some of these shots we happened to have made up on the spot. While we tried our very hardest to plan out absolutely everything before our filming date, sometimes we would be struck with a really cool idea we wanted to try. One of these shots happened to be a 180-degree loop around. This shot turned out SO awesome. It held so much depth from the emotion from her acting, and the significance of this reflecting on how Alice is thinking. She focused on creating her voice to truly show the terror Alice is feeling in the moment, while providing hand gestures to further capture the worry and tension going through her mind. Plus, by doing this, the camera is almost trapping her from all sides, which helped to center on the confusion Alice is feeling after being sent back in time to do her therapy session again. 

Here's a cute little BTS pic of the two of us!

    All seriousness aside, we had so much fun doing these scenes together and the fun little acting moments we had. 

Time Traveling...

    I'm pretty sure this is the last planning post I have to do for this insane journey. While I'm sad this fun project is soon ending, good RIDDANCE to planning. As I've said, all we have been focusing on is planning planning planning. So, I'm happy the next step in our production process is soon going to be underway. Since we finished filming everything last week, I'll try to "time travel" and go over our planning process for that day.

    It Twas the night before Chirstm- filming, when all through the group, everything was stirring, especially our time loop. Hopefully you enjoyed my short cheesy rendition of The Night Before Christmas poem. Anyway, we did a LOT. 

Where to?

These were a few example rooms I found from the website.

    I covered in detail our actual filming location last week; however, we had many more plans before we settled down on that location. In the midst of our planning process, we were concerned about where we were going to film the two scenes we had in mind, our main therapy scene and the outdoor scene. For the therapy scene, we came close to settling down on renting out an office building for $30 and hour, which contained a desk and two chairs. Luckily, we didn't settle down on this because I barely have 5 dollars, oops! But our main reason, besides the other hassle of having to pay, was that this restricted us from added more spice and character to our room. We wanted to show off a little bit of Dr. Schultz personality in the room, and a pre-decorated room just wasn't going to cut it. Plus, it ended up taking us 3 whole hours. 90 dollars for a room? Heck no. Then, one of my group members offered her house for filming, and it turned out to be perfect!

When to?

    Our schedules turned out to be a bit conflicting, and with a whole week of production posts ahead of us, we wanted to get filming done as soon as possible. So, we chose the Sunday before the planned production week! This gave us plenty of time to do our blog posts for this week, started our editing process quicker than anticipated, and took the stress of filming off our minds. But, what time of day to film? Our therapy session was set to be in the afternoon, so we scheduled our meet up a few hours in advance to shoot the indoor scenes before heading outdoors, with a good 30 minute to 1 hour leverage period. Sadly, at least for one of my group members, this did mean beginning to get ready at around 12:00, to start shooting at 2:30.

Dress to Impress + Bonus

    We just finished filming a couple hours ago... and let me tell you, it was spectacular! One of my favorites, if not my favorite thing I have filmed so far this year. The well thought out sets, lighting, costumes, script and just about everything helped put our thoughts together to create out best possible outcome. Today I will discuss our use of props and costuming to create the full effect of our characters and the setting around them. 

Costumes:

    My character was somewhat easy to portray through costuming. We wanted for her to be seen as "perfect" which is where the nice white blouse came in, also showing professionalism. I was lucky to have a mom who not only has 1, 2, or 3, but 8 white blouses in her wardrobe. So yes, a lot of options. I was able to settle on a pretty long sleeve with a V-neck which was beautiful. I ended the costume with a nice pair of plain jeans. 

    The props I used/was associated with was my clipboard, glasses, and alarm clock. The clipboard was used just to give the therapist a more professional feel, where we even wrote down some notes about Alices character on the paper on the clipboard. The glasses also were also just used for a more aesthetical look for the therapist, with no real practical use (when I put them on, they made me blind). The alarm clock... oh let me tell you... TRAUMA. I brought my physical alarm clock to use as a timer for the session, and whenever the alarm went off, flashbacks of the noise from the tired school mornings all throughout the week. And we shot with that alarm, MANY times. The scene we decided to shoot with required perfect timing, and luckily it didn't take us too many times, but I heard definitely that clock go off more times than I wanted to. (Dr. Schultz, me! ---> )

    Maiya's character, Alice, has a grungy look to her, and although we didn't have a top to her that exactly fir the color scene of Alice, it still gave the exact same feeling. She wore a long sleeve white shirt with a graphic design on it which gave the emo/grungy feeling to her character. She wore her hair up in a very messy ponytail just to emphasize her lack of trying. Also, I guess it was lucky that our actress Maiya already had some eyebags? It does fit the character, so I'd assume that's a positive.

As for props, we didn't use too much for this character, only her cell phone. But the cell phone does play an important part of her role, demonstrating her easily distracted nature. The phone also gives insights to the rest of the plot of the movie, trying to figure out how the time loop works, and who is on the other side of the unknown caller ID.

(<--- Alice Jones (yes finally a last name), Maiya!)

 

     Last but not least is T. Jacobs. Although there isn't much for his character, him being an intern for the office, he still holds an important role for the reoccurrence of specific scenes. Jacobs wears a white tee and brown pants, giving him a plain look as a background character and intern feeling to him. His probs only consist of some films he is meaning to give Dr. Schultz, when he interrupts he twos therapy session.

(T. Jacobs, Max! --->)

Bonus:

    After all this, ill finally release our finished script:

Location, location, location...

    What do you mean we are almost on week 5?! And we are scheduled to film tomorrow!?! These past few weeks have flown by so fast, and I'm so so so excited to start filming! But one of the main parts of filming, is yes, where you are doing it. We have struggled to solidify our locations in the past, but luckily this time we know what we are doing. So today, ill cover just that, everything about where we are filming!

P.S. Not looking too good for the Williem Dafoe cameo, as said in the message, they were supposed to reach out after 4 hours... and here, almost 24 hours later... nothing. :C

Who, what, WHERE:

    We have decided to do what we did for a previous project, film at my teammate Grace's home. An impractical 15-mile drive, but hey, it's worth it! She wonderfully took the time to design her own set from furniture she found around her home, and created this masterpiece:

    It's exactly what I had in mind! A large section for the patient (Alice) to lay on, and a well-fitting small seat for the therapist (Dr. Schultz). This makes it so it seems like Dr. Schultz is more put together and kept, while Alice can be all over the place, hence the larger room. Plus, it looks like a regular therapy office. Although maybe not 100%, we still do have the big window leading to outside in the background, but I have been notified that a swift usage of the binds in the background can cover it up beautifully. 

Lighting:

    As said, the blinds will be able to control the light from that part of the window, so we aren't too worried about that. Except, there is a very wide window above the sliding glass door, which we aren't able to cover up. This will hinder us depending on how sunny it is on the time we are shooting, because we will need to keep a uniform lighting to prevent obvious space in between takes. Theres also a lamp shown in the left half of the image which could be used to frame the therapists face even further, providing her with a feeling of her being on the upper hand, or in charge.

    But that's not all, Grace has not only been our lovely hosts but also has lighting equipment! She said the light isn't too professional, but a light is a light. This will be able to light up the characters faces a tad if we need it and provide different perspectives in how the two main characters are used.

Audio is Our Savior + Mysterious Bonus

  You may think visuals are the most important part in storytelling... well if you do, think again! Audio is one of the most essential aspects of media, and without it, confusion takes over. Audio is probably the most crucial part of our film. This will make or break us. Well, obviously, it will not be doing the latter, because, well, we're awesome. 

    I've had my fun, now I'll go deeper with what sound means in our project, and all the cool details we have to tie it all together!

Scenes:

    There are a few specific scenes I wanted to lay out where some sound techniques are vital to give the full effect in our opening. In the beginning scene, right after the beginning credits roll, Dr. Schultz's voice will slowly fade in. This gives the feeling that we are in Alice's mind, right after she has been drifting off into space.  To demonstrate the time loop further, we are deciding to use specific sound motifs such as an alarm clock that goes off, our character, T. Jacobs, slamming open the door, and the repetitive ring tone from the mysterious caller. Hopefully those will solidify the time loop, as we have always been given the question during our process, "How will you know it's a time loop?" 

Foley (yay!):

    Foley has always been so fun to me and I'm happy it was basically a requirement to have in our project. We are deciding to use these for sounds unique to our soundscape, and other noises that would be quite easy to create. Noises such as footsteps, door creaking, and maybe even a personal ringtone???

Other Resources: 

    We will try and make our lives easier by just accessing free, license-free (yes, a lot of free) sounds from sites to use for most of our sounds.  A couple of websites recommended to us were freesound.org and pixabay.com. I've used these two websites in the past to help me with my soundscape project, so I believe these would be reliable resources. But after mainly utilizing these easily found sounds, we will rewatch our project to see any other spaces that need to be filled with foley sounds.

Plus... we are perchance discussing whether we should or should not compose our own music for the opening. I doubt this will be the case, but my teammate Grace talked to me about a way that could make the process easy, plus she had some experience in the past!

Mysterious Bonus:

    Two words, Williem Dafoe. What in the world does this have to do with anything you may ask? We contacted him today in the hopes to try and get him on our project. Trust, we have high hopes this will work out for us. If you need proof.... look no further.