Filming: It Took Us Awhile

     On the first day of shooting, I told everyone to meet me at the park after my practice so we could shoot the breakup scene. It was a Saturday and I normally have practice then. I found out on Friday that I didn't have practice so I told everyone to get to the park earlier. Camila said she wasn't going to be able to make it because she didn't want to wake up early. That made me mad because she always does stuff like this and acts like it's only her grade that she has to worry about. Everyone else showed up earlier, so to save time, the three of us walked to the park to shoot the scene then waited for her. She took forever. After we shot at the park, we all walked back to my house because that's where our other location was at. We had a very limited time to shoot because Camila wanted to only ask her mum for a few hours, which made me even more mad because that gave us less time to edit!
     It took us multiple shots for a single scene because nobody wanted to listen to what I was saying. Honestly, I'm the only actual director while Camila is the actor, even though she wanted to complain about acting in this project. When we were half way through the script, Camila left. That left me to figure out what I was going to do for the rest of the day since I couldn't dump or edit out footage. It was very frustrating to work with people who barely care and limited time. I need people who are serious about this project and who are actually willing to make an effort. Granted, none of us are professionals, but still, better effort would be nice. And would it kill Camila to just follow the million scripts that we have? Seriously, WE HAVE EVERYTHING DOWN TO A TEE, STOP TRYING TO CHANGE IT I KNOW HOW I WANT EVERYTHING SET UP! DO YOU WANT AN A OR NOT??

Filming: Pre-Production Blog

     Before we started filming, we had to make sure that we had everything set up for our scenes. That meant that we had to find places to take pictures with Sam, the girlfriend actor, and both the girls who had a realationship with her. I woke up early in case anyone got to my house to take the pictures. After Pixie and Sam got to my house, we had to wait for Camila. I figured that I could take the pictures with Sam first. After we got the pictures, the three of us could walk to the park to get the pictures with Camila. By the time we got to the park, we were STILL waiting for Camila. It took forever just to get the pictures. After we got the pictures I sent the pictures to my wireless printer so they would she printer out by the we got back to my house. When we got back to my house the pictures were horrible.
     The pictures came out on a fourth of the paper. I realized that I wasted a lot of paper because of this. I decided to send the pictures to my email and print them from my computer. The problem with this, was that the pictures that came out weren't clear. So I had pictures that were clear and ones that were too dark. I don't have access to another printer so I had to make a choice about which pictures I was going to use. I chose the darker ones because I'd rather have the pictures be a few shades darker then barely able to be seen. After I cut out the pictures from the paper, I then had to print out a fake newspaper clippings for the scenes. I printer the first one from my phone and I got a fourth of the paper, because I didn't learn my lesson the first time around. I reprinted it from my computer and got the full papers. We finally got the film after that mess.

Pre-Production Blog: Planning; Finding Actors

   The time it took me to find someone to act as the ex and current boyfriend for our movie took forever. When we were first given the task, I ask around and someone said they would be able to do it as long as it didn't take too long. I knew it wasn't going to because all we had to do was take pictures and film a breakup scene. At max, it would have taken 30 minutes. As the date to film the scene and take the pictures got closer, my friend said they couldn't be in it anymore. This frustrated me. This meant that I had only a few days to find someone new who was willing to take time out of their, I'm sure, very "busy" schedule. Or, in other words, their friend passing this class isn't important to them and they don't care! Wow, I think I need new friends. I eventually ended up finding somebody, my friend Sam. Since we already had one of my friends, Pixie (her nickname) playing the best friend, I simply asked her girlfriend, Sam, if she wanted to play the ex and current boyfriend. This obviously meant that it would have to become a girlfriend. Hey, the show must go on right? Or is that only for theatre performances, I'm not sure.
   
     I figured that they might want to be together, even if just spending a day together to do a favour for a friend, but it was still nice to get them together to hang out.

    The whole process of trying to figure out who would be a good person to ask was very difficult and there were many disagreements between Camila and I. Once I told her that I already got a girl to say yes, we both knew that we were going to have to change 'boyfriend' to 'girlfriend' and our movie would have an LGBT sub genre. But that's fine, we didn't complain because we didn't care! We were just happy to find someone to be in the movie that we had to shoot two days later. I know that Sam is one of the people that go along with most things and are available a lot, so I took it upon myself to let her know that we will be filming more days in February and we will have re-shoots in March. She said it was fine and that was great, but if it turned out that it wasn't okay, I was going to contact her guardian and let her know that we needed Sam for the film and make it seem like it was this huge school project that she just had to be there for. I wouldn't have let them know that it wasn't for a class that Sam was taking, because then I'd be lying. Why lie when you can just stretch the truth and run with the loopholes?

     We managed to get the breakup scene that we needed and the pictures for another scene two days later. It really worked out in my favour, even if it did take a million stressful days to find a person, or, at least that's what it felt like. 

Planning Blog: Storyboard

     It took us a few days to figure out what we were going to draw. Even though we had three scripts, we still struggled. We both went back and forth trying to figure out what to draw and write. Camila believed that we should draw it before we write it and Bianca believed that we should write it first. We both agreed to just take a few papers each and do it our own way. Camila did the last four scenes while Bianca did the first four. We had to stay up even later than we were hoping the night before this was due because we wanted to make sure we had the time to check out a camera. We still couldn't even finish and spend over an hour in class uploading the pictures to google slides and putting it into the blog. The entire process was very stressful for both of us. We would do it again, though, for any other project we would do in the future, although we agreed that we wouldn't do this when we start our filming career's. 

Planning Blog: Title Design

     This is the title design power-point for our project. We first discussed the title fonts, which took us forever because we wanted different fonts. There were three different fonts that we finally agreed upon. We then discussed the title contrasts and how they would vary depending on what was being said. We chose the colour, backdrop, size, and spacing for our titles. We had a lot of title ideas, but finally landed on one. It took us awhile because we both had very different ideas about what the title should look like and include. Most of the title ideas were related to money or a pizza girl because we decided that those were the most important aspects of the movie. The title that we chose was Butterbean because it stands out from all the other titles, it being the main character's name and she being the reason the stalking started. Lastly, we discussed our title movements, which didn't take us that long because we had a pretty good idea about what we wanted the titles to look like as the moved within the scenes.

Planning Blog: Checklist

     This is the checklist for our planning phase. We started with the location because knowing where you're going to film is the most basic, yet most important part of planning. Then we focused on sound because we needed to know what sounds we will need to import or overlap in the editing phase. After that, we decided to get down the participants so we know the jobs of everyone so we won't get confused later on. We mentioned health and safety because we felt it was important to at least have down. Even though it's common sense to have a first aid kit and emergency numbers ready, it doesn't hurt to type it in. After heath, we wrote three slides about our schedule. This was because we wanted to write in everything we did up to this point and everything we're going to do. Since we're still going to be working on this project for at least another month, we want make sure we have a good idea about what we're doing when we start filming. This power-point is basically the skeleton of our project.

Planning Blog: Shooting Script

     This is the script that will allow the directors, Camila and I took look at when we need help with our scenes. Even though we will have our storyboard, this many help us as well. It was hard to make because we had to type what we had written and we ended up blending scenes together. This caused a lot of confusion between both of us and we both got frustrated. Going through every slide for each scene will make it easy on us when we have to draw out our storyboard since it's word for word on paper. At first, I was working on it myself, but I asked Camila to help halfway through because I was confusing myself. She helped me understand what was going on and get back on track. I was originally going to make the slides with the basic black and white background, but I remembered what we did for the sound script and I wanted them to match up. It took extra time to work with because the font was automatically set to dark gray, so after every slide, we had to change the colour to white. This just made us annoyed with the power-point.

Planning Blog: Sound Script

     This is the sound script for our movie. The script is split up into scenes. The dialogue for all the characters are included. All the sound that would be heard throughout the movies are included as well. Only two of our scenes have no dialogue. The rest of the scenes involve dialogue and sound. The characters start speaking in the middle of scene two. Music starts playing in the first scene and later fades out in the beginning of the second scene. The music fades back in scene three and fades out in scene four. There is no music until the beginning of scene twelve, then the music stops at the end of scene sixteen.