Wednesday, April 23, 2014

ROLE: Artistic Designer and Historian
Like Ezaz, Jenifer had to make the sketches of the characters and setting while also doing a research paper on comparing the Shakespearean era and the 1980's era. Jennifer put all her effort into creating the sketches of the dress code, the setting, and putting the portfolio together. She did have difficulties with the sketches since they take a lot of time and she's really busy. Making and creating the art pieces were not as easy as it seemed, it was hard to get accurate information for the drawings but it came out good in the end. She put the portfolio together with the help of the group and it helped to have good communication with the members.
ROLE: Producer
Max's individual role for this project was the producer. As the producer, Max did an excellent job of bringing all the equipment on the filming day. He brought the cameras, tripods, lights, and mic to use as we filmed. Without all this important equipment, the video wouldn't be the same. The lights didn't work as it started getting dark and he had difficulties with the lighting system we had, so we used the flashlights on our cellphones to support the lighting. He was also responsible for editing the video and burning it on to a disk. Max had trouble with iMovie but he eventually finished his work on editing the video.

ROLE: Director
As the director, Sanjith had to do a research paper on comparing and contrasting the roles of men and women from the Shakespearean era and from the 1980's era. The biggest challenge for him was how to portray a dad in the 1980's with the costume, the script, and the movements and actions that he made. As the director, the biggest problems were to meet up with the group and to decide on certain dates for when to film, and what role each person did for the portfolio.

Monday, April 21, 2014

ROLE: Linguist
Jackie's role was the linguist and she had to write the paragraphs for the five songs the group used for the 1980's era soundtrack. She was also in charge of looking up words and phases commonly used during that time period. She also had to define the words and phases from the Shakespearean era. Everything was much easier than she had expected and nothing from the project was difficult enough that she couldn't handle it.

ROLE: Historian and Artistic Designer
The historian's job was to research both the Elizabethan era and the 1980's era. They had to write about the similarities and differences between Shakespeare's time and the 80's. As co-historian and co-artistic designer, Ezaz found his role difficult. If he had not shared his work with another group member, he would not have given his 100% effort to the scrapbook because of the tremendous amount of work he had, being both a historian and designer. Even though his jobs were very time consuming, he still had a lot of fun making the scrapbook. 

BEHIND THE SCENES INTERVEIWS


During the filming break, we asked a couple actresses and actors about the roles they played and how the experience of movie-making was so far. They all seemed to have had a fun time, though there was both pros and cons about their filming experience. Check out the video below which contains this behind the scenes footage.









Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Saturday(4/12/14) - Filming Process


Saturday March 12th, 2014 was our filming day. We planned to get all the filming done on this day. To begin the filming process, the girls put on their makeup and costumes to film the first scene while the guys set up the garage for the later scenes and also set up the filming equipment. Setting up the scenes for the 80's prom was a difficult task. It was challenging for us to create something out of an empty garage, but with effort, hard work, and creative thinking, we all managed to create the scene or the "prom environment" we needed to film our 80's Prom movie.









The scenes were tough to film and required many takes to finally get it perfect and we also ran into many problems but overall, it was a lot of fun to film.

Max who plays Helga(the other prom queen nomination besides Kate) is "transforming" into a girl.
























Before filming the final scene, the group took a dinner break and ate IN-N-OUT which was brought to us by Jennifer's mom. Everyone was tired after filming for hours and we all had headaches from trying to solve a couple of technical difficulties. It was  getting dark and cold outside and the girls were  not only tired and freezing but also had aching feet from the heels they were wearing, which they had on for the past 6 hours.

The final scene was the crowning of the prom king and queen and when we were done with that scene, we finished off with a fun dancing scene.

The prom king and queen
Filming wasn't as easy as we expected. One of the many troubles we had to face was due to the modern cars in the background of where we were filming because it inhibited us to create a perfect "80's environment".  Some of the problems that we had were not able to be resolved very easily, but for the rest of our problems, we came up with ways to fix them. The camera angles had to be just right so that it would include everyone in the shots and the setting would look good, to do this, we used two different camera's. When the sun had set, it was completely dark because we were filming outside so we had trouble with lighting. To resolve this problem, we turned on flash on our
 cell phones and used them as flashlights.














Finally finished with a long day of filming, the time was close to midnight and we were all exhausted but glad to have all the filming done.

We cleaned up the set and the filming equipment.............

Cleaning up the set.

Cleaning up filming equipment.


























Looking back, filming this short film was a lot of fun and was also a very good experience. I personally learned a lesson on how to collaborate and work well with others and come up with creative solutions to problems. It was like solving a puzzle. 
After filming for a while, many of us complained and became displeased because we were all exhausted from working for so long. We all overcame the technical problems, aching feet, and lighting issues through team work. We supported each other and encouraged each other to do better and stay strong when we were about to give up. It's important to have people who can put up with this whole busy day and it was nice to have a group that was able to get trough all the harsh problems of filming. 
Nobody in our group took the lead, and I think this was why our group didn't split up and get mad at each other. Not one person in our group fought. This is because having one person take the lead and make all the important decisions will cause many disagreements but our group just came up with decisions together and made sure everyone agreed and was okay with all the decisions we made and everything we did.