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Learning Lines

 So, because many of our extras getting sick, we have been focusing on using our family members as actors in the short film. My mom has been recast as Queenie, the mom character. We had a few more scenes left to film with our previous Queenie. With the timing of her illness, we wouldn't have gotten a chance to film the leftover scenes without cutting down on our editing time. For editing, we want to give us as much time as possible in order to make sure everything looks good. We might still do an extra day of filming, for any scenes or audio that is needed to be redone, but the goal is to have everything done beforehand. With my mom now being Queenie, we spent the better part of today trying to go over our lines. There was a lot of laughter, a bit of stress, and mixing up words. My mom is originally from Colombia, with her first language being Spanish. Some of the words, mainly "ridiculous" were really hard for her to pronounce. With her, she really likes repetition to memorize, so being unable to pronounce a word properly was inhibiting her from repeating it as smoothly as she would've liked. This experience allowed us to better think about how our script fit with our actors. Some lines simply weren't working for my mom, so we adjusted accordingly. Finding synonyms or changing slight things in lines was better for us so we would be able to have many takes, rather than going exactly by the script and having to redo it many times, just for one viable take. As for me and my lines, it was pretty hard at first. I would take a few words from each scene and remember my lines like that. Instead of thinking "Mom, you can't be serious, I can still fix this," I would think "Mom, serious, fix." After enough rereading of the lines, my brain would start to naturally fill in the gaps. We also had a few of the papers in the scene in this style, unable to be seen in the shot, for my mom to be able to remember her lines too.


This was one of my very first takes with my mom, where she forgot her lines midway through. It was fun to laugh about, especially as I forgot my lines the take before.


Until next time, Danniella Miller signing off.



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