Skip to main content

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.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Filming my Pentel Commercial

 Today was the filming day of my commercial. My actor came over and we had to get right to work as we had limited time. There were a few circumstantial issues, such as the fact we were filming in the living room and we had to make sure none of my family members messed up the shot. Another issue was the lighting, as there wasn't sufficient lighting due to the constant raining and generally cloudy weather. We fixed this by taking longer shots and multiple takes, so if someone was in the background doing something that we could see we would take another shot until we got the perfect one. As for the lighting, we had to improvise by adding some lamps around the shot without breaking anything. When we got to filming we had originally planned to do a tracking shot as the actor walked up to look through some pens, but we realized it wouldn't be feasible with our current equipment. The filming process did end up being much faster than I had originally thought. This is the first time I...
Post a Comment
Read more

Planning the storyboard for my Pentel commercial

First Scene: This will be the shot comparing other pens to Pentel pens. It will give the audience an idea of the kinds of things you can do with Pentel pens and why they're so much better. It will be a zoom shot. As the actor continues writing, the camera will zoom in to look at how the pen is acting on the paper. Second Scene: Here, the actor will take a highlighter to the generic pen and it will smudge everything up. This will be an extreme zoom. As the Pentel pens' inability to smudge and fast drying times are a huge part of their advertising, I wanted to include a shot that would compare Pentel pens to other pens. This will still be on the same desk as the first shot, but it will instead be an overhead shot truly focusing on the paper. Third Scene: It's well known how infuriating it can be to have a pen smudging up all your hard work, so I truly wanted to show that emotion here. The audience can empathize with our actor's struggle and want to help him find a better ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Editing my Pentel Commercial

Here we are, the final step before my commercial is complete. I'm currently using Adobe Premiere Pro to edit. My only issue with this program is the fact that I'm still quite unfamiliar with it. I spend a long time editing in Final Cut Pro and Adobe is definitely much different. Adobe is making things easier for me, but I still have to take pauses in order to look up how to do a specific action or add in a different effect. I feel like if I was more comfortable with Adobe, I certainly could've finished editing much faster. Another thing I noticed was that the thirty-second time limit of the commercial made me seriously think about which shots I wanted in my final project. I had a lot of time spend making cuts or rearranging the order of clips and watching them play out. I did this to do my best to see what the final project would look like, and how the pacing would look like. I wanted to get my story across in my commercial, but I had a lot of trouble balancing each clip so...
Post a Comment
Read more