The Journey of the Film
The screenplay was the first major part of the pre-production process, setting the foundation for the entire film. I started with a story spine and treatment and then moved to a rough draft. Upon recieving feedback from the rest of my crew, as well as my professor, I refined the script, and eventually came out with a three page final script, aiming for a 3-4 minute film.
I created a lookbook slide alongside other pre-production material to communicate and outline the visual look of how I wanted this film to come out.
I am not very experienced with storyboarding, and I tend not to like drawing. So this part wasn't amazing. But I did manage to get together a storyboard that was coherent. I like to say I have a good visionary brain, and despite not having a super clear storyboard, I was able to put together a very clear shotlist, and subsequently, a clear shooting schedule.
Locations were a little tough. I had a very specific vision when it came to certain scenes. In the final scene, I had a VERY specific idea of where I wanted a character to sit. Therefore, I asked around to find locations that fit this vision. However, they ended up not actually panning out. In the end, I had to compromise my vision a little, and used my own apartment. While the ending scene had a little less weight, it ultimately still did work despite the compromise.
Again, this was the first time I directed someone that wasn't myself. And therefore, it was a little tough at times. I learned how to direct an actor on the fly. My actress, Sophia Mucha, was incredible. She understood everything I asked of her and more than delivered. My DP, Sofia Kokkino, also killed it. She was able to understand what I needed from certain shots and truly did understand my vision as I explained it to her. However, we all did not quite realize how long things were taking.
Lighting and room setup were huge. My kitchen, on most days, is of course, lived in. Therefore we had to strip it of everything to make it look a lot less messy and only left the coffee machine, because it's the central focus of the screen. We also had to be mindful of the natural light coming in and how it affected the mood of the scenes. In one way though, my apartment was good because there WAS no natural light for most of the living room sequence. We were able to use key lights to light most of the scenes, which worked fairly well to keep the character and scene well lit.
Managing the schedule was one of the biggest challenges. Again, the primary concern was us underestimating how long it would take. It wasn't actually an intensive screenplay, but we wasted some time at the beginning and took it quite slow before realizing how behind schedule we were at one point. Despite some delays, we managed to stick to the timeline fairly well, which was a great learning experience for me as a director.
I thought the rough cut would be fairly easy. I had a decent amount of footage, and good coverage of each scene. However, there were continuity errors in several shots, a lack of sound in some shots, incorrect sound in others, and more. I decided to leave the sound for later and work on the continuity rough cut first, which, while difficult, eventually did work out.
Color grading was quite annoying. We made the mistake of not shooting in LOG. And on top of that, there was the further mistake of having a way too warm white balance while shooting. To mitigate this, I worked to balance all the colors to achieve a white, washed out look, and worked from there. In the end, while it wasn't exactly what I wanted, it came out looking decent.
Sound editing was quite challenging. There were issues with inconsistent audio levels, background noise, and syncing SFX. There were takes where people were speaking in the background or calling out instructions to the actress. There were other takes with no audio at all, and I had to record them in post, which I had to match the quality of. I spent a lot of time cleaning up the audio tracks, adding ambient sounds, and ensuring the sound effects matched the visuals. It was a great learning experience in audio post-production. In terms of the music, it was very quick. I sat down at the piano for a couple minutes and just played a few notes.
