With most of the movie edited now, we've been considering how to end it, sorting out a few snags within the trailer and Navid has been working on the glitches that we want.
To end the movie originally, we wanted to have the therapist ask Veronica if she is ok, then have her say she is while smiling, and a tear will run down her cheek. We filmed this, but when we were editing, the movie was already too long and it didn't link too well. We decided it might be cool if we leave the trailer making the audience question whether Veronica may've killed her boyfriend. During the fight scene where the boyfriend beats up our protagonist, we filmed a bit where Veronica is thrown across the floor, then sees a knife on the counter side. It made a really cool ending, as the soundtrack gets a lot quieter and slower and we show her looking at the knife, then it cuts to black before the title of the movie is shown. We thought it looked really creepy and will make people watching it wonder what would happen next, as any good trailer would. Navid had edited a lot of the trailer and when we watched it, it seemed like every time we did, Yuden and I had more ideas of things we could change. We had a lot of disagreements. But one of the main things that bothered us was the cuts being on the beats of the song. Yuden wanted it so that the breaking of the bottle to be on one significant beat, but the trailer was too long if we kept it where we wanted it, and we had to fill up a lot of space before hand. I thought it would look fine if we cut it on a different beat, but Yuden was adamant that it wouldn't look good. We compromised and brought the shot forward. We did this for a lot of shots. We insisted that the jump cuts in the classroom had to all be the same length and perfectly on the beat. Navid hated us. What did turn out really cool was the glitches. Navid had to search how to do them and he spent a long time getting them perfect at the right places. Then Yuden stepped in and complained that there were too many. It's looking good, though.
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We started editing. It didn't start so well. I had several idea in my mind of how the trailer should start, but the opening shot had changed so much from how we originally planned it that we actually didn't have a way of starting the trailer. And at first, we were getting frustrated because the shots just looked so uninteresting, all strung together without full coherency or a story. I kind of wanted to try editing on my own, but when I did that, I found a lot of problems, mostly with the audio, that I couldn't decide what to do with without my group guiding me. I brought up the problems with the audio, mostly in the cafe scene with Lara and Navid acting. You couldn't properly hear them, and the way I wanted to have some of what Navid was saying as a voice over was really difficult, because the dialogue was so continuous, without any pauses. This made it hard to have other scenes going on at the same time. We thought it might be worth recording a voiceover, but that would negate the footage of the therapist and his colleague talking in the cafe, which we wanted to keep in as it gave some context as to what the therapist is saying and who he is talking to. Over dubbing didn't work either, so we settled on just trying to make it work with what we had.
We did end up deciding on how to start the trailer. We wanted to have a shot of Veronica, the one where she is looking out the window, that we filmed for the original therapist's office scene, but the bit we cut made it look too much like a still photo, it was really unnatural. We already had other footage edited, like the cafe scene linking to the restaurant and other bits from there, but we needed a start, and this beginning wasn't linking well. We then elongated that shot to see what happens next, if Veronica moves, which she did. She turns around and gets up off the sofa that she was kneeling on. I thought that, to link it to another scene, we could have another character, or Veronica, moving in that direction again, so it's like a continuous movement and it would look pleasant to watch. We found a shot of the cafe scene, which linked perfectly both to that bit and to the stuff we'd already edited. With all the group this time, we went out to film the alleyway scene. This time, we went for a location closer to school, and more secluded where people wouldn't hear the bottle breaking. We had to get another bottle, which was different from the first, but it didn't look all too bad on the footage, because we couldn't see it exactly, and the two shots, the dinner scene and this, don't have to connect perfectly.
We set up, and already ran into the problem of it being too sunny. We didn't want to risk going out in the evening and waiting around again, because it got too dark too quickly. We had to wait there for the sun to go in. Luckily, we were under a lot of trees, making it pretty shaded. This time, Yuden managed to break the bottle easier and we could see everything. We also decided to film a contrast scene to the creepy dark scene Yuden had filmed on her own. When the sun was out again, we went into the main area of the park and filmed her laughing, happy, dressed in the same, bright pink dress she'd worn for the dinner scene. It ended up looking really good. Yuden and I went out to try and film the alleyway scene that's meant to come after the dinner scene where Veronica and Jeremy have a fight. We wanted to show just how crazy the protagonist is by having her throw an alcohol bottle at her boyfriend out in an alleyway, which would've made for a really cool shot, however, we didn't know how we'd be able to do it. We wanted to try and get some sugar glass, which would make it safer and give us more we could do with that scene, but it was too expensive and too difficult to get our hands on, so we were trying to think how else we might be able to shoot a similar scene. Since our actor as the boyfriend wasn't too keen in standing in front of a wall and have our protagonist throw a bottle close to him, we decided we could just shoot the scene with Yuden only, breaking the bottle on the floor or throwing it against the wall, making one less person we could potentially accidentally hurt for our movie. It also meant, since we only really have one bottle, we could do it in one shot, or as many times as it would take to actually break it, which we learnt took a lot more power and takes than we expected.
We also ran into problems with where to film. Our original idea close by school wasn't available as there was too many people around. That was our main hurdle, trying to find a place where no one was. Yuden and I got on a bus and hoped we'd find a location. Lara then called us, because she was going to come out and film, and she suggested a location close by her house. There were some people walking around, but it was beginning to get late enough and we weren't interrupted by people passing us too often. We set up to film, and it was getting dark, so we decided on an area just under a street lamp to give us some more light other than the one we'd brought with us from school. It took so long to actually manage to break the bottle that by the time Yuden did, it was far too dark and the footage wasn't good enough. We decided we might have to try and fine a different location and film again in the week. We all went over to Yuden's house to film both the bathroom scene and the home scene in which Yuden's character and her boyfriend would be having a normal night in, then it would glitch to her being beaten up by the boyfriend. This worked really well, as Yuden didn't mind being thrown around a lot, making it look really realistic. We did have a problem with time, as the battery for the camera ran down really quickly and no one (I) forgot bring another one. Still, we managed to get all the footage we needed and most of it looked really good and realistic.
Deciding that Lara's house was too much like a house to appear as an office, we asked our school if we could use the interview room, which is more formal, but still quite calm. We had several problems here, as the set up of it meant we had to move a load of the chairs, the table, and frame it so that we don't see the stuff on the walls, which would give and indication of it being in a school. We tried to open the blinds as well, as they have the school logo on them, but it looked much worse when we did. I had to angle the camera so we only saw Navid and Yuden.
We also tried to get Yuden to cry, similar to the scene in Get Out, which proved difficult to film, as either we couldn't time the filming right and get the tear, or Yuden couldn't get herself to cry. We got the footage, but we're not sure how good it is. For the third time, we went out to film the running scene. We wanted it to be perfect, focused on Yuden all the way through and have the screen go black when she gets close enough. Utilising a bigger lense to zoom in much closer, Yuden didn't have to get so close to the camera before the screen went dark. It took more tries than expected, as focusing on Yuden throughout the shot was really quite hard. We thought we might have to chose between keeping focus on Yuden far away, or focusing on her when she's close, so when she's running, she will gain focus by the time the screen goes black. One idea that Yuden had was to film a scene in which she would be sitting in a bathtub, fully dressed all formal and drinking something, then that would smash and she'd fall into the water. It would be a cool shot to keep coming back to in the trailer, so Yuden and I went to her house, chose a dress for her to wear and we had some red food colouring to make it look like she's drinking wine. Filming was difficult due to the shots we wanted, we couldn't use the tripod all the time, so I had to try and keep the camera as still as possible when recording. The footage, however, looked really cool, with Yuden being able to keep her eyes open under water. We thought that would also look really cool as a poster, so we tried to take a picture, but struggled to focus it on Yuden's face. We'll have to try again some other time.
Yuden had this other idea of filming a shot in which she would look really bad and be playing with a lighter, contrasting with some of the brighter scenes we had and being a nice transition between the running scene onwards as, when she runs in front of the camera, the screen goes black. She filmed it at her house, doing it many times, differently, then we chose to use the most in focus and the ones that looked the coolest. There was one shot where she blew out the lighter quite violently, which worked either as an end for the trailer, or as a freaky transition.
We went out to film the park scene with Durum, the boyfriend in the film. In this scene, we have a cute bit where the couple are playing on the swings, then it cuts to Yuden panicking. The scene went well, with even the weather helping as it was really sunny while we filmed the bit with Durum, then a little less so when we filmed the panicking bit. We also added some more shots in, like some from behind, which looked quite cool, as the sun silhouetted Durum and Yuden. One shot that was a little more difficult to get was the one where we wanted to get just the swing on it's own. We couldn't time it properly while it was swinging and film it. Yuden decided to do it herself, running between getting the swing moving and pressing record, which seemed to work better than when we all tried to do it and move out of frame.
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January 2018
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