Production Week: Final Day

After receiving feedback on our movie, our group realized we still had a little more work to do. While I thought the first draft was great, I'll admit it was missing a lot of things like a voiceover, credits, title, production logo, and time. Another short filming day had to be planned to make up for these mistakes.

We were never able to film the first scene in Ms. Vincent's class, however, we felt that the introduction would be too long if we added another scene to the beginning. Our end was good, but it wasn't strong. The audience should have a reason to want to see more of a film after watching the first few scenes. After some discussion, we decided to add a scene, with another teacher questioning Carla in a suspicious manner. This leaves the audience wondering "was she caught?" or "will she get away with it?" and makes them want to watch more. 

The day of filming, I wore dark colored clothes to contrast the costume the beginning of the movie. This portrays the evolution of Carla's character. She went from a bright, smart girl to a dark killer. Jada and I added another small prop too, a folder for Carla to mindlessly flip around as she thinks of what she did.

Later that day me and Jada met up to film the final scene since Brandon had class. We went to our teacher's room and asked her if she wanted to play the teacher who would interrogate Carla and she gladly accepted. We named her character Ms. E and discussed how we wanted the scene to go. Our group was on a time crunch, so we didn't have much time to write and memorize lines, all we could do was make a general outline.

The scene takes place the following day and Carla is wondrously flipping through her folder with no thoughts, just guilt, until Ms. E stops her and asks if she's heard about Mr. Johnson's death. Carla gets nervous and asks, "what do you mean" to which Ms. E responds "Carla I think we know."

After talking about the outline, we quickly filmed the scene, which was mostly improvisation, but we made it work. The camera work was kept fairly simple since the scene was really short, being less than 30 seconds. The camera movement went from a slow zoom (before Ms. E) to random movement. This portrays Carla's mind which is all over the place after committing a crime. The shot goes from medium full to just medium and the angle stays eye level. The camera framing remains one shot, only showing Ms. E's hand. This was done to give Ms. E a sense of power, the audience can only hear her voice and see her hand, making her a mysterious yet intimidating character, leaving Carla in a vulnerable perspective.

Jada and I took two takes and chose the best one for the final scene. After we finished, we added the clip to the movie to finalize editing, including adding a voiceover.