Some difficulties that were encountered during shooting and production was one, the fact that after we noticed that a lot of the shots did not turn out as good as we hoped. Either the shots we took were too short and weren’t long enough to look good and make sense in our clip or we looked awkward while performing the characters lol. Another thing that make production sort of difficult was the fact that we almost completely wiped out our ideas from our story board so we pretty much were shooting with last minute decisions on our minds. With that we pretty much were shooting on our basis idea from the beginning and some of the ideas that we kept from the storyboard, which during the day we shot we just came up with cool ideas and went along with that.

With these messed up shots we reshoot some of the inserts that we needed in our film. Scarlett and I did this separately in order to get this done faster.

Additionally with the overall obstacles related with shooting we had some difficulties recording the sound that we wanted to pick up too. We were originally going to use Scarlett’s guitar mic to pick up the sound but we decided last minute to use Mr. Engle’s condenser since it could pick up the organic sound we wanted better, while also picking up very quiet sounds.

I had the condenser first because I was trying to pick up organic sound from the record player that you first hear as you put the needle on and the record begins to spin. However the condenser wasn’t picking up the grainy sound or the screech on the record beginning to spin at all. So in hopes I tried using my Iphone and it actually turned out to work really good.

In my blog I talked about technology we were planning to use during pre-production, yet some things have changed so I decided to update you guys on what technology we ended up using during production. 🙂

The main piece of technology that we used about 90% of the time was my camera to shoot all of our scenes within the first day of shooting. My camera, as stated before, is a Nikon Coolpix B500. After shooting and getting all the shots that we need, we downloaded the videos all onto my computer which is a Mac.

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To pick up sound we used two different technologies. Scarlett and I wanted to pick up more organic sounds and make the sound we needed in our movie as clear as possible so we muted all the audio picked up by the camera and re-recorded our sound using a condenser and an iphone. The condenser mic was used to record the record player and scarlett playing/tuning the guitar. The condenser mic didn’t pick up the initial grainy sounds from the record player but picked up the guitar being played very well. The guitar being played was picked up by the condenser and then recorded through garageband on Scarlett’s Mac. Since the condenser mic didn’t pick up the organic sound needed by the record player, as a backup option I used my Iphone X. The sound was then recorded by voice memos that was on my phone.

talk about what we learned

So Scarlett and I had planned to shoot on three separate days the first day being February 18th, the next the 22nd, and the third day would have been the 24th. However, due to miscommunication and the fact that we decided to make a lot of changes to our original plan, storyboard, and script we did not shoot on the 18th and the 24th, we decided just to shoot on the 22nd which was last Friday. One thing that lead us to this change is the fact that it seemed really complicated for the first two minutes of the film, so we stuck with a lot of the same ideas but just simplified.

This is me and Scarlett at my house because we decided to shoot there first. We shot all of the scenes for Jax and cut out the roof scene we were planning on for Beck. We came up with a lot of different ideas.

This picture was taken on our way to Scarlett’s house. We still shot later in the day even though our whole intro is inside each of the characters houses. We wanted to shoot later so it wasn’t so bright in the rooms.

This is Scarlett’s dog Romeo that we took a picture of at her house. At least he was camera ready. Honestly, he should have been the star of the whole film.

Finally, now that we are financed we are going to schedule the days that we will shoot for our movie. Scarlett and I have carefully thought about what days and what times we will start shooting in order to keep continuity within our film. We have decided on three separate days over the course of next week.

Starting next week on the 18th of February we will shoot at Scarlett’s house. We will begin at 5:30 before the sun sets so we can plan before that time which will usually be around 6:30. This day is to shoot inside of Beck’s room.

The second day of shooting will be at my house on February 22nd. This day we will begin at 5:00 so we will have more time to plan and to possibly get all of the shots of Jax inside her room.

The final day of shooting will be for the outside of Beck’s house. These scenes will also be shot at my house but will be known as Beck’s house on the outside while the inside is Jax’s room. Shooting will begin at 5:00pm on February the 24th. The things we are most worried about over those three days is being able to keep continuity with the lookout the outside shots and make sure that the shots inside the rooms look like they are occurring at the same time too on the same day. Wish us luck!!!

Along with the schedule we picked out what technology we will use to shoot and pick up sound outside of the music that will be playing in the background. The camera we will use is a Nikon Coolpix B500 which will be provided by me. We haven’t tested out the camera yet and we still need time to figure out just exactly how to work it which is why we will start early on the first day of shooting. We plan on just taking some random practice shots to test the camera, lighting, etc. before getting our real shots in.

For the sound, since we will not be filming any audio for the opening scene we are going to be recording diegetic sound which will then switch to non-diegetic sound in order to create a sound bridge. The only sound we will hear is the tuning and playing of the guitar while also a record being played. In order to catch this sound, we will use a Shure guitar microphone and record through an amp to a soundboard or straight to our laptops which we still have to test as well. Scarlett will be beginning to test the sound technology and her camera this weekend. We will keep you posted on how the technology works and if any changes/complications will occur, hopefully not though!

Today we have finally received an answer back from A24! Scarlett and I are so excited, we have worked extremely hard to come up with this movie to make sure that it is different and stands out. We have done lots of planning in advance and have already gone through most of the pre-production stage to allow our movie to be done faster and more efficient.

This is a really amazing opportunity for Scarlett and me as movie director’s to finally get our vision out there for everyone to see. We hope you all enjoy our film and thank you to the company of A24 for believing in us and our dream. We will not let you down!

Tomorrow I will discuss and display our shooting schedule. It will display when we shoot at Beck’s house and room, while also display when we will shoot at Jax’s room for the opening scene. Along with the schedule, the type of technology we will use will be pictured and listed so you guys as an audience will know even to the little details like that about our movie. Another factor that will be hit on tomorrow is what type of technology we will use to pick up sound and what types of sound we will record and put into the makings of our movie opening.

Now that Scarlett and I have written the screenplay and I have discussed what the feel of Adolescent is going to be, we have created a screenplay to sort of outline the first two minutes of our film. The whole storyboard doesn’t really portray the type of style we want to shoot our movie and how we want it to look because it was difficult to find every picture with a grunge mood to it. However, each block and picture is to just get an idea of what our film will look like and be sort of set a basis for when we actually go to shoot.

Before explaining the setup and what each block is supposed to be, I just want to state that none of the shots are for certain and they could possibly change depending on how they look when we shoot and if they fit well enough to sustain continuity.

The first block is just simply the black screen that will contain our credits and title before the shots actually begin. One reason as to why we want to show this black screen for our title and credits is because it is present in a lot of coming of age films and in the background we are going to have a guitar being tuned in the back to kind of show it is something important and something to remember. The next block is most likely going to be a close up of Beck’s guitar while she begins to practice a song to show that it is a key interest in her life. The same is shown of Jax’s record player which begins the parallel that is created between the two characters.

The parallel is continued as it jumps back to Beck in either a full body or mid body shot of Beck playing the guitar again as she messes up the song. When she messes up it goes back to Jax either a full body, mid, or close up of Jax starting to play the same song that continues for the rest of the opening scene. Then an establishing shot is shown of Beck’s house showing that it is where she is going to be next, then shows a close up of the main aspects of the house that sort of makes it a regular suburban home. We cut back to Jax’s room where it shows her closet and we can see that in both locations Jax and Beck stand out dramatically. We then cut to an establishing shot of the roof to then a full body of Jax sitting on her bed staring out the window. Another parallel is very noticeable with the last two shots as we show Beck smoking on the roof, and Jax laying on her bed smoking a cigarette as well.

After discussing the basic necessities to begin preproduction, I want to address how we want the look and the feel of our movie to come across to our audience. Many coming of age films can be either very eccentric and happy like Clueless or it can be the total opposite and be super dark like The Perks of being a Wallflower. However, for our film we want our movie and our characters to look more grunge rather than have a super dark message or come across as too shallow.

The main concept we started with was how the grunge style was during the 90s. Some fashion icons we looked at was Courtney Love and Drew Barrymore, we are wanting to take inspiration from their outfits for the more feminine character Jax. Jax is a girl who started out super girly and popular but after her boyfriend cheated on her and she outcasted herself she started to resent life and picked up the more grunge ” I don’t really want to be here” style.

A concept we are taking from Drew Barrymore is denim jackets she was seen a lot in during the 90s. Drew’s style doesn’t contain that distressed, worn out fashion that was the main aspect of 90s grunge but, that feature we are taking more from Courtney Love.

Courtney Love was the epitome of “grunge” back in the 90s. Even though that picture was not of her it’s of the fashion line that she launched. A lot of Courtney’s clothing was disheveled, informal, had darker tones, loose, worn out, and ripped. One main thing both from Drew and Courtney is that they had really crazy curly hair, which is what we are going to portray with Jax as well.

While for the other character Beck, we are taking the style from Kurt Cobain who was obviously a man but took a lot of his fashion aspects from a more feminine perspective. The feminine aspect of Kurt is perfect for Beck because she’s obviously a girl but lacks a lot of femininity. Kurt wore a lot of stripes, ripped shirts, worn out shoes, and ripped jeans.

Now focusing on the color scheme of the movie to go along with the feel we wanted to go with a more nostalgic palette. The feeling of nostalgia is a major part of the feeling of Adolescent because we want the audience to feel like they are looking back on their youth while and sort of seeing Jax and Beck as a representation of it as well. Scarlett and I wanted Adolescent to feel like a memory that you often go back to reminisce on which everyone does at some point during their life when they are growing up. This color scheme reminded us sort of like a dream or a memory, so when we are color correcting our film we plan on following these colors while adding some grain to create a blurred memory feel.

These colors were an idea of Scarlett because they are often found in sunsets. Scarlett has a picture with her with a sunset in the background, using that as our initial idea and baseline for the feel of the movie, we found a color palette that perfectly matched with it. The sunset though often is very typical, we saw it as something very nostalgic because you just get this at peace feeling, and often we go back to remember the sky and the feeling it caused us to have.

While we wait for an answer to our film pitch we will begin discussing and planning the pre-production stage of our film so we can begin shooting right away if A24 believes in us. One key thing about starting pre-production is to really think about and be open to all the locations that would be best to shoot in, in order to actually get your shots. The location of the movie has to make sense with the purpose or theme of your movie, so, for example, if we are creating a coming of age film we wouldn’t want to shoot at an old abandoned house that is haunted or something.

One thing we took into consideration before choosing the locations that our shots will be at was the fact that pretty much every coming of age movie occurs in a small town that they have grown up in their whole lives or literally no one has ever heard of. So we decided to do most of our shooting in Dade City/ San Antonio and Brooksville, Florida since they are the definition of a small town that no one has heard of, especially Dade City. We decided for Beck’s character to shoot in Scarlett’s room at her house since it has a lot of aspects that we are looking for with Beck.

Scarlett’s room has tons of record holders on the wall, band posters, guitars, lights, everything that you would think a creative, non-conforming teenager would have in their room.

The other location filming will occur at my house, in my room, outside of my house, and in my room. My room is going to be Jax’s room in the movie because it is not decorated like anything that represents her current personality in the movie. The contrasting decorations to Jax’s style are to highlight how conformed she is in her home and pretty much by the world around her.

The outside of my house will be portrayed as Beck’s house when we use the establishing shot of it, and use the roof to get the smoking scene of Beck during the last few shots of the opening. My house is a typical nice looking suburban home in a small neighborhood, which is what we wanted to portray for Beck’s house. One difficulty though we might find is trying to make the same location look like two different locations but I’m sure if we angle and plan our shots well enough it could be easily done.

So now that we picked our locations we have to pick the actresses for the two main leads in our film. This really didn’t take much thinking between Scarlett and I because we both decided that If we just were the actors in our own movie it would be way easier. Both of us acting in our own film would make scheduling easier, and production/editing way easier too. The main thing that we knew would be the best part about acting in our own movie is that we know exactly what we want and how we want the characters to look and act. We also both love the grunge style and have pretty much the same mindset about our film so we just knew it would be way easier and less costly.

So with this decision, we decided for Scarlett to be Beck who is a character that is more masculine but also feminine and myself (Kaytie) to play Jax who is the more feminine character that started out as a preppy popular girl but later outcasted herself and wanted to be different from everyone else.

Tune in later on my blog to see the transformation of Scarlett and I as we portray Jax and Beck during shooting!

Today I created a film pitch for my movie Adolescent, in order to catch the attention of A24. The purpose of my film pitch was to convince A24 who is a production and distribution film company to finance, produce, and distribute me and Scarlett’s film. The video takes on a sort of more personal approach rather than completely professional because I didn’t want to sound too cold and not appealing. The video is also in a series of shots in order for me to get as much information in and be able to convince A24 as much as possible.

While watching the video you can see that it covers pretty much anything that A24 needs to know on my film, so their interest can be sparked. At the beginning of the pitch introduce my film’s name and briefly give a synopsis on what the movie will be about. After the synopsis, I explain why A24 is the best choice to produce and distribute our movie and introduce our purpose for creating the film. I also explain our purpose in comparison to other films produced through A24 and talk about the total budget it would talk to produce the film. Following all of the business aspects of my film pitch I just really elaborate pretty much every reason as to why A24 should be interested and follow through with our movie.

So wish Adolescent luck!!! :,)

In order to be able to produce our film, I looked at a few production companies that have produced many of the films in my genre and that I have researched. Films such as Lady Bird, Eighth Grade, Moonlight, and Mid90s were produced under the production company A24. Other films like The Perks of being a Wallflower were produced under Mr. Mudd. While for distribution A24 is also a distribution company and many times have distributed the films that they have produced, for example as said before Lady Bird. However, Mr. Mudd mainly just produces films so Perks was produced by Mr. Mudd but was distributed and financed through Summit Entertainment and the help of Lionsgate which it is owned by. Even though Mr. Mudd has produced great coming of age films like Perks and Juno, that’s pretty much the only coming of age films they have produced.

Seeing that a lot of production companies also distribute movies as well, Scarlett and I felt as though that would be particularly easier and more efficient on both us and the companies we want to work with. Looking at Summit Entertainment, it is owned by Lionsgate which is a huge film production/distribution company. However many of the films produced through Summit Entertainment are action or romance with action in it. For example, some of their films were Twilight, Divergent, and Warm Bodies. So since those genre of movies aren’t really what we are going for or close to our genre, we decided that A24 would be a better fit especially since a lot of Summit Entertainment films have a decently high budget as well.

A24: As a production and distribution company we believe that A24 would be the best fit for us. This is because they have produced films in our genre that have turned out to be very successful, and films like Mid90s were pretty much self-financed and had a really low budget ($64,539). A24 is an independent entertainment company, so it is outside of many of the major film studios like Walt Disney, Marvel, Warner Bros., etc. This company is perfect because our film Adolescent is an indie film, that will definitely have a low budget since it will be our first time creating a feature like this.

Producing and distributing our movie through A24 would attract the exact audience that we want because many great coming of age films have been produced through the company. Audiences will see that we are produced and distributed through A24 and if they recognize the company through films they have watched, they can see we will most likely be a successful movie as well and will be worth their time to watch.

To convince A24 to finance our film we want to explain how our movie is taking a coming of age film but from a more different approach. We want to show the teenage mind through two girls both different but experiencing the same things. We can see how the experiences of a teenager really do affect each of the girls in different ways, and how they grow throughout the movie into beginning to touch adulthood. Our film will have a more grunge approach, that’s more nostalgic than black comedy like Heathers was. To make the money back that is financed through A24 we will sell our movie through a number of different marketing and cross-media strategies. Just like any other movie we will create movie posters, trailers, and teasers for our film. We will create social media accounts to keep the public updated and interested in the movie that we are creating since social media is one of the biggest platforms today.

Along with trailers, teasers, movie posters, and social media, we will also take strategies through cross-media and maybe even some aspects of synergy. For cross-media, we will create a unique soundtrack for the film, often from songs that have already been created that will be recognizable and make our film memorable. Additionally, we all know that after many movies that are made that often have a very huge impact or have iconic scenes/quotes people will create unlicensed merch on their own that people will buy. So another way to get money back would be to create our own merchandise for the films and sell them in stores such as hot topic which is known for selling merch for many movies, often which the items sell fairly quickly.

As a means of exhibition for our film, we thought it would be best to initially release it to film festivals to gain popularity. We also decided to take this route because our movie will be pretty low budget so it will be financially better to start off both for me, Scarlett, and A24. A specific music festival we plan to release the film at is Sundance. Sundance is the largest film festival in the United States and after that, if the film is sold we plan on then releasing it to select theaters. A movie that took this route is Mid90’s which was released at an Ontario film festival which then went into select theaters across the nation. As our film grows we then eventually want to create our film on DVD, release it to online platforms like Netflix, Itunes, and even through home entertainment.

Sources: “Mid90s (2018) – Financial Information.” The Numbers – Where Data and Movies Meet, 19 Oct. 2018, http://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Mid90s-(2018).

“A24 (Company).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 5 Feb. 2019, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A24_(company).