For this project we were given the choice of working on Drama or a Documentary. I said before that these were the two areas that I was interested in working in again, and now I had to make the choice as to which one. Our group all really wanted to make a documentary, but as we only had a couple of weeks before we had to deliver the final product we decided to make a drama.
The reason behind this choice is that when you’re making a piece of fictional work, then you are in control of what happens. Not that’s it that easy, but all you need is a story and some actors and you can get it done relatively simply. The main thing that concerned us what that if we made a documentary, then it all hinges on the contributor being willing to participate, and if they change their mind at the last minute then the entire project can fall apart. On top of that, none of us really had any connections to anything that we thought would make an interesting enough subject so we opted to make a drama.
We were given a choice of three famous scenes to base our script on; a scene from Romeo and Juliet, Pulp Fiction or Sleeper. We decided to go with Romeo and Juliet as the scene we were given was where their eyes meet across the dance floor, and they fall in love. As there is no dialogue in this scene we thought that it was left quite open for us to interpret it in different ways. We decided to do a modern take, but not in the same vein as Baz Lurhmann’s Romoe + Juliet.
We decided our roles for the project, and as we’ve all worked together before we know each other’s strengths and we all have certain roles that we like to do. There was no arguing about it, really we all knew what we would end up doing; I was the director. My main concern was that we managed to recreate the idea that the two main characters have a big reason for the fact that they can’t be together, and the idea of two families not liking each other just doesn’t seem like something that could still really happen. The idea we came up with would be that the two main characters would be from rival political parties. On top of that we also decided to make the focus of the story a homosexual relationship, rather than a heterosexual relationship, as in the original. This worked really well with our idea of putting a political spin on the film as we decided we could incorporate the real life debate of same sex marriage law, and have that be what is making the love between the two leads forbidden.
As a director it was a fun new challenge, as based on the script written by Hannah, we had quite a good little story to tell in a short amount of time. Rather than just adapting the one scene, it was written as a very short story, nearly all taking place in the same room but still incorporating other locations.
Time was a big factor with this production. I mentioned before that we were worried that making a documentary would just mean that our time was way too tight to get anything done properly, well that ended up being a problem with this production. As we needed quite specific locations for our film, we only had access to one of the rooms for a total of three hours. This was going to be the only time that we would be able to use the room as a shooting location before the film had to be delivered, so it was imperative that we got as we much done as possible and used our time wisely. This is where I first real problem lay, as shortly after we arrived at the location we heard from one of our actors that he was running late.
Not wanting to waste any time I got everything in place and shot everything I could do with just the one actor there. But after that it was just a waiting game, and he was over an hour late. Not only was he late but he hadn’t learnt his lines. Normally when I’ve worked with actors before they’ve either learnt their lines, or we’ve agreed before that will be a bit more of an improvisation element to it. But with this film we were quoting Shakespeare, and it was very important to all us that we kept some of the original dialogue so we had a strong connection to our inspiration. Having one of the actors not know his lines was incredibly frustrating, especially as we were already falling behind, but I knew I couldn’t let it affect the production so I just took a deep breath and threw myself into to get everything done as quickly as possible.
This did lead to a good new learning experience for me, as I ended up having to work very closely with the actors. Before this I had just blocked the actors, and as they already knew their lines, there was maybe just the occasional note I’d have to give about the performance. But with this I really had to help him get his mouth around the words, which involved breaking it down into small chunks that he’d be able to memorise and then putting it all together in the edit.
It also meant that we had to change what we had planned to do in quite a significant way, just because time wouldn’t have allowed us to get everything done if we had shot it in the way we had originally planned. When the film gets into Romeo’s monologue, it was originally something we were going to have him deliver into the camera, but as this we had to keep breaking up the dialogue for our actor, this wouldn’t have worked so we had to change it into a voiceover.
It all worked out in the end, and for such a short film made on a tight schedule, it really taught me a lot. It’s definitely something I’m taking forward from this point, in that you can never be too prepared and it’s always a good idea to have a back up plan in place.
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