Planning - Mise-en-Scene, Casting, and Locations

    Hey everybody, and welcome back! Today's blog post is all about how we're going to handle the logistics of our film. We want to plan actors for our characters, where we'll shoot each scene, and how we'll set everything up. Let's dive right in!

Locations

    Locations are extremely important, because if your setting doesn't match your diegesis, you won't be able to properly convey your story. We need to consider where each of the following scenes will be shot for our film: Jackson's House, Jessi's House, and their school. 

    The school is the easiest, as we can just use our own high-school (which we've used several times before for short films). For Jackson's house, Tejal and I agreed that we'll use her house to convey the fact that Jackson is quite wealthy. For context, Tejal basically has two houses on her property (yes, I'm serious). Then, for Jessi's house, we're going to use her guest house (see?). Both these options are really solid because they're close together (so we can film the scenes consecutively without travelling and in the same day). The school is also a good option because we have plenty of time before and after school to film when the campus is mostly empty (or at least not as busy as usual.

Costuming

    We want to make sure our actors' outfits fit their characters, so we have to plan ahead of time what we want them to wear. For Jackson, we want him to wear a quarter-zip and jeans to convey the feeling of wealth and fit the general "preppy" look. As for Jessi, we'll use more dramatic clothing items like tall boots, lace stockings, leather, and colored hair extensions. Tejal will be providing those since (spoiler alert!) she'll be playing Jessi.

Crew

    We also need to establish our cast and crew so that we have a set team (other than myself and Tejal) well before our filming dates. The actors are outlined in the following list:

• Jessi: Played by Tejal
• Jackson: Played by a TV program actor (and good friend of ours), Alejandro Bennett
• He has a lot of experience acting, and he also fits the vibe of the character, so he's a really good option
• Jackson's Friends: Played by volunteer drama and TV kids
• There is plenty of overlap between the two, so we'll have no trouble finding extras who are able to actually act
• Teacher: Played by my AP U.S. History Teacher, Mr. Sheets
• He's pretty cooperative with TV, and he definitely fits the vibe of a teacher, so he's perfect for the role.

That's it for today's blog! See you all in the next one - stay tuned!