Pre-production: Brad's Notes

'Ello chaps. Brad here. Chuck gave me the okay to add to this blog and I have time between angry parents at work to squeeze something out, so here goes.

As Chuck mentioned, we are trying to make this our most professional project to date. We certainly spent a lot of time on the script, putting it through countless changes and revisions to get it to the point where we're happy with both the story and the jokes in it. After about a hundred scheduling snafus, we're finally sort of ready to film, which brings us to this point.

A disclaimer - I get incredibly frustrated when we film, as everything seems to take so freaking long to get done. Oftentimes, that frustration has come from either a lack of understanding about how long things will take to film or a simple lack of planning.

This time, Chuck and I both talked about how long we would need for each scene, then tacked on a little time for unexpected delays. For example, if we plan to film until midnight and end at 12:30, everyone's mad (well...I'm mad). But if we plan to film until 1 am and end at 12:30, everyone is pleasantly surprised (except for me, because then Chuck will ask us all to re-do scenes for extra coverage and we'll stay the full time).

Timing and scheduling are huge issues for us this time, as we have to get our actors back to Boston and Worcester at a reasonable time so they can resume their normal lives the days after we film late into the night. I've taken days off work for filming and recovering from filming, so maybe I won't be the biggest crybaby on set (but I probably will be).

In addition, Chuck and I have gotten together a few times over the past week or two to work on what we loosely call pre-production.

This script calls for a fair amount of wardrobe changes (especially for my character), so we want to make sure people have the right outfits from scene to scene. Trying to avoid easily-avoidable continuity errors, you know?

"Big deal," you say, "you did that in all your previous videos."

Well, sort of.

I was watching our previous video "Decent Proposal" the other day and remembered the Hobo and the Goat joke. In it, Chuck and Sousa are tasked by Bradley Stevenson to create some clean comedy and come up with a comic strip about a Hobo and a Goat and show off their drawings. Great, right? Except when we showed up to film, we had to take a long break to allow Chuck and Sousa time to draw the pictures. It seemed like such a little thing to get done ahead of time and it...just...wasn't.

So, for this video, Chuck and I are doing as much as humanly possible ahead of time. We are working through the script scene by scene and line by line and checking which props we need AND making notes on who is responsible for that prop (most of it will come from one or both of us). This should prevent any avoidable delays for props or costume issues that we've dealt with in the past.

With all this planning, the only real drawback is my terrible handwriting:

Keep the Focus

The biggest lesson I've learned over the years from making independent short films is my theory about distraction. Basically, my theory is, when you write something, you want your ideas to come through clearly - and the main way to do that is to make everything surrounding the idea to be very normal and devoid of distraction.
Example: If I want to write a scene about Chuck and Lou talking about Chuck's break-up, and there a couple jokes, with the focus of the scene explaining "Chuck is sad", then you want to avoid certain things:
1. Strange clothing. Make sure the clothing seems normal for the characters you have. If someone has a broken arm in a sling, make it part of the scene as opposed to not mentioning it.
2. The setting - make sure the setting makes sense and there's nothing eye-catching going on in the background.
3. Don't add in weird visual jokes. When we've filmed stuff in the past, one of us might have the idea of like "Hey I'll wear this funny hat". Don't wear the hat, it's a distraction.
When an audience watches something, everything on the screen poses a question. A lot of those questions are easy to answer. "What's the relationship between those two characters? Where are these characters right now? What time of day is it?" etc. When you have a glaring question that is unanswered - "Why is he wearing that hat? Why is that guy's arm in a sling?" - the focus stays on the unanswered questions and your project doesn't put out the message you wanted it to.
Just something I've noticed is unbelievably important to making a clear and effective piece of film. Keep the audience's focus on what you think is important. Don't detract from it.
Two days ago, we filmed the first scene of the pilot. When we wrote the pilot, we said to ourselves "Okay, the pilot will be representative of the most professional and funny and clever we can be. It's the culmination of our years of filming. In realizing that - are there are any jokes we've previously written that we want to include in the pilot?"
The pilot is not for the people who have liked all our stuff previously; it's to show higher-ups and hopefully start moving forward into careers in the business of filmed comedy (although I'm sure we'll release it publicly for everybody at some point); so repeating an old joke isn't a big deal. We want to show new, important people the best of what we have to offer.
Honestly - we only ended up writing in two older jokes (and there are around 60 jokes in the pilot). Both physical gags in cutaways. So on Monday we filmed one.
In the pilot, obviously, Tom Wells has been written out. We were already going to have Lou Perella (who appeared in "VBW Attack", "Rhode Island Rock Band Round Up" and as an extra in various other S*D videos) in the pilot as our "manager" (and as an authority figure for the rest of our foolishness) - but when we had to ex-communicate Tom, we attributed all Tom's traits (meaning "Tom Wells" the character in our videos) to Lou's character. He's taking over as the resident dick that tries to ruin our fun. One of the jokes we're re-doing is a joke I loved from a video long ago, and the main character in it was Tom - so the joke now revolves around Lou.

Here's a shot from the original version.

And here's a shot from the new version:






Little bit sad, right?
But I'm excited to film. Here's to the beginning of the best project we've ever done!
- Chuck Staton

First Post - The Introduction!

Senior Discount has filmed scripted videos for years. We started with really short, loose scripts, but eventually we started becoming more and more professional. We started giving consistency to our characters and focusing on small storylines that continue through our videos.
After doing so many videos, we decided to finally ask ourselves where this was leading. So, we decided to write a television pilot based around the world of Senior Discount. I love the videos, but they've been building for so long that it would be difficult for someone completely new to jump in to the latest one without feeling like they're missing something.
In the pilot, we start over. It's the same world with most of the same people involved, new characters, new environments, more story, and more work on the screenwriting side. We want to bring this to new people (hopefully people who can help us professionally step forward as filmmakers/writers) so we're re-introducing everyone. At this point (after about six months of work on it) the pilot is fully written. Tonight, we started scheduling things.
Senior Discount will be focusing on this for the next several weeks (and then will be a big announcement from the band about our next event - that I'm very excited for) so I decided we'd do a blog with what happens in making the pilot so the S*D fan-dix know the deal and see that we're moving forward behind the scenes.
I've included a picture of my computer, right now, as I just typed up a shooting schedule for the pilot (which will begin hopefully in about five weeks).

Yes, that is Tokka (of "Tokka and Rahzar" fame) from "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze" standing between my monitors. He keeps me honest.
More pictures and updates to follow!
- Chuck Staton
-- Senior Discount