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