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:
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