03/12: Angela Award ceremony

We gathered at George Mason University in Fairfax on a Sunday to hold a photo shoot of many principle actors for the film's poster. We hadn't seen one another in months so it was a very nice little reunion! Everyone looked a little different.

There's our producer, Dave explaining something to Dave Coyn, who plays the character Ron Price.

Our still photographer, Jason Hornick, eyes the lighting situation at George Mason University's Star Lab.

Josh and JJ each wait for their turn to be photographed.
Then, we broke for lunch.


Lunch makes us happy.

We then trekked down to one of the electronic classrooms to film a scene that is shown briefly in a !SPOILER! montage at the end of the film. Mary Lechter, who plays Angela Lynch, accepts a film award at a large Golden-Globe-esque ceremony. I made up a background to project onto the video blackboard behind our actor.




We had our extras dress in tuxedos and gowns, so I suggested that we pull one of the guys to be our 'award presenter'.



In the actual film, the shots will be a lot tighter, so composition-wise it will look more like this:

I didn't get great shots with my digital this time around, but I took better pictures with my Nikon 35MM that I will have processed soon.

I modeled the scene to be a cross between a photo I found of Blythe Danner and one of William Shatner, both accepting Golden Globes:


..I really liked the contrast of gold on vivid plum-blue, and the photos from the shoot don't show it very well, but we had Mary in a sparkling gold dress. The analysis of the scene for me was that the narrator, DE Randall, had spun a tragic tale of a terrible film that was made some years ago, and Angela Lynch was the only good thing to come from it. In a sense, Angela Lynch was DE Randall's human trophy. We made her gold and sparkling like the award she was accepting. Also, the rest of the film has very bold verticle and horizontal black lines in virtually every scene, for "11", this scene was to show that Angela rose above the tragedy surrounding the movie Lucifer Cicero, so I specifically designed a circular backdrop. Lucifer Cicero's spell had long since been broken, thus, no more parallel lines.

03/06: Spring Forward for "11"

Hello friends and fans.

Recently my director requested that I remove the picture of our rough draft of our film poster. He is afraid that my friends will see it and think that our film is going to be crappy, because the rough draft of the poster is crap. I assured him that nobody even looks at my pithy little blog here, for one thing, and for another, my friends that do are proud supporters of this project and are gung ho to keep abreast of the goings-on of the production designer, which unfortunately includes a rough draft of our film poster. SO I am adding this disclaimer: The film poster posted below is not in any way our final product, so no, we do not suck. We know what we are doing, and everything is an evolutionary, collaborative, process: ESPECIALLY when it comes to design.

I expect all y'all out there to already know this, let's just humor my boys on the production team. As the only girl on board in core production, I have assumed the position (ahem) as The Nurturer. "Everything's going to be alright. Everything's going to work out. Everything is just fine. You're doing great work!" My team needs the reassurance, and trust me, it's not because they are fragile, but rather because "11" has experienced every type of obstacle since we've entered principle photography.

We've counted on key people just to have them back out at the last minute and AFTER the last minute. It's a scary place to be in when you think you're the only one invested in such a major undertaking that is a feature length film. When you eat, sleep, and breathe something and find out everyone is not on the same page, at all. We had our web guy put up a partial website and then leave us high and dry. We had a sound guy disappear on us in the middle of filming so now we have to rely on our post production audio tech even moreso, as he is presented with the task of matching up our dialogue that was recorded using two separate and very different-sounding methods. Several major scenes had to be pushed back and our premiere has had to be re-scheduled several times. And of course, there are always challenges finding proper funding to help us realize our dream with this picture. This is all just the tip of our iceberg. There's things I am not at liberty to discuss and there's things that I probably don't even know about! There have been personal obstacles in each of our lives to persevere through as well. This production has been a tremendous challenge all the way around, and it is not over yet!

Sunday, March 12th, we have a photo shoot with most of our principle actors in order to get the proper shots we need for a proper movie poster. Afterward, we are filming a short scene in which our character Angela Lynch is accepting a major acting award, in addition to a pawn shop scene, I believe. Then it's a serious meeting about the look and design of our official website, and the programming and launching of it.

We have one major M-A-J-O-R scene left to film, Jim Green's campaign rally. We had scheduled it erroneously for Easter Sunday (due to actor availability...I can't believe he's only available Easter Sunday, the pagan!) before we discussed it and concluded we will be unable to get the 100 extras we're going to need to pull this shot off. And of course the next day our actor can do this is: Mother's Day.

Mother's Day, being the lesser of the two evils, will hopefully afford us the extras we'll need that afternoon, otherwise we will have to postpone the entire shoot until late spring, and have to reschedule our premiere for the umpteenth time.

It's not easy getting 100 random people, a high school marching band, a balloon guy, and whatever the heck else to commit to show up in a field in Virginia on a Sunday afternoon. I just hope the weather is nice.

My personal goal is to make the July 3rd deadline to submit to the Savannah Film and Video festival, which is held the last week of October, annually. It's extremely important to me to make it full circle, since the Savannah College of Art and Design is where I went to school, they are the sponsor of the highly acclaimed and well-attended international film festival, and I've worked on this thing hard enough to be really proud of it. I've been a student and an after-party schmoozer there for years, nametagged as a screenwriter with yet-unpublished ideas, I want to finally attend as part of a contending film. Thee Production Designer of a quality feature-length film. I'd like to move from agonizing over When Will We Finally Get This In The Can, to agonizing over whether audiences and judges think the production design stinks.

Stay tuned for more pictures and information next week!

-Alessandra