StellaConnellyHawkenProject2021

 1.  What inspired you to create this project?         We were inspired by our collective love of performing, writing, directing, improv, and comedy. The four of us had talked for months about wanting to do a senior project together, and this happened to line up with all of our biggest interests. We were also inspired by our experiences throughout the pandemic with trying to lead clubs despite the chaos around us, and we wanted to pull joy from the crevices of the craziness that has been this year. 2.  A self-reflection about what went well with your project: comment on your initial design objectives and goals, the quality of your mentorship, your level of engagement etc. As you write this section reference back to/comment on your essential questions.  What were you hoping to learn / accomplish?                    Honestly I can't imagine this project going any better than it did. Ye...

 Editing! We were super lucky with this project because one of our members, Natalie, has a pretty extensive editing background. That was one of the reasons we ventured into a film-based product to begin with, but I don't think any of us realized how necessary her level of proficiency would be for this project.  After the first week and a half, Nat edited a mock-up of the first 30 seconds, or "cold-open", so we could all get a feel for what the style of the piece would be. I think it really gave us a sense of direction to have a concrete example of what we were looking for. Monday of week three, we all ventured out to Nat's house on the west side to collaboratively edit as much of the mockumentary as possible. Unfortunately, the computer containing the Premiere Pro project stopped working shortly after we arrived (terrifying!!!). Luckily all the work was saved, but unluckily this meant that most of the editing was postponed.  The next day, as Nat worked from home, the ...

 As we reached the third week of our project, we started to get nervous. Time was running short and we still had several major scenes to film. Because our mentor had a limited amount of time with us this week, and he was our main cameraman for the four-person scenes, we decided to switch one of our biggest scenes to a Zoom format. This definitely presented its own unique challenges, both to our technology and to our acting, but it was worth it in that we were able to still include the scene.  We used the pandemic theme of the mockumentary to justify this choice, stating that Holden Academy (our fictitious school) had gone remote for two weeks due to a high number of cases and we were holding our Hug Club meeting virtually. To enhance this justification, we got back into our talking-head costumes and filmed new confessionals containing our characters' respective opinions on Holden's switch to remote learning. I honestly think all of this has been really cathartic. Being able to...

We pretty much spent the second half of week two just filming other scenes. After getting the talking heads and the Principal Dean scenes out of the way, we went through the rest chronologically. This was the point at which we all sort of started to worry about time, so it became increasingly important to get at least two scenes filmed a day. We usually achieved this, although sometimes a bigger scene would have to be re-shot the next day because each one takes so long.  There were also a lot of unexpected complications around this time because of the number of scheduling conflicts our group had. Between doctors appointments, AP tests, and other prior engagements, it became difficult to make sure we scheduled our four-person scenes on a day where we had all hands on deck.  Personally, I started to have some difficulty with my character around this time. Shmeeko, the character I played in the mockumentary, was honestly quite the acting challenge for me. They were originally bra...

We started the week off strong by filming our meeting with the principal scene. We had enlisted the help of TJ to play the principal, so we wanted to get his cameos done first so we could do them all at once and go back to our regular filming schedule. We rehearsed a couple different mock-ups of the scene beforehand without him, to figure out what plot points needed to land in this scene. Then, we borrowed Mrs. Ricci’s office, told TJ what beats his character needed to accomplish within our timeframe, and filmed a few takes of the scene. We actually got a good take pretty quickly, despite it being the first scene that we filmed.  Afterwards, we headed back to the health room to film some cut-away interviews, also known as confessionals or talking heads. They’re a staple of the mockumentary genre, so we knew they needed to be really solid. We borrowed some lighting and sound equipment from both HPS and the main library, and spent some time teaching ourselves how to set it up. Once w...

 Improv time!! We spent the second half of the week really regenerating our improv skills (as I mentioned, we were over a year out of practice and all severely underestimated how different Zoom improv is from in-person improv). We started off almost every day with some scene rust, which is where you do quick two-person scenes (not necessarily related to the characters or plot of the mockumentary) as a warm up to shake the rust off. Then, we moved on to workshopping some scene ideas in character, in the form of 2, 3, and 4 person scenes. Here are some of the main things we focused on: - Pace. Pacing was a constant battle for us, especially once we got to filming the larger scenes. With four of us in a scene, and no script to dictate time, we were liable to fall into one of two traps: big, airy scenes with lots of pauses and low energy, or high-speed scenes that the audience couldn't follow because there were so many of us speaking at once. We used our scene-work days to find our rhy...

 We spent a large portion of this week building the skeleton of our project. While not much of this week's work was used in our final video, it helped us greatly in setting a tone and direction for our film, as well as getting back into the flow of doing improv in person again after over a year of collecting rust. We had already done some of the leg work prior to the start of the project by figuring out a club, a premise, and some basic character ideas, but now it was time to really begin fleshing it out. Four our character work this week, we researched some archetypal four-person character dynamics, so we could get a better feel for how they would interact as a group. As a  very  basic jumping off point, we landed on some classic archetypes for media set in a high school: the smart one, the jock, the weird one, and the "Straight Man," a film and theatre term that essentially just means the normal one; the one the audience is supposed to relate to.  Once we had their...