It’s here! The 2013 Summer Make a Movie Workshop film, The Good, The Bad, and The Janitor is through post production and DVDs will be going out to our participants next week. We are so proud of these kids! What began as a writing and acting for the camera workshop became a full-blown production when our students drafted a 30-page screenplay.
The first week of the workshop was spent discussing screenplay structure and formatting, and learning basic rules for acting on camera. The students spent considerable time brainstorming together to come up with movie ideas – at one point there were over 40 topics on the white board! – finally narrowing it down to the two character types they most wanted to put on film: Spies and a Mysterious Janitor.
With that decided, the students set to developing the What, Why, How, and Who of the script, creating a story outline that they were then able to turn into written pages in a day and a half. Yes, that’s 30 pages of script written in less than two class days! I’m telling you, these kids are awesome 🙂
With the first week behind us, students were instructed to bring in costume ideas the following Monday. Our fabulous hair and makeup wizard, Ginny Platisha (Bella Luna Salon in Prescott Valley) went to work getting our kiddos prepped for camera, and we set to rehearsing actors, setting up shots, and getting all of these talented actors to hit their marks.
After a week of filming more than seventy shots, we had our rough footage. Cason stayed up all night the Thursday evening before the workshop wrapped, constructing a rough cut of the thirty-minute short.
Our audience on Friday loved the film, and we were so happy to see the joy on our students’ faces! It’s taken us a fair bit of time to get the final cut complete (Cason started graduate school this fall – so time has been tight) but we’re incredibly proud of the finished product. Since we’re entering it in a few film fests, we can’t post the whole film on our site yet. But we can share the trailer…