Good morning from the set of “Degraded”!

Hey y’all!

First off—it’s COLD outside here. And yes, I am talking about this 52-degree weather. I’m from the South! While fall here will never compare to the South, I am loving how much this city has to offer in fall activities. Next weekend I’m taking my nephew to a fall festival in the loop and I can’t wait!

But back to filmmaking—We have a lot of exciting things happening this semester so far. We just wrapped production on our first major collaborative short film between the Producing and Directing students. I also have been given the opportunity to produce two shorts in November with some awesome MFA directors. We are also starting production for our next big piece that will be filmed next semester—I’ll talk about that project in my next post!

DEGRADED

But as things wind down from our first production of the semester, I wanted to take a moment to write about the experience. As a Creative Producing student, we are constantly in pre-production for different films at the same time. But I can finally say, one of my films has officially been shot and is now in post-production! I’m just waiting to review the first rough cut of the film next week!

Pre-Production

For my first short film, I collaborated with fellow student and incredibly talented Director Emily Harmon to create a film loosely inspired by one scene in Annie Hall. (For a while we had taken to calling it Danny Hall but as the story went through several drafts and pages of notes, it turned into a piece we finally called “Degraded”.) Surprisingly enough, pre-production for this film went really smoothly—mostly due to an amazing crew and brilliant director. After a very long day of casting, we found the perfect pair to act in our short film—I can’t thank them enough for fully embodying the characters Emily and I lovingly created.

Production

The actual day of production went beautifully. We had loaded equipment in the day before since it was a secure location and pre-lit the set with the help of our extremely talented Director of Photography Luke Dyra. We put in a 10-hour day, wrapping two hours ahead of schedule! One of the most valuable lessons I learned this day: check…double check… and triple check that you got everything you needed before doing a company move. Luckily we only moved a short two blocks walk away, but we missed one insert and had to go back. Darn! However, I don’t count this as a major screw up—rather a lesson that we can learn from.

All in all, the shoot was incredibly fun and I feel like the final film will be a huge success. I will never be able to express my upmost gratitude to those that worked with me on this film. It was something that Emily and I had created together and I’m really looking forward to seeing the final piece!

As for the work that is upcoming, I am in contact with a very exciting author about optioning her book. Stay tuned for updates on that venture!

xoxo, SJ