After I finished the script for the teaser trailer of the Mockumentary. On December the 1st, I decided to go location scouting and look for suitable areas where I can shoot my movie. It varied from classrooms and hallways, to going offsite and shooting there. After completing location scouting, and deciding on the most suitable locations to proceed to film. The main locations I decided to pick for the trailer was a school playground, a small classroom, and a small fenced area that's in the school but I made it look like it was shot outside of the school.
The titles:
On December 16th, production started. The first scenes I decided to complete were the title scenes that were displayed in between the teaser. Three days after, I shot the first live action scene involving an actor. Originally, for the titles I put the titles in stop motion animation, by taking a series of pictures and combining them into one whole video.
I decided to do stop motion animation for this scene because I did not have a cameraman to film me writing down the titles on the whiteboard, and it would have not looked good because its suppose to be titles being shown on the screen, and I wanted the titles to be viewable and have a smooth frame rate. I also proceeded to do stop motion animation instead of writing titles on the computer is because I wanted to do something different and have some originality to it.
Sadly, this approach was not successful because the lighting ruined the shot on occasions, and I would have to use different white boarder marker pens to write down the title if they runned out of ink, and this could affect the continuity of the shot. Then on the 9th February, I decided to re shoot the title writing scenes but instead of a big whiteboard, I decided to use a smaller whiteboard.
I filmed a hand writing the titles on the mini whiteboard instead of using stop motion animation. This saved time, ink and did not affect the continuity between takes. Overall I was happy with the final product for the titles.
The expelled student scene:
Then, when I came back from my Christmas break, I decided to continue shooting the teaser trailer. On 10th January I worked on shooting the first scene involving a student, but the difference was that this student was suppose to be kicked out of Ashburn and the original plan was to film outside.
The reason why I decided against filming outside the school, was because the filming could be disturbed because cars pass by, which could make the film seem less professional and make the characters dialogue unclear for the viewers. Overall, I was impressed with this scene, but if I were to reshoot a scene like this in the future, I would probably have gone somewhere else that looks a bit more remote, and looks like it's in a different area, not in a school because that did make the scene a bit unbelievable because he's suppose to be a student that was expelled from the frictional college, and to have the scene of him being shot in the school does make it less believable to the viewer that he is an expelled student.
The interview scene:
A day before the Christmas break started, I decided to film the first live action scene involving an actor. This was a scene where a teacher was being interviewed by the crew making the mockumentary. I was impressed with the first actors performance as the protagonist of the movie. Unfortunately, due to scheduling conflicts with the teacher, I had to find a new actor to portray the protagonist in the interview scenes. On the 12th January I found another actor and reshot the interview scenes. This time I had a different approach to the interview scenes than the first time around. The first time around, I had the crew speaking in the scene, asking the teacher questions and then the teacher will proceed to answer the question. But this time around, I had titles written on the screen of the question, then the teacher proceeded to answer it. I preferred the second approach because again it seemed more professional, and did have that relevance to a trailer more than me asking the questions.
The Playground scene:
This is the final scene I filmed for my teaser trailer before I wrapped production. This scene was originally suppose to be shot in the classroom, and this would have the teacher teaching the fellow students, and failing to control the class. The reason why I could not do this scene was because of a combination of reasons.
Firstly, not many students were available and their was a lot of scheduling conflicts between me and the actors I was hiring for the classroom scene. Secondly, since I am shooting the teaser in my college, there were problems with looking for an available classroom to shoot the scene in because they would be occupied by another class.
For an alternative choice, I decided to pick three school students in uniform to film with the teacher in the school playground. In this scene, like the original classroom scene planned, we are showing the teacher failing to have control of all the students. However, instead of the students being all together in one take, I split the students up.
Two younger students were put together and I filmed them having a fake fight with one and another, and we would see the teacher try to control the students, but the students would just blank the teacher's instructions, which does display how he is not respected by the students like shown in the scene when the expelled student refers to the teacher as a "posh boy snob who always begs it to the kids", and another student during the interview scene shouting out "your shit!"
While the older student in the playground shot, would interrupt Mr Garrett (the teachers name) when he's talking about the playground, and the older student interrupts him telling him that he forgot to do his homework, and how he wants the teacher to overlook it, in exchange for some money. This also displays how the students do not take the protagonist seriously, and even some take advantage of how he's so desperate to being respected by the students.
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