Me directing on my first day of shooting!
The Set Up
Costume
The night before the shoot I asked the "actor" to bring a white dress shirt which was my choice of the costume because he is, after all, he is playing an old 1960s psychology professor at a highly respected -fictional- university (inspired by Standford University). I looked at pictures of Philip Zimbardo (the Standford University psychology professor famous for the Standford prison experiment) and Stanley Milgram (the Yale psychology professor famous for the Milgram Obedience Experiment) to draw a conclusion as to the most probable outfit the experimenter would be wearing. Similar to the experiment in my story, both of them conducted their experiment around the same time the debriefing video would have been filmed (Milgram 1963 [REALLY CLOSE] & Zimbardo 1971). I then concluded that a white shirt and skinny black tie would be the best costume choice.
Philip Zimbardo
Set & Lighting
I knew I couldn't film the 1964 video in the same place the 2017 experiment is being planned so I scattered my house for the right place. I decided to shoot the video in front of a plain white wall, sure it might sound boring set design-wise, but not all sets can be academy award winners ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I realize now that I shouldn't pursue a career in comedy, I should probably stick to business. Seriously speaking however, I strongly believe that if you're filming a secret debriefing video for a classified experiment that you know could potentially cause public chaos, you want to give as little clues to where you're recording it as possible; especially if it's a prestigious college whose reputation could be potentially damaged by information about the experiment leaking to the public. To achieve this set I recorded it all in a VERY tight shot which allowed me to block out the rest of my room. To light the set, I used a 3 point lighting set up which eliminated the shadows from the shot, regardless of where the "actor" moved. The backlight in the set up is warm white light unlike the fill and key light, I thought it wouldn't be very noticeable but I remembered that after editing and lowering all saturation it won't be noticeable at all (I quickly edited the same picture of the "actor" reading the screen to test this).
Original Picture
Edited
The Script
As expected I did a few minor changes to the script minutes before we began shooting and most importantly I added directions for the actor so he knew when to look frustrated, serious, and (because at times he was reading from the printed script) when to look at the camera.
The Shoot
The Directing
I decided to shoot it all separate, every paragraph in the script was a different video, all ranging from ~8 seconds to ~15. After getting every paragraph in the prologue separately, I filmed it all together as one about 3 times. In total, It's fair to say the shot took about 1 hour (because everything technical was set up before Enrique arrived).
The Acting
I have to start this by saying that I truly appreciate Enrique coming out to do this, I had never met him before, he met my dad not long ago, and he volunteered to help me by acting as "Experimenter #1" who has the only lines in the entire 2-minute opening. I also have to mention that 2 of his kids graduated in media and/or cinematography and another one is studying acting in California so he came in knowing how much this type of project means to the director. I knew I wasn't going to have an award-winning actor on the other side of the camera, but I hoped they would be as convincing as possible. I know Enrique tried his very best, but it was too obvious that he was reading his lines because he kept squinting to do so. Near the end, however, his lines flowed out nicely! However, I had a bigger problem by then... In order to be authorized to run a classified experiment about racism in 1945, the experimenter would have had to be white ( Enrique is white, but English is his 3rd language, he has a very heavy accent, and the script is full of technical psychology vocab; therefore, you can't always understand what he's saying.) I think I could try and pass him as a German researcher; however, the experiment began in 1945 which is the end of WW2. At the time, a project of that magnitude and level of clearance wouldn't have been given to a German. Yes, I do think of those little details because my job is to tell a good story and this isn't a children's movie where plot holes can be left unfilled, the audience for this drama will analyze and draw conclusions of their own; I have to give them "2+2" not "2 and go figure it out." In conclusion, I don't want to use the audio; if it sounds off to me, the audience will pick up on it. I thought of reshooting but I have no time to waste and dubbing it to perfection would be near impossible. I'm going to sleep on it and try to find a creative solution tomorrow.
PS: Tomorrow is day 2 of filming! I'm super excited!!
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