My "2010 Year In Review" Part 4

I wrote on my Facebook wall that to write something like this "Year In Review" is such a difficult job. I think I'm telling truth, it's really difficult because I have to remember a lot of things at one time, and I couldn't write that much of things without a lot of brain energy. :) All right, let's move on.

Yesterday I talked about how did I come up with the idea for the Internet scams PSA back in April, after I had my idea, I had to write a storyline for PSA. Because that was a sitcom, the storyline should be playful and funny. What kind of storyline could be funny? I kept on asking myself this question, I used to think about those typical sitcom stories settings like Friends, finally I decided to have my storyline as a middle-aged couple who lives in San Francisco trying to look for an item on the Internet, (Oh shoot! Look for items! That's what EOTB's Friday Flea Market Team does!) but when they received the "item", they found out that the "item" was not as described and the "seller" fled. I had my storyline, then I sketch the setting. First, I was thinking to set the story inside a bedroom, but later I decided to set the story in a living room instead.

A lot of things to consider as a producer. After created a storyline, wrote the script, made a sketch of the setting, and so on. However, the hard thing was yet to come. Who would be the actor / actress for that sitcom-style PSA? I had a really tight schedule, so I could only find someone who were in my class to play the roles of husband and wife respectively. Another thing to consider was we were doing that without paid, it was for educational purpose, so there were not so many people in class wanted to work with me at first. Soon after, I have volunteers who wished to work with me, they were Cory, Hillary, Andrew and Sai, they were all my fellow classmates. Cory and Hillary play the couple, Andrew helped me as an editor, and Sai helped me as cameraman. Hillary was not only the "actress", but she also made her living room of her house to be our setting of the sitcom, so we didn't have to find a location anywhere else kudos to her!

After days of preparation, we had our production on Saturday, April 17 around 11am. Cory, Sai and I all arrived Hillary's house shortly after 11am that day. As soon as we arrived, we started setting up the scene, we also discussed the floor plan, the blocking, the script, the position of cameras, to see if anything should be revised a little bit. In fact, we did revised our floor plan and script a little bit before we started rolling cameras. Then we took a short lunch break after everything was set up properly.

Lights, cameras, action! We began the production after the lunch break. There were a lot of expected and unexpected during the production, for example, we changed the script at the very last minute, that caused our actor and actress to memorize their lines again, they forgot who was on this line and who was on that line. That was so funny and we NGed ten times for one scene. Even though there were hiccups during the production, we still finished it in that afternoon, and it was better than I expected! After ingesting, logging and editing, our piece was ready to air on the second episode of IDTV series.

My story of 2010 continues on this New Year's Eve...

P.S. I'll re-post the PSA and the behind the scenes video right here later today, so you can review them. :D