Production Blog: So, Things Are Changing

 I received a call from Naliah yesterday, and she had some concerns.. Essentially, she felt like we weren’t moving fast enough with filming, and that this was caused by it being difficult to get our actors together. This prompted her to have an idea, which I found really interesting. She thought that instead of having a film about three teenage boys going into the forest and getting tormented by a chihuahua, the film would focus on the origin story of the evil chihuahua and eventually shift to a lone dog trainer trying to find the chihuahua, not realizing it’s pure evil. 

I am very grateful that Naliah came up with this idea and I honestly think it will work. Firstly, the reason she suggested it is because it requires less actors and she could easily film Chico’s backstory. It will only require me to act as a dog trainer searching for Chico in the forest, while the actors we already have can act as dead bodies and voice some screams for us. I also like how the idea still sticks to the horror-comedy idea we originally wanted. This is most obviously done by the concept of an evil chihuahua being a part of the film, but we were also thinking about how we could make the dog trainer say some ironic lines about the dead bodies she will stumble upon in the forest. This would keep up with the parody aspect that I wanted present in the film as well. I ended up bullet-pointing our new film structure, so we could have more organization. With regards to changes in our script and storyboard, that will have to be done roughly, just so it doesn’t take up too much of our time, but so that we can still meet the requirements for our film. The lack of a tight script does not concern me too much, but I consider the storyboard a really important part of the film creation process as it literally demonstrates which shots to film. Even if it’s just a little messy, I’m hoping it will keep us on track for the rest of this project. 

In addition to this new idea, we started to create what we needed for our short film package. We created a gmail account that we would both have access to(and that a hacker hopefully won’t take over), so we could make a youtube account for our social media, and a wix website. We’re still thinking about other social media sites, like Twitter or Instagram, but Youtube seems like a good place to start until we can figure out how to utilize the others as effectively as possible. 

I ended up quickly making a channel banner with the movie’s working title “Chico’s Revenge” in a scary font and creating a wix account with the joint email. I’ve been off social media for a very long time, so I’m a bit worried that I might not be able to navigate it as easily as I used to, but it will likely be a very small learning curve. 

Overall, I’m really happy Naliah had that idea and that we are getting a bit of a headstart on a short film package. 

Pictured: The Channel Banner for Chico's Revenge