Back to the Drawing Board...

I'm an extremely pragmatic person and I don't like to jump into anything without having a clear picture for how everything will play out and I was very concerned about our idea for 'The Chef."

I touched on this in my last blog post, but low key lighting is a huge pain the ass because I simply don't have the right equipment to make it look good.

This kind of low key lighting is not hard to accomplish but to achieve a more balanced and "naturalistic" low key lighting would require more lights, gels, and a more adept camera in low-light settings.

Another option was to go the quirky route and use high key lighting to almost contrast the dark themes of the film.

This would also prove to be way too difficult to accomplish because it requires a lot of set design. I have created a production-design-heavy short film before and that approach is also quite costly and time-consuming.

This was a set I built last year inside my house. I spent way more money than I am willing to admit on creating this and I definitely feel like all the work I put into constructing the set was not worth it at all. It did not add enough value to the production and I would have saved way more money avoiding this setting all together.

Now I probably won't go as far as to try and build a set in my home ever again, but it production design is something I know will bleed me dry.

Given our super short time frame for this project, we need to streamline the production process as much as we can. We don't have time to do reshoots because our low key lighting was too dark for my camera, and I don't want to spend hours and hours on set design when nature and cityscapes are already out there for us to exploit.

The lemonade mules idea would be shot outside, but trying to get two child actors will be virtually impossible. My last film had one kid in it and it took me about two months to find someone decent that was willing to act in it. It will be way harder to find three.

We need to go back to the drawing board and think about what stories we like but also if it is practical given the resources we have as students with zero budget.

My criteria for a pragmatic production:

• Outside or inside with lots of windows
• One or two actors ages (15-30)
• Limited dialogue