The First Time...

My lovely AND talented wife, Jennifer, comments on her process:

First timer

The idea of me directing one of these short films probably came from the fact that on my husband’s previous films, I can’t keep my ideas of what I think  would be good to myself…so it’s not that I really thought I could direct, but I knew I do have ideas…so my approach to this was not to get overwhelmed with the whole responsibility of the project, but to try my best to execute any ideas I had with the material & see what happens….I also really wanted to be open to anyone else’s ideas tooJ  I had after all directed College Night in undergrad & a few short plays in directing classes in grad school…so for this I wanted to think cinematically….I knew my actors were talented & would bring a lot of choices, no need to worry about the acting for this one…I wanted to see a story in pictures…which led me to the idea that for the first page, maybe my pictures could lead the audience to think …”hmm, what’s happening here?…why is he afraid or sweating it out?”…only to hopefully set up it being funnier once it’s revealed the reason for his fear…I wanted to convey a feeling in the shots that I set up of that of the male character…of feeling trapped in a situation…inappropriate …..I just went through the story and tried to “cover” all of the action with several setups & learned as we shot, that after I think a got the scene covered, that I probably didn’t need OTS & and close ups of 4 lines of dialogue!…next step is editing…another thing I’ve never done before…