Set Design Creation

My group and I thought of ways to stay good without breaking the bank. For equipment to film, we were in luck, as our team member Emma had a camera already available for filming and a tripod.  Our own phones gave us access to film behind the scenes and photography. The Mise en Scene elements are where the money was allocated. Jade, along with Emma, combined their finances to order a mental asylum gown, two backdrops, and props for the officers' costumes. Totaling up to around $100.00. I put in $15.00 for the police officer's walkie-talkie.  While staying within our budget, our goal was to use as many resources as possible available in our location and think outside of the box to think create our set into life. 

We took one day to plan and set up our location. Emma and I were the ones to build and unbuild the set.  Our initial plan was to use Emma's garage since it had the ideal space and lighting we needed. But, since backdrops are not able to stay up, we chose to set up our main scene in Emma's studio. We chose this location, which worked in our favor as we were able to still add the same effect with lightning and a prison scene. So now, with a steady wall for our background and lightning, we needed to create the bars element for our prison cell. We used a dog cage (Emma's dog) and elevated it with a plain table to capture within filming behind the table that our character, Avery, being captured "behind bars" or in a cell. 

 We added an extra detail, such as a bed, which we used as a small daybed. The following scenes did not require the same changes. For example, our integration scene require table recycled from the prison scene and two bar stool tables. For our Officer Garcia's office scene, we kept the same furniture and details in Emma's Dad's office space. We also used the same table and bars for a special effect of Avery looking within Officer Garcia's office. The teamwork definitely paid off, and for our film and was a fun and money-saving process we used to create our scenes. 

This all happened on the first day of our production process, and we decided to start with our Set design. We initially had planned to use Emma's garage, as it was spacious and the perfect place for lighting, and also big enough to hold our backdrops in place as well. After a good 30 minutes of trying to set up in the garage, we realized that we couldn't place the backdrops the way we wanted them to be seen. We had no way of placing them on the walls since there were many objects in the way. So, we decided to use my studio instead since the walls were plain and the exact size of the backdrops as well. Now, for placing them on the walls, Emma's dad had an idea of just stapling the backdrops onto the wall. It worked. As for the lighting, Emma just dimmed her studio lights and closed the curtains to make it look darker and eerier.