CAPSTONE TREATMENT

The Delivery

A UPS man by the name of Kyle stops from house to house dropping off packages to unnaturally happy neighbors.  Delightful, carefree music plays in the background and the neighbors endlessly praise Kyle and treat him like a hero.  As he stops from house to house, a pair of eyes follows him from some cracked blinds in a window sill just across the street.

Kyle unsuspectingly approaches the house where the eyes belong and pulls with a small package.  He rings the doorbell, the door flies open, and he’s yanked inside.  Everything goes dark.

Kyle wakes up in a blurry haze and he realizes there’s a ball and chain around his ankle.  Before him stands Reggie, a fat and awkward man with blurry glasses.  Reggie tells him that he’s kidnapped Kyle and that he is going to be his new best friend, and that they’re going to go through new best friend exercises.

The first exercise is talking about girls.  At first, Kyle refuses to even talk to Reggie, but Reggie has wired an electric shocker to Kyle’s toes, so he can zap him whenever he wants.  After a couple of zaps, Kyle relents.  He talks about his girlfriend Victoria, and Reggie talks about his infatuation for Sarah Michelle Geller, and shares the photoshopped photos and collages he’s made.  Throughout the conversation, Kyle tries to be as unpleasant as possible, but that just makes Reggie pity him as another person that just needs a friend.

The next day, after a terrible night’s sleep on a bed of newspapers, Reggie renames Kyle to Gus because he likes that name more.  After feeding Kyle/Gus a meager breakfast of an undercooked Hot Pocket, Reggie forces Kyle to play Super Smash Bros with him.  Kyle gets excited because he could probably beat Reggie so hard that he won’t want to be friends anymore.  Kyle beats him, but then make a team match where it’s three-on-one against Kyle.  When Reggie wins, he does an obnoxious victory dance that he’s been dying to do.

During this, we see the neighbors across the street discussing amongst themselves why the UPS truck has stayed parked in the same spot overnight.  They’re a too-perfect couple whose home is immaculate, and they dress like their straight from the 50’s.  The husband smiles brightly and talks chipperly to his wife, but turns and screams at his dog for sitting on the sofa.  They’re totally oblivious that there might be a problem across the street.

We see Kyle and Reggie making macaroni art.  Reggie has decided that they would do portraits of each other.  While they make the art, Reggie talks about the practice of meditating to expanding your mind to greater truths--that’s how he discovered that cats can speak to aliens and that the Illuminati is responsible for the plague that destroyed the dinosaurs.  Reggie finally shows his art to Kyle, and it looks like it was made by a first grader.  Kyle shows his macaroni art to Reggie, and it’s the image of a donkey.

That night, Kyle can’t sleep.  In a whim of desperation, he takes Reggie’s advice and meditates for a means to escape.  After an intense zooming shot on his face overlaid with overwhelming, chattering sound effects, his eyes snap open in clarity.

The next morning, Kyle announces to Reggie that he is leaving that day.  Through meditation, Kyle has discovered that he’s the protagonist in a really crappy senior capstone film project, and that the ball and chain around his ankle is just a prop.  He yanks it off his leg and sprints to freedom, Reggie on his heels.

Kyle runs up the stairs and bursts out the door while Reggie’s mom makes a sandwich in the kitchen not far away, and Kyle hops in his UPS truck, but it won’t start.  Reggie has caught up to him.  Kyle jumps down from his truck, ready for a fight, but then Reggie pulls out a nail-spiked baseball bat, saying that if he won’t be his best friend, no one will be.  Kyle takes off running, again with Reggie on his heels.

Not far away, two police officers named Phil and Dave stand outside their patrol car watching a UPS guy and a nerd running down the street screaming.  They lazily ask each other over donuts if they should do something about the situation.  After a little hesitation, they shrug and decide they probably should.

We see Reggie being forced into the police car, and Kyle thanks them for saving his life.  Phil and Dave pull up their britches and humbly tell him it’s all in a day’s work.  They ask what Kyle is going to do now that he’s a free man.  He tells them jokingly that he’s going to Disneyland, and they start to laugh… for too long.  Other people passing by start to join in the laugh fest, including many of the neighbors from the area.  Kyle eventually feels awkward as the laughs unnecessarily escalates, and just walks away.

As we watch him, we fade to black.  Roll credits.

Darrin Fletcher, Storyboard Artist/Director

What stuck out most to me of what Darrin Fletcher said in class yesterday is that there are a thousand different ways that you can become a director.  Of all the directors he's worked with in the film industry, each one has had a different rise to their directorial debut.  He talked about the tenacity each person has to have in order to eventually make it in the movie industry, and that it's important to form your own style after looking at the work of so many others.  Fun fact: he's also worked on the classic Transformers and Spiderman and His Amazing Friends cartoons!!
Work hard.  Be the hardest worker that you can.  That's what stuck out to me most.  He also said that if you're working on more than your first picture for free, than you're doing things wrong.  Here are some other things that I thought were really profound.
-Accept responsibility for your job.  Do your best.
-The business is 99% who you know.
-Every single project you work on is different.  Don't allow yourself to sink into a routine.  Treat each project differently.
-GREAT DIRECTORS ARE GREAT LISTENERS, and they're humble!

On top of all this, he showed us a rubric for a typical storyboard layout, and he said that a typical storyboard for a full-length feature will circle an entire room nearly from ceiling to floor.  The rubric he showed us fit on a typical sheet of paper.  On the right side, you have the widescreen borders of each shot, and to the left of each border, a description of the camera movement, lines from the script, and what's generally going on in the shot.  It was a pretty useful layout, and I can see myself using that same method on pictures I'll make in the future.

Wrapping Things Up

For the past week or so, we've been spending our class time working separately on all of our responsibilities within the production.  As of right now, my bio on Phil is complete.  I've also typed up the first draft of the synopsis, and I've sent it to Phil to get his opinion.  In class today, he told me that he would like the Pofrey Peak opening to be a little more exciting on paper so it can prime the reader for the rest of the story.  He also told me he'd like the elements of current-day Picabo talking to her younger self and the idea of implying a dual feature/documentary style.  I've been working on that pretty hard since then, but it's kind of difficult squeezing the whole synopsis into just one page...

I'll also need to type up the bio of Marshall Moore as part of the production book.  I actally couldn't find any information on him online, so as I was looking for information on him, I remembered that he gave all of us his business card during our Park City trip!  So I shot him an email, asking for a bio, and he responded in a matter of hours.  He sent me a bio and his phone number, so I got to call him up and ask him how things were going.  He was extremely cordial and polite.  I thanked him for allowing us to view the Park City studio, and he told me that he hopes I'll be working there someday!  Man, that would be so awesome...

My writing portions of the production book are due in two days, and it looks like the deadline won't be much of a problem.

Tabletop shooting, the Star, and the Final Stretch

So here's what's gone down in the past week or so.

On the 26th of March, we were supposed to have a "special guest" come speak to us, but that ended up falling through, so we ended up doing some tabletop shooting.  We took some of the trinkets we got from Dee Street's place and placed them on a lazy Susan, then twirled them slowly and got some footage of it.  Luke Jensen is a pro at it, so he set up some lights, busted out a dolly track and the Sony F55 and got some footage that we can use in the documentary.  I learned that with tabletop shooting, you want a little bit of shadow that can fall on and off the object as it rotates, so you adjust lighting as such.  Kind of interesting.

On Tuesday, Picabo came to visit!!  The one and only!  She spent about fifteen or twenty minutes telling us stories from her career, funny things that happened on the slopes, and then we spent the rest of the class filming her, mostly.  Ben, Luke, Dave and Judea had set up an interview setup in Studio C with the right lighting and an A cam and B cam.  Picabo sat down in a chair and she talked about riding down Pofrey Peak as a child with her friends.  It was a pretty cool story to listen to.  After that, she took the time to get pictures with the class and sign autographs and stuff.  She's a really neat lady--full of energy and really personable.  So I consider it a pleasure to have met her.

Yesterday, Phil let us know it was all go time to finalize our jobs on pre-production.  I'm on the writing team with Maddie Kelm and Keshara Bjorkman, and we apparently have more stuff we need to write for the production book than just the treatment.  We've got bios on the above-the-line crew that we need to write up, along with a disclaimer, a page outlining the benefits to investors, and a wrap-up page explaining why this is going to be the best sports documentary/feature ever.  And it's all due for us in two weeks (April 16th)!  That's for the writing team anyway.  The people working on the production book still need to compile everything together.
Here's how we've divvied up the responsibilities.  I'll write the treatment/synopsis and get bios on Marshall Moore and Phil Tuckett.  Keshara is going to get bios on the DP Ben Braten, the screenwriter Brian Strasmann, and the staff and crew, which is basically our entire class.  Maddie is going to write on the benefits to investors, the wrap-up page, and the disclaimer page.  So that'll be due in two weeks!

The Screenwriter, the Mini-Doc, and the Production Book

Last Thursday, I had the chance to meet with Brian Strasmann along with Maddie Kelm and Phil Tuckett.  Our meeting objective was to bounce ideas off each other relating to the Picabo Street screenplay, and Brian had some good thoughts.  Honestly, he had written a screenplay in the past about a ski racer that's eerily similar to Picabo's story.  We talked about the opening scene being an epic bike race down the hill where Picabo used to work during the summer as a kid.  She and her friends would throw their bikes in her dad's truck and race down the mountain where they hauled rocks for construction.  It would be an exciting way to begin the movie.

Also, during the weekend, I managed to complete my mini-documentary/vlog about our Park City trip a couple of weeks ago.  The finished product ended up being longer than expected, but a nice way to practice a little more with filming and editing.







Today, we discussed production books.  Phil gave us an example of a film that almost happened called Team 51.  The production book was pretty solid, with bios of all the crew working above the line, actors they were interested in, locations they had picked out, a budget summary, and examples of other independent films that did well in the box office.  I'm planning on keeping the production book as an example for future projects.

ESPN Picabo Documentary

We watched an ESPN documentary about Picabo Street in class today.  It was a fairly rudimentary documentary.  While we watched I got some cool ideas for the feature aspect of our own production.

First off, I think it would be great to emphasize how Picabo got into partying and got kicked off the US Ski Team.  I think some intense workout scenes in Hawaii would be fantastic too, as kind of her turning point.
I'd also like to make it clear how people were often annoyed by her because of her cockiness.
Her major injury in 1998 would be another plot point where she loses her "tiger."  She's not fearless anymore.
I think the winding down theme of the film should be "There is success in doing your best." That way our feature-documentary has some sense of a resolution at the end.

Brian Strasmann: Screenwriting Presentation

Yesterday, we were privileged with having Brian Strasmann come into class and lecture us on the process of writing a treatment and screenplay.  He's worked in Hollywood for a number of years and worked on films such as Free Willy, so he's been in the filmmaking game for a while.

He explained to us a four-page structure for getting down the story for a winning screenplay.  First off, he recommended that we know our beginning, middle and ending.  That's important.  His four page structure went a little something like this:

1/2 page on the opening scene, condensed and specific.
1/2 page of a general narrative synopsis of the first act.
1/2 page of a dramatic recreation of a plot point, condensed and specific.
1 page narrative synopsis summarizing the second act, fairly general, naming four obstacles for the main character to overcome.
1/2 page of a dramatic recreation of a plot point at the end of the second act, specific and condensed.
1/2 page narrative synopsis of third act.
1/2 page dramatic recreation of the ending scene, specific and condensed.

He said this model works for anything from a short film to a full-blown feature length.  Of course, ours is going to have to be modified a little bit because it's a dual feature-documentary thing, but I'm going to meet with Brian and Phil tomorrow along with some other writers to discuss how to exactly implement this for our project.