Reverse Engineering

There are honestly so many stories to choose from. Producing this film has been a whole adventure, and I don’t mean that lightly at all. I feel like I personally have gone through such a personal journey in discovering my own capabilities as well as some weak points. Furthermore, it has taught me so much about the field that I want to go into. Last of all, this film is what made me feel at home at SAGU. Before this, I didn’t really feel like I belonged, but now I can say for sure that those boys love me even when I’m cranky and have been on set literally all day in a bad mood.

I guess one fun story I can share is actually from our first day of shooting. Our first day was actually at the school, right outside of the Hagee Communication Center. We were shooting on the SAGU bus. Basically, everything went wrong that day. People were late, we didn’t realize how long it would actually take us to get shots off, and the shoot started way too late in the day, so the sun was setting. We got the first few shots off that we really needed outside of the bus, which is great because we were actually able to keep those for the final edit of the movie. However, the sun went down before we started our whole first scene inside the bus, so we set up a bunch of lights outside of the bus pointing in. We were trying to make it look like it could be daytime on the inside of this bus, closing the blinds and everything.

Of course, it didn’t really work. We ended up having to go back and reshoot later. However, in the middle of shooting that scene, we were all inside this bus about to get a shot off, and we just heard our makeup artist outside of the bus say, “Are those sprinklers?” It instantly clicked in our brains that we were right next to some of the sprinklers that go off every night, and our gear was piled up outside of the bus, so we sprinted off of the bus and frantically moved everything out of the way of the sprinklers. This may sound like the straw that broke the camel’s back on such a terrible first day of shooting, but it honestly broke up the tension so well. We were all laughing about how that had played out with us all sprinting off of the bus for such a random thing that we overlooked. To this day, I wish we had that recorded just to watch that moment.

Something that comes to mind would be having to run through the forest with a heavy gimbal trying to keep our actress in focus and in frame. I was running backwards through the forest, trying not to fall over with a $4,000 camera and a $1,000 gimbal. We did that for probably two to three hours, and then, we had to go back and reshoot it anyway because it didn’t work. I wish we had behind the scenes of just us running through the forest shooting this. So that was great. I think overall, some pretty great memories are just setting up for a scene, doing all the production design, writing, all that stuff, and then seeing it come out in a visual story after all of the color grading, sound, all those cool things.

My favorite memory from filming would probably have to be just working with the team on something we had been working on for months. Just seeing it come to life after all of the hours we put in is a story in and of itself. I realized a lot about how much actually goes into making a film. Just going through that journey with the team was something special, and I wouldn’t trade that for the world. Yes, we got at each other’s throats sometimes, but it was because we all cared about this project, and at the end of the day, we’ll always be family. Families fight! I’m just really glad that I got to work with this group of people, and I can’t wait to see where God takes us in life.

My favorite experience filming was probably the Halloween shoot at my house. It was cold and long, but we kept telling jokes and having fun the entire time. In a slow mo scene, I actually had to find a hairdryer and wave it like a maniac underneath the shot to give our female lead the look that her hair was dancing in the wind.