Franklin's Cake Blog

The Script

For this project, we chose the treatment that I wrote. I also wrote the script. The concept for the short film was that a man forgets his anniversary with his girlfriend every year and this year he forgets again, but doesn't want to anger his girlfriend again. He makes a last-minute cake that becomes sentient because the man spills chemicals in the batter. The cake tries is murderous but the man stops the cake before it causes harm.

The Process

During pre-production, I worked on the script with some help writing dialogue. We agreed on production roles minutes after our group got together. I was the writer and director. Ryan was the editor. Greyson did art direction. Ethan and John operated the cameras. As for storyboards, nobody wanted to do them, so we split them up across the group. We all participated in finding the locations, actors, and creating the schedule. Then, we were ready to film.

The first filming day was on a Thursday at Olathe North. We were filming most of Act II, the scene where the protagonist Franklin brings the cake to life. Murphy's law really came into play here. We showed up at the school around 4. They let us in the building, luckily, but we forgot to bring a few props. Some people went to get the items while we planned the shoot. While setting up the shots, we realized that we didn't grab the SD cards, so we messaged the group members who were getting supplies. They didn't see the message before getting back, so they had to leave again to get SD cards. Meanwhile, our actor was somewhat patiently waiting. After that, we were finally recording. The shots were pretty much improvised because we didn't know what the science rooms at North looked like beforehand. My voice was super hoarse from the start so I could barely speak. Directing with a hoarse voice is less than optimal. I really strained my voice on this recording day, something I don't plan on doing ever again. John was a big help, and was like an unofficial co-director. Once we started filming, it went smoothly. We finished filming right before 7, which was our original prediction.

The next filming session was at John's house. The scenes shot here took up most of the short film, so we had a lot more filming to do. Once the crew and actors arrived, we prepared the first shot. We had a slow start once again, but we sped up over time. People had to leave at a certain time, so we really were rushing while filming the last of the shots. We got it done just in time, and surprisingly took about the same amount of time to record as at Olathe North, even though we filmed a lot more at John's house. Finally, we were done with production.

Technical Problems

Once we were in post-production, we immediately noticed a major issue. All the shots upstairs at John's house had really bad white balance. Everything was orange/yellow and it looked awful. Ryan spent a lot of time fixing the colors, and even then the colors look weird at some points while watching the film. Also, after recording the voice lines for the cake, we realized we had to redo a line. Those were our main issues during post-production.

Role

I was the director and screenwriter for this film, two roles I was unfamiliar with. I'm not much of a leader, and I never have been. Writing is something I'm better at; I just haven't written many scripts. As for directing, I feel I could have helped the actors more because they were fairly unfamiliar with the script when we started filming. I did guide the video crew well though. I think I did a pretty good job with the writing. The dialogue progressed the story in the most natural way a story about a murderous talking cake could possibly be. The jokes were alright too.