Production
Like every project, The Loneliest Boy began with an idea. The moment of inspiration occured in class one day. We were in the early stages of getting what is now RE|visions together. Ideas were floating around and I immediately thought about the story of a little boy and how it would fit into the scheme of a project with people at different stages of their lives. I immediately knew that this would be my final project and no matter what happened, I would some way adapt this to what the class decided to do
Now, with this idea, I had many ways that Icould go. Being not very familiar with the majority of the programs on the Actlab computers, I jumped to the conclusion that I would do a performative piece. This idea got thrown out the window shortly, when I saw the way the project was shaping up to look like for the entire class. So, I found some middle ground. This middle ground would be a still photo project that would be put in to the computer program Flash and play out sort of like a slide show. There would be some narration to fill in the gaps of the limitations of this particluar medium. This would be accompanied by somewhat of a musical score.
Then, the question arose of where I could find kids the age that I wanted for my project. My initial thought was of my friend Kristin, who worked at a day care here in Austin. I spoke to her and she said that it would be possible and would get back to me. I heard back from her and it was a "no go." She said that the day care manager did not want anyone interfering with their daily duties. What to do now? My next thought was of my mother. She taught third grade in my hometown of Bay City( about 2 and 1/2 hours from Austin). She said that it would definitely be fine. I told her the type of kids that I wanted and she spoke with their parents to make sure that it would be alright. The parents said that it was fine and everthing was set. This was only going to be a backup shoot though, seeing as some of the production crew wanted to be there to supervise.
The day came to make the trip down there and my camera needs still had not been met. I could not get the digital camera that I wanted to shoot the project. So, I had to resort to my girlfriends personal camera. This put severe limitations on my project. This meant that I would not be able to run the still photos into live action the way I had wanted to do with the digital camera. Oh well!
I got there and everything was almost perfect. I used the school's playground and the main boy's house for locations to shoot. Even the boy's mother let me photograph her for the project. The weather was perfect as well. There was a blue sky which I had wanted and was supposed to shoot, but forgot. It is the link beween my project and the following one. Luckily, Henry (the class producer) had taken care of it and had already taken the photo here in Austin. It took about two rolls of film to shoot it and most of the photos went fine. A few of them had reflections of me in them or I caught the actors looking at the camera.
I got back and got prepared once again to shoot what was to be the real shoot. I knew what to expect a little more since had already done this once before. Henry had made arrangements to shoot some children that he had selected from a binder of headshots in th CAGE here on campus. We were sat up to shoot on a Sunday morning. We had a park selected and a house had been made open for us to shoot at. That morning came around and I got the call that one of the kids was not going to be able to come and we had to scrap the whole shoot. Now, the backup shoot had become the main one.
I organized the photos I had in to the order that would best tell the story. In order to show that the character was dreaming, I would get closer on his face and then show an image of what he was imagining. Then, I would go back to the original shot of his face. Other than this, the rest of the pictures were in a pretty chronological order and were easy to organize. For effect, I also put reality in black and white and dreams in color to help distinguish between the two. I then took all of the ones that made the final cut and put them into Flash. I put a delay in between the photos that I thought were appropriate so that the slide show would tell the story at the pace I desired. The only shots that were put in at different speeds were the dream shots to once again emphasize that they were being imagined. I recorded a little bit of narration to help where the story might get little hazy and added music. This is the final project that is seen.