Through these past few months my group and I have been developing and building onto one film opening idea: a poker movie. Even with this concept it has changed and adapted frequently until we were able to come up with our (what we thought would be) final film opening idea.
In the begging our idea was grand, we wanted to create a poker scam movie. In this film a young, scrappy, sarcastic ex millionaires son and his two companions run a poker scheme against the mob which sent his father to jail. However, this idea was very extravagant and complicated to be honest. There were a lot of components which made this idea unattainable for us to accomplish. One of the biggest ones, which our teacher explained to us, was casting. This idea required a mix of an older and younger cast and because we are younger people it would be harder for us to acquire older cast members. Our teacher also pointed out to us that in poker it is not typically common for older people to play poker with younger people.
So, we had to readjust our idea. We knew we wanted to keep it poker related because this way we could keep the same setting; a ragged garage with a poker table set up in the middle. This setting would allow us to have more control over props and set design as well as lighting and mis en scene. So we decided to switch it to a high school poker tournament. This way we could keep our original set design and then all we have to do it find younger cast mate (which is easier for us) and create some new background scenes to introduce the characters. And, for about a month and a half, this has been the idea we have been developing and working on.
Then, out of nowhere, corona hit the US. This pandemic has really changed everything. Everyone's daily lives has been ripped from under them and we have all had to readjust to this new reality were living in. So, as a result our original project idea did not work anymore. We had planned out some scenes that needed to be filmed in school. These scenes were what was going to give the bulk of the background and general idea of the film. Without these scenes all we had left was the poker game which we could film in the garage but then we ran into another problem. We could not find enough people who were allowed out of their house to film for us.
We were running out of options and honestly, motivation. But we have been working on this project for too long and too hard to just give up now and we knew we had to come up with a new idea, and fast. When this project had started, one of my group members, Dean, had been researching a lot on action movies so he decided to take the lead on our new idea. Our biggest concern for this new idea was finding something that we could do in a place that was actually open to the public and required a small cast. This was not an easy task but what we were able to come up with really worked with the situation we are in. Our idea only required a three person cast and Dean was able to find an outdoor area we could film at. It was honestly not easy to switch up our idea so quickly and with so little time left but once we finally got to production it was smooth sailing and I'm really pleased with our results and what we were able to create and honestly, while this project has had its ups and downs and there were a lot of problems and things I could have done better everything worked out in the end.
