MAKING OF THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT
Welcome to the Making of "The Butterfly Effect"; a closer look at the behind the scenes process that went into creating this project!
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It all started with a common goal: turn a produceable script into an awesome TV pilot episode. Our group came together after each of us expressed interest in the original "The Butterfly Effect" script written by former Temple student Dani Halteman. We liked the way it was able to combine a popular conspiracy theory with the conversation of race and gender. After deciding that this was definitely the script we were going to be producing, our team consisting of Steven Aronow, Sitong Cao, Tyler Crystal, Yiming Fu, Logan Moritz, Emma Saperstein, and Abbie Turrisi officially became Metamorphosis Productions.
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For the rest of the semester our Monday nights at 8 PM were devoted to weekly group meetings starting with making edits to the script. We began by re-writing parts of the script to our liking, discussing and solidifying locations, creating character bios, and storyboarding the script. We also decided to create a GoFundMe for our project to help with the cost of props and catering on shoot days. Luckily, that received a good amount of attention and we would like to thank all of our friends and family that donated! Pictured below is us during one our weekly meetings in the tech center.
The most important part of pre-production was finding the perfect cast. Since the plot revolved around four diverse young women, we wanted to make sure we our cast matched the characters we envisioned. On the day of our casting call, we had about ten girls audition for Phoebe, two audition for Chloe, two audition for Elara, and zero audition for Sophia. While this was not the outcome that we were expecting, we were luckily able to pick out our Phoebe, Chloe, Elara, and Professor Alvarez (pictured below) from the casting call.
Finding our Sophia was definitely the hardest part of this entire process. We reached out to various casting websites, Facebook pages, and asked friends in the theater department for help. After weeks of searching, we got a message from a girl in the film department who knew of someone who would fit the part and was interested in potentially auditioning. She gave us her contact information and pictures of what she looked like (pictured below) and we scheduled a table read. The girl, Selwa, a freshman biology major with basically no acting experience, ended up NAILING the audition and we happily added her to the cast as Sophia.
Once we finally had our complete cast, we were able to work with everyone's schedule and begin filming right away. We confirmed our locations with the administration of the buildings and were good to go. We wanted to get the scenes with all four of the girls finished first because those would be the most difficult to schedule. That being the case, our first weekend of shooting was on October 26th, where we filmed a scene with all four of the main characters. It was the first time all four of them were together due to scheduling issues during table reads. The girls instantly had amazing chemistry and were hitting it off great. On top of that, the group was working together very well as crew members. We finished every scene that we intended to get done and had a great time working together. Everyone's strengths were definitely being used and each member had an essential role on set. This translated to our second day of filming as well on October 28th. We were able to complete 95% of the scenes that involved multiple characters in that weekend, leaving the rest of the solo character scenes for the next shoot days. It was a great start to the production aspect of the project. Below is a group photo of our lovely cast after the long weekend of filming and a fun video of Emma showing off her slate skills on set:
Sometimes a weekend of filming can go so well that you forget anything bad could ever happen on set. That was us after the first weekend of filming. We were on cloud nine with how successful our first two shoot days went. Unfortunately, that success did not transfer over to the second weekend of filming. Our third day of filming was a long, stressful, tension-filled Friday afternoon, November 9th. After having to travel back and forth from Logan's apartment (the set location) to the equipment office three times due to mistakes with the equipment, our sanity slowly but surely began to deteriorate. On top of the struggles with equipment, we dealt with some issues with a roommate of the apartment who was not happy about us filming there. These conflicts led to a lot of extra down time on set as we dealt with them. At the end of the day, with these conflicts and struggles, we were only able to get two of the four scenes scheduled for that day done. A problem we did not run into in the first weekend of filming. On the bright side, this was definitely a learning experience for us all and for the benefit of this blog we were able to capture the mood of this stressful day in the following video clips:
Despite this rough day of filming, we prospered through and on our next shoot day, Monday, November 11th, we were able to make up the scenes we did not get to film on Friday. We definitely learned from our mistakes and made the best of the situation. We would like to personally thank our amazing lead actress Tiyana for being so flexible with us and for being an incredible team player. While we still have two more shoot days to go we are so excited to see this project come together. We have begun editing the scenes we have done so far and have a solid rough cut. We are very proud of the work we have done so far!
