Production: Making Props

Hey Blog!

In a previous post I talked about some important props that we would need to make for this project. These were some of the classic yellow bottles of pills for the medicine our character takes near the end of our opening, and the actual pills of course, and the envelopes that they would receive that signify their acceptance into the university of their dreams. It is very important that we make these props as realistic as possible because, if they look cheap or fake, the whole production won't look as serious or professional as it should. Especially because we've chosen to use a different time period to ours, albeit only 20 years ago, many things were different then to now, so we have to, not only make sure that our entire mise-en-scene looks real, but also specifically the way that things looked 20 years ago.

One of the biggest changes from then to now is that now we have the overwhelming use of the internet in almost every aspect of our lives. So, to accommodate for this, most universities will send an email to access their webpage where admission decisions are available for students, but, in the early 2000's, the internet was only just starting to pick up and this wasn't common in the slightest. Because of this, we couldn't simply have our characters get a quick email on their phones and move on, we had to have some physical form of mail that our actors could actually hold and open. As my research in a previous blog post explains, students would receive a large and thick envelope from schools signifying their acceptance into that university, our characters will receive such envelopes, thick enough to contain multiple pamphlets with information and such. We decided that they would be applying to NYU, the New York University, since it is a prestigious university, hence their excitement, and it would mean that they could move to New York together, a great opportunity for them as best friends starting college. 

We met up this week to start the actual creation of them so that we can begin filming this coming week. We made the packages using some large envelopes of size 8 1/2 x 11" that Sofia's dad had from work. On them, we printed the university’s logo and address as well as each character's name as recipients and their addresses and city. We stuffed them with a lot of papers that we could find so that they would look bigger and thicker as well as some magazines and comics I had around my house to account for the amount of paperwork inside them. Specifically for Lily's, I typed up a letter of acceptance that she is going to pull out of the envelope and read to Jackie. For this, I copied some letters of admissions to NYU that I could find on Google, Pinterest, and Instagram and edited it to fit our purposes. Here are some photos and videos of us making them!

The second very important prop we had to make was the medicine bottle I mentioned earlier. Obviously we weren't going to make a bottle from scratch, but we were going to put some items together to make them play as the medicine Lily would take. Here's what we did.

Sofia has this carousel sort of organizer in her house where her family stores all of their vitamin bottles as well as other medicines they take, and my family has some of the classic yellow bottles as well, and, luckily, one of them has recently been emptied, so we're going to use this. Because Lily's character is ill, she would need to take many medicines, which is what the organizer's job will be: to show a lot of small bottles together where we're going to say is where Lily stores them all. Now, we obviously can't have our actress take any of these pills, so I'm going to take one of my family's empty containers to Sofia's house when we begin to film and I'm going to put some Altoids mints into the bottle and these are going to be what our Lily will take near the end of the opening. These actually turned out to be the perfect fake pills. Check them out.