The current work that I have been trying to take on, has unavoidably been affected by the restrictions that had to be implemented due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Without a doubt, COVID -19 he’s been the biggest challenge that most people have faced this year, taking over the normality of life, because of this, working in projects has been close to impossible. Over this last year, there have been multiple things that had to change regards to my way of thinking and my way of approaching my work not only in regards to university work, but in life I’m general. Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, projects that I had been looking forward to work in, had to be postponed or adapted to function with the new safety guidelines implemented. In consequence of this, ‘The Devil in the Details,’ had to be reshaped, not only in the delivery method but in the expectation of what the end result would be.
‘The Devil in the Details' is the name of a preview for a pilot episode based on the online forum, ‘The S.C.P Foundation’, a secret organization, designed to contain supernatural objects. Two agents of the Foundation, Hennedy and Wilson, work alongside each other in order to contain these objects and report them to ‘The Foundation’ with the aim to Secure, Contain and Protect. This entire world of objects, monsters and the supernatural, is completely written online by users for users, compiling millions of entries into an enormous archive of short stories. The script was written by James Sinclaire, and working alongside Callum Woods in the completion of this project, we completed a final animatic storyboard to showcase the vision we have developed surrounding this idea, an idea generated online by these million of fans worldwide. The storyboard is an aspect of a production that helps serve as a guide for the type of shots that will be used during filming. My goal was to work on a storyboard of the script that was written to provide a preview of what the framing would look like in the shot. The main idea behind creating a storyboard of this script is to present the idea for this dramatic series as a pitch for a future project, showcasing what it could be and the massive growth that this plot line could have for future episodes. In this case, as the country eased itself into lockdown, getting together to film was not allowed and planning shoots was not something we could do either. In addition to this, hiring actors to play the respective parts of the characters was prohibited due to the limit of people allowed to gather outdoors and indoors, limiting the further development of this idea. Because of this, we had to take a different approach to the way that we were working and adapt the expectations that we had for the final outcome. This is one of the reasons that we had to change our original the idea of the short episode with hired actors and instead bring the vision of what the S.C.P television drama could become in the future and the potential it has as a fictional program.
After James wrote the script, I started working on a storyboard. Because we could not recreate the storyboard through film, as one is intended to, the drawn storyboard itself became the prime visual element of the production. This storyboard was intended to be used as a way to give a visual representation of the program. Due to the storyboard becoming such an important element to the showcasing of the idea, a great amount of effort went into making the drawings as understandable as possible in regards to the sequence of events and the dialogue between characters.
Apart from storyboarding, we took a promotional photoshoot, following the implemented COVID-19 guidelines to give as much perspective and aesthetic value as we could. As we could not get a cast to play the characters off Hennedy. Willson and Emily, each one of the members of the group had to take on a respective role. I played the part of Emily Perez, the analysts for ‘the foundation’ that helps Kennedy and Wilson figure out what the mysterious object in question actually does.
This promo shoot of the characters was done with the intention to help give a certain look to the show. As the COVID-19 measures that were in place, prevented people from meeting indoors, there were limited options to where we could go shoot the portraits that we needed to better showcase the scrip. Outdoor shooting became the only thing that we could do in regards to character portrait shoots, this was a complication due to the fact that most of the things written in the script happened indoors, mostly in a run-down apartment complex and sound testing studios.
To better shape the content that we have created for ‘The Devil in the Details’ and get a better result out of our storyboard, we decided that recoding a scrip read-through was the better way to enhance the vision that we have created around this idea. During the scrip read-through each one played a respective part in order to compensate for the lack of actors in this production. As a group, we arranged a Skype meeting to have the sound ready alongside the storyboard that had been developed. As everyone is meeting everyone online through these video calling platforms, there were technical malfunctions that could only happen online. Using first the platform Skype to communicate with each other, the sound quality was very low, with the words often cutting each other giving us trouble understanding what was being said when speaking. After a couple of tries using Skype, we decided to use Microsoft teams as the platform, since it also includes the screen recording update just in case any other audio file gets lost. Microsoft Teams worked better but It was not the best. The read-through had to be done slowly so that everyone could understand each other's cues and tone of voice. Things were running smoothly in the read-through of the script when out of nowhere Callum was nowhere to be heard, after a long pause, James and I realized that he had indeed cup off and was no longer part of the call. Despite these incidents that we encountered during the production of this project, the final result is one that can be engaging and entertaining for new audiences as well as fans.
‘The Devil in the Details’ is a production that we as a group developed with expectations of what the project would be and after COVID-19, these expectations had to change and adapted to work with the restrictions put in place. Despite the challenges that we encountered like these COVID-19 restrictions not letting us meet together as a group to produce this pitch in person, as well as not allowing us to hire actors, affected the ways to approach this project. Facing these COVID-19 issues when producing our work, and meeting online through these video chat platforms, we achieved a finished piece of work for the future when restrictions put in place do not affect the way we work in the media workplace.
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