Week 3

The third week of shooting stands out for the fact that nearly every scene we shot was based around kids between the ages of 10 and 14. Patrick and I have worked with kids dozens of times. Between the the years we spent supervising City Rep's Children's Theatre School, and our time at Lowell, Nibley Park and Wasatch Elementary schools, we have supervised, in a creative capacity, over 1000 kids. So, we're pretty used to the ups and downs of the situation. Of course, film is a bit different from stage, so there unique new challenges.

Probably the biggest advantage to kids on stage or screen is that they tend to be more excited about what they're doing. A kid doesn't differentiate between community theatre and Broadway, student film and Hollywood Blockbuster. A kid is thrilled to be in a movie. You don't get the sort of half-hearted work from them you might you sometimes get from adults on a low budget film. They are both taking it more seriously and having more fun, and both of those things rub off on the cast and the rest of the crew.

The biggest disadvantage is that kids can be hyperactive, noisy, unfocused, demanding and whiny. They can also push very hard to make themselves the focus of every scene. We've experienced all of these problems this week, and to be honest, most of them came from one out of the approximately 30 kids we've been using (I won't mention the particular performer by name in case anyone actually reads this).

By and large, though, working with the kids on "Dreamworld" has been a great experience. During our two days at East Hollywood High School, where we shot all of the school sequences, we were dealing with large numbers of kids, most of them extras. It was very important to us that the extras have a good experience on this movie. Often, visiting a movie set can be like visiting Dickensian London: there is a complex class system, and extras rank dead last, almost as sub-humans. We refuse to ever let that be the case on a film we make. Fortunately, the crew, particularly Brandyn Cross and Johnny O, were like-minded, and we all worked well together (I did place a temporary ban on jokes about "The Clap"). One particular crowd scene took 15 takes to get right, but considering the number of kids we were working with, that's not bad. Kids have to be reminded repeatedly not to look at the camera, and that came up a lot this week, but, in the end, much of our best work was done this week. The production value we got out of the East Hollywood location was immense, and added immeasurably to the film.