Nov 23

Today I read over episodes 1, 4, and 5 and I made edits to them as well so that they were ready to be read off and filmed. I also finished scripting episodes 2 and 6 - I decided to film all of the episodes today because I am leaving tomorrow for LA and the due date for Criterion C is the Monday I get back. This way I can edit as many episodes as possible in California. I have not finished writing episode 3 yet, though, because it is about composing and I haven’t finished composing yet. I also finally decided on my YouTube channel name: it will be called VerdiHelpful, but the web series itself will be called Behind The Curtain, and I will be using the alias ‘The Demiflat Diva’. “Behind The Curtain” was originally one of the names I eliminated, but I felt like the names that my friends liked didn’t work well for the title of a web series, but Behind The Curtain fit because it implies going backstage and the web series talks about all of the things that you do behind the scenes to put the opera on stage.

After figuring all of that out I set up to film. I decided to film in my bedroom on my bottom bunk. The color of the wall and the pillows and decorations is very friendly and great for YouTube. The colors of that space are not in the Classical Music color palette that I found, but I felt like those colors were too dull and muted - they weren’t friendly. Opera is already a somewhat hard to approach topic, so I wanted my channel to look friendly and approachable, and a good way to do that is to use bright and poppy colors. I kept the music tone by wearing music T-Shirts that connected to the theme of each episode. I set up a film light, put my iPhone in a tripod, and set up my computer on top of a suitcase about the height of the tripod. I also put my script onto a teleprompter which you can find easily online - I always use it because it makes reading much easier. I filmed every episode save episode 3 starting at about 10 or 11PM and finishing at 5:51AM. I started late because I took 4-10PM to work on writing/finishing/proofreading the episodes. 6 or 7 hours of filming seems like a long time, but picking wardrobe, framing the camera, setting up the lights, doing a few takes for each episode, changing clothes, watching playback, and my iPhone repeatedly failing to record episodes due to my iPhotos being full required each minute of that time. I plan to start the Adobe Premiere 1 week free trial on Monday.

Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 4, Episode 5, Episode 6

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