Production - Scene 1: The Alarm

Production: Scene 1 - The Alarm

When Nicole and I first started thinking about how to open Audrey's home sequence, the question we kept coming back to was how to establish her character visually before she says a single word. The voiceover handles some of that work, but we wanted the images themselves to be doing something independently, and the alarm shot ended up being the answer.

The detail we settled on is that Audrey sets a 4:00 PM alarm for her after-school nap. On the surface that's an ordinary thing, but what it communicates is specific; she doesn't just fall asleep and hope for the best, she built rest into her schedule the same way she builds everything else. She recharges, but only within a structure she created for herself. When the alarm goes off and she's immediately awake and moving, it tells you everything about her without dialogue. That was the goal of the entire home sequence from the beginning, to let her actions do the characterization work so the voiceover doesn't have to explain everything.

Filming the Shot

Getting this shot to actually look clean on camera was harder than I expected. The original plan was to physically zoom in on the phone with the camera to bring the notification into focus cinematically. When we tried it the footage came out noticeably shaky because without a tripod the zoom introduced instability that made it look like a mistake rather than a deliberate choice. We watched it back immediately and it was clear it wasn't going to work. The shakiness pulled attention away from the screen itself, which is the only thing that matters in that shot.

Although we figured it out in the end, and it proved to be a learning experience, it was still scary. It reminded us that although we planned it out great, we still don't know exactly what we're doing, which means our timing may be very different than what we have planned.