Production Diary – The Medea School of Melodrama

Once a month I’m going to talk about a specific production, what it was like to film it, and what was involved in making it happen.  This month I’m going to talk about The Medea School of Melodrama.

The Medea School of Melodrama is a short film that was originally made for an SPC-TV production called Tape & a Stick. 

The basic idea was that each week there would be two objects that you had to include in your short film and there were three films per episode.  I think it was a cool idea, since there were multiple people who submitted shorts so you could see how others would use the objects.  However, it only lasted for three episodes – Tape & a Stick, Balloon & a Sock, and Soup & a Cow. I The fourth one was Shampoo & a Bible, but it was never finished. As one of the producers on the show (Morgan Thomas and LT were the others), I tended to do as many shorts as we needed to fill up the episode.  Sometimes it was just one, sometimes it was two, for the first episode I helped with all three. 

 We had already gotten what we needed for Tape & a Stick and were working on Balloon & a Sock during the summer of 2002.  Morgan and LT had come to my house for a week over the summer just to hang out, and we decided rather randomly to film a movie while they were there.  We decided one day that we would film it the next day at the MacLeod Farm.  We didn’t really have an idea, but one had been simmering in my brain for a while – a school where people are taught to be melodramatic characters and taking classes geared to subjects like Taking Over the World.  So I sat down and wrote the script that night and we were ready to film the next day.

The casting was pretty easy since we were just going with who was available and divided up the parts by who wanted to play what.  There were actually six parts, but we were short one actor and since that character (the sidekick) only had one real line we left it to film later.  Morgan played the Villain, LT played the Hero, Annamarie MacLeod played the Damsel in Distress, Jen Weber played the Sassy Vamp, and I played the Professor.  The characters weren’t given names in the script, those came later and actually changed between the first edit for Tape & a Stick and the re-edit which I did this past year (I like the newer names better).

The movie was written in the style of an infomercial about getting a degree at a specialization school.  There were few scripted lines, mostly just speeches about each character’s chosen field of study (Hero, Villain, etc).  A lot of the filming was just shooting B-roll and cutaways for the narration of the list of classes.  

The first thing we did the day of filming was pick costumes.  Each character had to take classes in subjects other than their field to fulfill Gen Ed requirements, so they needed a lot of different costumes.  Luckily my mother is a costumer and the whole third floor of our house was basically a costume vault.  I filmed them picking things out to cover some of the classes on fashion.  It was a lot of fun just watching the actors pick out what they wanted for both their main character and their character’s outfits for other classes.  I remember Annamarie saying as she looked through the costumes that she was going for “maximum puffiness” and hopefully pink for her main outfit (which she successfully found).

Morgan, who played the Villain, found a white, fluffy dress with lots of ruffles for her outfit as a Damsel in Distress, which was hilarious to see how annoyed the character was while wearing it.  But they had the most fun picking out their Sidekick costumes, because they could be as random as they wanted with hats and props.

I had a little trouble working in the balloon and the sock, but both uses turned out to be pretty hilarious.  The sock was turned into a puppet, played by Jen Weber, who was the narrator for the whole thing – which is totally bizarre and fun by itself, and Jen is always hilarious at stuff like that.  The balloon we decided to use as a prop for one of the classes.  A “little girl” is holding a balloon for a class on Villainy and Morgan runs in and takes the balloon from her, making her cry – but she took it a step farther and started hitting the kid with the balloon. 

Once we got to the farm, we started off by filming the characters’ lines.  The funniest part was when we decided to film Jen’s lines as the Sassy Vamp on her red car.  She poses with a bottle of “hooch” and a cigarette while sitting on the hood of the car, which is amusing enough, but for one of her lines we decided to have her crawling sexily on top of the car.  That’s not an easy thing to do and resulted in some very funny bloopers.  We also learned there is way to get into a hammock and make it look sexy.  Hammocks are also not easy to get in.

After that we spent the rest of the day filming all the b-roll.  Because there was really no script for that part, it allowed all of us to be creative and just have fun.  And we did.  It was great to see how actors in their roles pretended to be other things in other classes.  That didn’t make sense.

For example, Annamarie played the cute and sweet (and kind of ditzy) Damsel-in-Distress, so it was quite amusing watching her in the “Villain” classes.   Morgan, as the Villain, refused to faint in the Damsel-in-Distress class Fainting 101, and just walks off the screen disgusted.  And seeing LT playing the Hero trying to be sexy in the Introduction to Seduction was priceless. 

We added a class on the set that someone suggested – the ever popular pirating course “Laughing and Jumping off of Something”.  I can’t remember who came up with it now, I think it was Jen but I’m not sure, but I think it’s pretty funny.  

There were talks with some of the actors about doing a mocumentary following some of the students through their four years at Medea.  Some of the students would switch majors by the end (the Damsel-in-Distress would turn into a Sassy Vamp, etc) and meeting the teachers, but it’s no scripts have been written and it probably won’t happen.  I think the only reason I would want to do it would be to see Andrew Thomas play the villainous looking Home Ec. teacher, who somehow makes baking cookies sound sinister.

I’ve had people (including the actors) ask why it’s called the Medea School of Melodrama.  Originally Medea was supposed to be MEDEA, an acronym that stood for something like the Melodramatic Education Department of something something, but I could never figure out a good one.  Honesty, I just liked how it sounded.  Of course it conjures up the dramatic character of Medea from Greek tragedies.  However, I have since decided that Medea was the daughter of the man who founded the school.  She died young, but always loved melodrama and wanted to learn how to be something more than a Damsel-in-Distress, so her incredibly wealthy father founded the school in her memory.  None of that is ever explained of course, but it would be if I ever did a longer version.

I had a great time filming it (and editing it), and I hope the actors did too. Unfortunately I can’t post the movie in its entirety for various reasons, but here are a few clips from the final edit: