What an incredible and intense week we had! It’s been the most intense one ever since STL started, no doubt about it. We worked on VFX, music, structure, general tone and pitch… All that in just five days!

We started off with David’s Prescott’s meeting where we showed him our progress with the VFX plan. After researching in depth scientific information about PCA’s symptoms we started imagining how those scenes would look like in the documentary. And we did what he suggested in his first mentorship: we drew those ideas! As you can see, they are very rough sketches, but still useful. He also pointed out that two of the ideas that we had to depict the symptoms were contradictory between them. We don’t want to make any spoilers…but if you read our following post you’ll see the solution we found to that contradiction! ;)


Next was Scott Stafford’s first mentorship. We showed him all the references and ideas we had for the music and sound and he gave us some very good advice to keep working on that:

-We were planning on using a Waterphone for the psychiatric parts, but he suggested it was better to substitute it with metalophones, since the Waterphone is a bit too cliché and could give the wrong impression to the audience.

-He also gave us a very useful homework: to do a Spotify list to start adding the songs we liked for reference or maybe even to use them in the documentary after getting the rights.

-He told us the best way to comunicate with the composers is to give them information about the emotions rather than the instruments or musical styles. We could even do an emotion script and that would be the most useful document for our composers.

-And finally he told us that one of the most important moments in the music production for a film comes when the full edit is done, even if the VFX and color grading are not yet finished, and directors see the whole movie without music or sound and explain to the composers how do they imagine the music for each scene.


Last, but not least, we had our first meeting with our new mentor: Shiho Fukuhara, calling from Japan. It was very important for us to meet her at that time of the week because we needed some fresh eyes to look at our project, knowing very little about it beforehand. Note this, it’s important! Look for fresh eyes to test your project from time to time. She also gave us a very good advice: to focus on emotions rather than facts in the structure. If we focus on emotions, she said, the audience will feel engaged but if we focus on the facts the audience will just feel sorry. And that’s definitely not what we want.