“Just A Voodoo Daydream”

While we wanted to go in a comedy-drama direction, we also wanted to inject elements of horror or fantasy. As such, we drew inspiration mainly from films like Clueless and Mean Girls for the comedic dialogue.

In the scene, the main character Ashley (played by me) is primarily inspired by Cher from Clueless, with a much snarkier personality. We wanted to give the other character Maya (played by Mia) a good reason to really hate Ashley, leading to her daydreaming about casting a curse or hex on her snarky friend with voodoo magick. Ashley dons a fur coat, sunglasses, and is carrying a Juicy Couture paper bag, while walking down Bourke Street, as we wanted to showcase how her character is stereotypical of high socioeconomic status without having to explicitly mention it. 

Though we had a rough concept of the direction we wanted to go in, ideas for the script only came in the morning of the shoot. In order to make it feel more natural, we decided to do a round of rehearsals, where we improvised the lines. From there, we noted down the lines we felt fit our scene the best and worked with those.

As for lighting, we went with more well-lit locations for the comedy-drama bits, while the voodoo bits were shot in a dark space, for more emphasis. 

To make the shot where Maya is daydreaming about conducting voodoo magick more realistic, we gathered some props – a candle, a pentacle charm, a bunch of crystals, as well as a voodoo doll that I sewed from scratch. We felt that lighting the candle was a nice touch to signify Maya’s passion of hatred towards Ashley, and when Maya is snapped back into reality, the candle goes out.

Word Count: 292 words.