In the play 9 Months, which I Love You Because is based on, there
is a lot of talk about birthing videos, and in researching the film,
I watched a lot of birthing videos on YouTube, which led to the
writing of a scene in the film in which Sean (Travis Johnson) shows
Kevin (me) Paddy (Leon Jones) and Ian (Kenny Forthun) his wife Amy's
(Frances Rodriguez) birthing video. But, before we could film that
scene, we had to film footage for the birthing video, so today, we
had Travis and Frances out to our offices to film.
Since the birthing video is only seen on a tv, and will only take
up a few seconds of screen time, we knew we would not be filming it
in an actual hospital. This is where writing our own films comes in
handy, because even at the writing stage, we had it planned out how
the scene would be shot, and didn't have to wait until pre-production
to figure out how to shoot the scene. We simply designed the scene in
the script so that all the dialogue would be filmed in close ups,
with the camera held by Travis, with instructions to turn the camera
back and forth between their lines so that the camera is on him for
his dialogue, and on Frances for her dialogue. Because of this, we
were able to get around filming in a hospital, because not enough of
the room will be seen in the frame for anyone to be able to tell
where the birthing video was filmed. In place of using an hospital
room to film the scene, we just waited to paint the bedroom of our
apartment set (the original color is white) until after filming the
birthing video, and-except for anyone who reads this blog post-no one
will know the difference. By doing this, we were not only able to
save a lot of time, money and hassle, but were also able to get two
sets out of one.

Travis Johnson as Sean and Frances Rodriguez as Amy