The night of John Quick and I’s “Seven Samurai” viewing stands out as a specific moment that really shaped our show, but what came after was what helped us nail that shape.  While we watched the movie we brainstormed episodes.  The first episode would introduce the world and Gamer’s Brigade, as well as the obnoxious villains, to follow the opening of Seven Samurai and meeting the farmers and the bandits.  The next episode would be in town looking for more members, also following along with Seven Samurai.  Things diverge quite a bit from Seven Samurai as the story progresses, but it was definitely a starting point.

That night we had notes for 5 or 6 episodes at least, and ideas for the rest.  For instance, one idea was to have young Kyle getting ambushed in a desolate place.  Snow was a possibility, but we didn’t know what those logistics would look like.  We also didn’t know when would happen in the story, but the idea was there.

A few days later John presented to me an episode outline based on our notes, and we sat down and talked our way through it.  Each episode had a paragraph or two describing it loosely.  All twelve episodes were there and laid out and, though things were shifted as we went along, this was the first time the complete story was laid out before us.  We talked about moving on to the scriptwriting phase, but decided to keep working on character development first.

We returned to Yogi’s, our place of thinking, and started working on character story arcs that could occur.  Shane’s quest was to — (I can’t spoil it all for you, can I?).  Every character was given a loose arc that I would work with the actors on, once we found them.   We hammered out personalities as well for the characters, which the story arcs would reflect.  Shane would be serious, and clearly the leader.  Ryan would be loyal, but has a fairly negative disposition about things.  Kyle is excited and in awe of everything that’s going on.  These are just a few examples of what we came up with that night.

Also that night we went through and determined what each character’s relationship to each other would be, and what each character’s relationship to the group as a whole would be.  We went through each character and described how they would act towards each other, such as Shane to Kyle, or Shane to Wild Dog, and how they felt about one another privately.  This work definitely helped describe the characters to the actors later, and solidified how each script would go. All this time we were shaping the world of the show, and filling out as much detail as we could.

I will always go this route when planning a series or movie, and anyone who doesn’t want to is essentially saying “We want this to be quick, we dont care about being thorough.”  It was tedious to describe all these relationships and to have the world planned out, but that groundwork meant that making decisions about characters and settings later in the process would be much easier.  For instance, during one shoot I wanted the wild dog character to just laugh maniacally and walk away, but the actor pointed out that, due to the character’s background, he would be a little sad, and he was right.  This planning and thought definitely shows in the final product, and it’s always (I think) obvious when the details are thought of and when they aren’t.

Anywhoo, It was around this time, I think, that the name “Student Seven” first popped up as a potential title.  It might have been earlier, too.  I know the title came early in the process, because we knew that we wanted it to conjure thoughts of Seven Samurai.

Now with characters, a plot, and a title, we still had some work to do.  While at home visiting my family, I realized (somehow it hadn’t yet occurred to me), that we only had six main characters.  If the show was going to be called “Student Seven“, and be based (however loosely) on “Seven Samurai”, then we would have to have seven students.  I’d been floating an idea for a character anyway, so I just starting writing up the character known as Cym.  Rather than based on a samurai, she (the first definitely female character) was going to be the awkward, timid, mousy girl who spends all of her time on the computer.  I fleshed out her backstory and character arc, went over it with John, and we decided to fit her into the episodes we’d already planned out.

At this point in the process the ball was really starting to roll on pre-production, and John and I decided that we needed a producer if we were gonna transition into actual production anytime soon.  We decided to ask our friend Chelsey McKrill, who at the time was producing the web series “Tycoons”, which just was released last week.  I remember texting her about it during a shoot, and then John and I sat down with her and pitched the whole show to her.  She quickly fell in love with the idea of doing an action web series, especially something vastly different than what other groups were doing at IU at the time, and thus we had a producer.  She wanted to get the ball rolling on setting up auditions and writing scripts, and John and I agreed.

I remember having a meeting with Chelsey where we sat down with a calendar and started figuring out an overall schedule.  We knew all of the locations we would need, from the episode outline, and we knew that we had a ton to film.  12 episodes at roughly 3-5 minutes an episode meant we were shooting almost an hour worth of show, or a very short feature length film.  We quickly decided that trying to shoot all of it in one semester would drive us insane, so we decided to work on getting the first six episodes done in the fall semester, and the second six in the spring.  This was going to be the longest time spent working on a project for either of us.  Again I felt that nervousness about embarking on something this huge.  What if we got sick of it halfway through?  What if it was just miserable to work on, would we have to push through and finish it?  I was nervous but I wanted to continue, because I thought that it could also turn out to be the best experience I’d ever had (spoiler alert: this was it was the best experience I’ve had).  We set audition dates for September 20th and 23rd.  Keep in mind, it was still mid-August at this point, so you get an idea of how far in advance we were looking.  Chelsey and I set up a timeline for having all the scripts finished, as well as a rough shooting schedule.

With our “Show Bible” getting fuller every day, and a new producer in Chelsey McKrill, our show was coming right along, and it was time to start writing scripts. Next week on “The History of Student Seven” we’re forced to search for a new director of photography, we start working on art direction, and we have our first meeting with our fight choreographer.  Until then, cheers!

-Sam Sher, Director.

A few days after our road trip conversation full of ideas, John and I met at a restaurant in Bloomington called Yogi’s for beer and dinner, and to figure out some story concepts and solidify the jello of ideas that was Student Seven at the time. Beer and dinner seemed as logical a place as any to start formulating, and so it was.

We started developing the world before anything else, which I think helped us shape the character’s stories later on. By the end of the night we had begun our “Student Seven Show Bible”. We knew that honor would be important, and that characters would have to defend their honor by fighting. We knew that there would be student groups, and that a student group would have an enforcer to defend the group’s honor. We decided that in this universe guns would not exist, as more impetus for characters to fight each other physically. We wanted to balance the modern aspects of the show with the samurai/kurosawa elements, and we decided to watch “Seven Samurai” for inspiration, since our show was to be an adaptation of it. That night I think we agreed that the story should be about a student group that essentially filled both the role of the farmers, and the role of the Samurai, and so we can up with the idea of a student group that needs more members to accomplish it’s goal while being harassed by other students groups, and so they go out into town to find more members. This is when a shape really started taking hold.

At this dinner John mentioned that he wanted to DP it. I said that I’d direct it, and so out first team was formed. I would direct, and John would DP. We knew that we’d need a producer, but we wanted to form the idea a little more ourselves first.

My concerns from the drive about the plausibility of this show really happening lingered, but the more we fleshed out the story, the more images I saw of what it could be, and so my excitement for the project increased with every idea. Here we were really thinking of something quite unlike anything I’d seen, and with the right crew I knew that it could be better than your student production, which until then was all I’d ever been really in charge of. With the right production value, we could really turn this story into something more. The key would be achieving that production value.

John came over to my apartment a few evenings later and I put on the movie. We’re both big fans of Seven Samurai so it was only natural that we’d want to watch it and soak it all in. We quickly began picking out characters that we could use in a college setting. Some of the characters were obvious translations, others were merges of different characters. Shimada, the calm, understanding leader of the Samurai became Shane, leader of our student group. Katsushiro, the young, idealistic samurai, became Kyle, the overexcited freshman. Kikuchiyo, the buffoon, became a character who on set was known as the wild dog, but is never named in the series. Gorobei and Shichiroji were slightly combined to become Ryan, Shane’s old friend from another group and his second in command. Heihachi and Kyuzo were also combined to create the final two characters. Script, who is cold and sharp but brilliant, was modeled a little more off of Kyuzo. Kentucky, who just wants to perfect his art, was similar to Kyuzo also but was glad to work with the group, like Heihachi. Here we had our student group, and in that night we came up with a name. “Student Seven”. We liked it. It rolled well off the tongue, and had a nice sound to it. “Student Seven”.

If you’re counting you might notice that there are only six main characters. Shane, Ryan, Kyle, the wild dog, Script, and Kentucky. This would be rectified shortly later. Also worth noting is that initially all of the characters were male. We weren’t trying to be sexist, the thought simply didn’t occur to us until later that some of them needed to be female, something I’m so glad we realized.

John and I took notes that night, forming out a story for our Student Group. We didn’t have a name for the group yet, just the show and the characters. But we knew that it would be about a student group, trying to make a project, that discovers that it has to make a game in half the time they need in order to qualify for a student group fighting tournament, which would give the winning group resources to make a stronger project. With this story in mind, John and I parted that night with plans for us each to come up with a twelve episode outline. Our rules: each episode has to have a fight scene, and be under 5 minutes.

Next week I’ll talk about how we hammered out the episode concepts, filled our empty character spot, started better fleshing out characters, and found a producer. Until then, I hope that some silly pictures and clips from the set will be enough!

-Sam Sher, Director

It started a little over two years ago.  Driving back from a shoot in Terra Haute, Indiana, John Quick mentioned the idea of doing our own web series, with us in control.  We’d previously both worked on other shows where, while we would write or act, we weren’t the top dogs, and we didn’t have final say.  This time, we agreed, we wanted to have final say.

Out of this we started spitballing ideas for a Kurosawa-esque show about Samurai.  Being a big Kurosawa fan myself, I liked this idea.  However, we had both seen plenty of student/our level productions try to encompass huge ideas and not be able to live up to it either through production value, story, actor’s age and believability, or any number of other factors.  We wanted to find a way to tell a good story, make it big, and believable, and still do it within our resources.  This led to the idea of a story about college-age students in a world where they were expected to be more like Samurai.  This would allow us to use university settings and actors our age, and maintain the realism of the world.

This was all on the drive back from Terre Haute a few hours before the sunset, just chatting about something that would be cool to do.  Having seen ambitious ideas falter before, I was a little skeptical.  I liked the ideas that we were discussing, but I had my doubts.  I’d been on plenty of sets where everyone would lose steam halfway through the project, or by a few days into shooting the sets would be hell, and I was afraid that that was inevitable.  I also knew that John and I had been on projects that had never been allowed to challenge their audience, and had always been dumbed down for the widest appeal.  We wanted to see how we could do it if we were in charge, and if we could take precautions to make sure it went well.  I wanted to know if I could do it, and this prospect excited me.  The challenge was there, and we wanted to take it.

I think that there are a few directions that micro-budget films can go, and that the filmmakers behind them should be aware of those directions.  I think there’s always the chance that someone will have an incredibly ambitious idea and write without thinking of the resources.  This isn’t a bad thing.  There are tons of ways to pull off these ambitious ideas, if the people and equipment are there.  In our case we were extremely lucky to have the people and equipment to pull off such an idea.  In other situations the people and equipment might not be there, and all that remains is someone with an idea.  It’s up to that person to figure out a way to tell the story through the people and resources available.  It’s not a detriment, but a challenge and the better one can adapt to their resources then the more creative their project will be, and this almost always shows in the final project.  However, there’s a distinct difference between succeeding and not, and it’s always visible.  I wanted to be very careful going into Student Seven that what we were talking about would be possible.  Although at this time I don’t think we’d titled it Student Seven just yet.

That evening, driving back from Terra Haute brainstorming with John Quick, we decided that we would make a show about Samurai students fighting for honor at a corrupt university.  I was thinking of the logistics, and how possible certain scenes I was imagining would be.  I had loads of ideas for scenes, from classic black and white sword slash and blood spurt fights to a bicycle fight sequence, but didn’t yet have a formula, a story, for putting these scenes together.

That evening we planted the seed of what would become Student Seven.  We drove for however long it takes to get from Terra Haute to Bloomington and discussed our idea to the point where we knew we were ready to start making characters and forming a story.  There was a lot of work to be done if this was going to happen.  Despite my concerns, I was thrilled to be working on a new idea that I would be in control of.

Next week I’ll talk more about the story development and the character writing process. Until then, enjoy the updated “Synopsis” and “Production” pages, and the continuing stream of pics and behind the scenes videos that are being posted!  Also, I’ll soon start posting cast and crew reminiscent blogs about the cast’s experience.  I can’t wait to show you all the final product.

-Sam Sher, Director