Students on campus may be surprised to find film crews cropping up in their dormitory common rooms.
A new student-run sitcom called The Common Room, filmed mainly in the gathering areas of Craven Quad, has recently set out to portray humorous and unconventional takes on student life. The visible production process and finished product might be startling to the Duke community, but The Common Room has been a long time in coming.
“Technically, we had this idea two years ago,” said senior Christine Ko, director and co-producer of the series.
Ko started by filming scenes herself, using equipment provided by Duke Student Broadcasting, and by spring semester of last year had developed it into a full-fledged production project with a number of other students. Some of them came on board as writers, and it is with these students that each episode originates: group discussions determine the themes and riffs that will be at the center of each installment.
“We are professional, but we’re not terribly professional, and we have a lot of really fun writer’s rooms where we throw ideas around, and it just becomes more and more ridiculous,” said sophomore producer Jeremy Chaikind.
The show’s creators display this discussion of ideas by uploading a series of “Writer’s Room” segments to their YouTube channel. These clips, which depict some of the funnier moments that take place amongst the writers, offer an inside look at how the writers generate and shape ideas.
Once an episode is written, it is filmed over the course of a month, Chaikind said. Students then log significant time during the post-production process as well.
“[Jeremy] and I just sit down, and we edit for hours,” Ko said.
She and Chaikind agree, however, that this also represents a disadvantage to their production process: a 20-minute episode in just one month is a tall order, especially for a group of full-time students. Both producers, though, say that they prefer the frenetic atmosphere of The Common Room to the time-consuming perfectionism of short films. It also helps that students are able to set their own filming and production schedules.
“What’s nice about this is you can give as much as you want, but you’re not bound to something,” Ko stressed.
That being said, The Common Room is not without its aspirations: the crew hopes to produce seven or eight episodes this year. As for the day-to-day, though, the students behind the show are just enjoying the experience.
“This is wild,” Chaikind says. “We’re just having a really great time.”
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