Jennifer E. Smith: “Movie Set Research” – This is What Happy Looks Like Valentine’s Day Blog Tour

Today we are SO delighted to be hosting a special Valentine’s Day blog tour stop for Jennifer E. Smith’s upcoming new YA novel, This is What Happy Looks Like — on sale April 2nd, but you can pre-order it now. You may also know Jennifer already from her first book, The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight — now in paperback.

Today, Jennifer stops by for a special guest blog — and then we have a really fun contest for you! Details below Jennifer’s guest blog.

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This Is What Happy Looks Like takes place in a fictional town in Maine, where a film production arrives for part of the summer – bringing with it Graham Larkin, the star. So when I first started writing it, in addition to worrying about the usual aspects of a setting – creating a town that hopefully comes to life and feels realistic – I needed to learn a bit more about what a movie set would entail.

I’m lucky enough to live in New York City, where film productions are pretty much everywhere. It sounds crazy, but I think it’s rare to go a week without seeing one – the trailers lined up on the street, the huge lights, the police barriers, the Craft service tables. Whether it’s for a commercial or a television show or a movie, they seem to pop up all over the city. But after a couple of months of lurking whenever I happened to stumble across one, I finally found someone – a friend of a friend – who could give me a proper introduction to the whole thing.

I spent a day on location in Brooklyn, where they were filming a scene for a TV show, and tried my best to take everything in. There was a lot to learn – the names of the various cameras and lights, the many parts of a call sheet, the roles of different crew members – and it was a lot of fun to watch the countless takes as they shot the scene. The books I write don’t tend to require a lot of research, so I really enjoyed learning something new, and it turned out to be enormously helpful when I sat down to write those scenes in the novel that centered around the filming. I still had to do quite a bit of research online and talk to several authorities on the subject, but capturing the feel of being on location was important, and hopefully it comes through in the book.

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