Production
Prior to shooting the film, director Neema Barnette researched the female prison complex in order to determine the style of inmates and film she wanted to create. She interviewed women inmates from Los Angeles and North Carolina, forced the actresses to go to prison to research their roles, and attempted to highlight the biggest issues that the inmates addressed regarding their abuse.
Neema struggled with finalizing the location for filming the movie because of the complex issues that she chose to address. Civil Brand was originally intended to be filmed in North Carolina but the original script was denied by North Carolina correction officials who were afraid of the message the film depicted about the prison complex. As a result, Neema Barnette was forced to eliminate disputed elements in the original script and submitted a watered-down script to Tennessee officials, who approved the new script and allowed filming to begin in December 2000 at the Tennessee State Penitentiary.
Once allowed to film, Barnette struggled with several production issues, including a smaller budget and restricted shooting schedule that was cut from 30 days to 15 days. After being shut down after 14 days of shooting, there were a total of 21 scenes missing from the film and Barnette waited for a year to receive extra shooting time only to receive 1 day, which was used to film 41 set-ups needed to piece the movie together. Lions Gate gave her a week to edit the final version of the film and in order to piece the scenes together and create fluidity, Barnette had Da Brat narrate more and cut out some original scenes she had. While filming, she used strategic camera techniques to hide missing elements of the film. Because of the reduced budget, Barnette was forced to shoot the cell block scenes in a static frame rather than complicated frames requiring a wheelchair camera, which she did not have. To hide the emptiness of the prison courtyard and lack of extras to play inmates, the director used camera techniques to section PU$$Y off one area of the courtyard and avoided shooting any reverse angles.
Read more about this topic: Civil Brand
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