Filming The Milgram Experiment

We were recently asked in my Media Production course to write, plan, and shoot a three minute short of our own choosing. My partner, Constantin Polseski, came up with the idea of making a film about the infamous Stanley Milgram experiment. This analysis, conducted in the 1960's at Yale University, was intended to portray the effects on people who are forced to do something by an authority figure even though they personally know what they are doing is morally unjustifiable. The experiment involved a professor who would be introduced by the scientists to a "learner" who was in reality a paid actor but the professors had no knowledge of this. The two would go into separate rooms and not have any direct contact with one another. The leaner would answer a series of questions by the teacher and when the answer was wrong, which would be all the time, the professor was pressured by the scientists into pressing a switch to electrically shock the learner with a higher voltage each time. The paid actor would simulate the sound of screaming in pain, so the professors actually believed that they were shocking this man. The scientist would demand the teacher to continue on, against their own consciences, and over 60% of the time, they continued on to what would actually be a fatal voltage. The hypothesis of the experiment was used to explain why so many people followed Hitler during WWII.
Our film is a heavily dramatized version of the event. We shot the film in a small room with a single construction light beaming down on the actor portraying a professor. The actor playing the scientist was off in a corner of the room just over the professor's shoulder. The scientist was off in the shadows of the room to add a sinister feel to the character, which is what we were going for in the original script. Most of the lines uttered by the scientist were actual lines used by the scientists such as "it is absolutely essential that you continue" except they were read in a much more fierce, commanding way than the actual scientist said. The movie came out excellently, exactly as I anticipated. If we had the opportunity to do it over again, I would not change much, except the pace of the dialogue. The original cut ran 6 minutes long and that gave me quite a headache when it came time to edit. Cramming all that information into the span of three minutes was quite the challenge, and much of it was due to the pace I had directed the actors to perform.