The entire film was shot in one night. At one point toward the end of shooting, the actual restaurant location began filling up with confused staff members, managers, waiters, and chefs who all sat and watched the crew finish shooting.
Though they workshopped their characters and basic plotlines with directors beforehand, the Kids of Widney High completely improvised all their dialogue, and most of the story on the spot. These changes sometimes drastically altered the rest of the film's scenes.
Each individual vignette was shot as its own separate short film, later edited together as if everyone was actually in the restaurant at the same time. Tanesa and Shelly's sequence was shot last, at 10:30 in the morning. To engender the illusion that it was still dinner time, an elaborate tent was created around the couple to guard from the blast of light cascading through the entire side of that restaurant.