FREAKING OUTTTTTT. This week has been so hectic for me with my school work and upcoming competitions and club meetings, I've really only been working on the opening when I'm in class with Faye face to face. THUS I panic-created a schedule for us to try to keep ourselves organized so that we can actually fully produce our film opening.
We have to finish our storyboard as soon as humanly possible because I'm leaving March 13th to compete in the Student Television Network Conference in Long Beach California, therefore, we have to get everything filmed before I leave. Faye and I spoke and realized since our film has no dialogue, a script wasn't really going to be helpful for us, however, we will come up with a shot list to go along with our storyboard. Hopefully, having our deadlines laid out in front of us will help us "lock in" on producing this project.
We've developed the storyboard and we're adding details to the personality of our main character. Now that Faye's sister has agreed to act in our film opening, I can begin imagining an accurate representation of our young artist.
As a guide, we came up with a general outline of timestamps for filming and editing, how we imagine the final product will result in.
Something I pitched to Faye as a way to conclude our opening (and in that same sense, not conclude by continuing the story) is that she breaks her hallucination by getting up to drink water and calm down. We considered the possibility of someone in the house calling out her name to break her from her hallucinogenic trance, but Faye offered that perhaps we use a sound bridge to transition between the two scenes instead of showing the moment she snaps out of it. I loved that idea because it incorporates a more technical, yet simple editing element, but also may create a more seamless and natural transition to the next scene.
The last shot of the opening we decided would be a pan from the character's eyeline to the refrigerator, where it can be read/revealed that she has a Doctor's Appointment that same afternoon. This short, but effective detail adds so much to the opening because it ties back into the complexities of the character and expands upon the idea that she is struggling with something medically and mentally, and we are also considering revealing that the glass of water (originally used as a way to calm down) is also used for her to swallow her pills.
Full Storyboard (Featuring Faye's illegible handwriting)
Faye completed the storyboard after some input I gave her and now I'm getting started on our screenplay. In class, our teacher Señora T. Stok gave us a lesson on screenwriting, which explained mostly to pay attention on making dialogue choices that sound natural or fitting to the scenario being written; however, so far our opening has no dialogue, so we only have to worry about the rest of the screenplay. Completing the screenplay will be vital because the screenplay will allow us to have a clear guide when it comes to filming, and then make editing much easier when all the scenes are organized. T Stok inspired me to log back into my dusty, long untouched, Celtx account, a free scriptwriting tool that we can use to complete our screenplay, so I'm getting started on that.
Well the idea did not stick. Faye expressed her creative block in terms of adapting the story from stage to screen, it wasn't clicking and she was hoping to create a film opening that was more artistic and abstract, like we had discussed early on. I wanted to respect her vision and agreed with her in many aspects, so we started over. After all, the best advice for anyone who is starting out writing is "write what you know" and personally, I don't know anything about lawyers or death for that matter. So "write what you know" we did:
Our new idea would follow a young artist facing artist's block. It's a simple idea to begin with, but one that both of us relate to; Faye and I are both writers who have faced plenty writer's block in the past, and anyone who suffers from being artistically expressive will undoubtedly connect with the story. Our main character feels a cathartic freedom when painting, so when she hits block, anxiety takes over, and it's revealed that she suffers from hallucination as a part of the opening. The hypothetical film would follow her journey as young teenager struggling with her art and her mental health, as well as her social and familial ties (writing what we know!).
The main aspect that drove this idea was a visual choice. To represent her artist's block, Faye explained a phenomena inspired from the show Love, Death, and Robots, Episode Zima Blue where a blue square obstructs the middle of each piece of art created, gradually inducing an ethereal and abstract sense of self art.
For our main character, this is what she hallucinates, her own art with a piece missing from it, leaving the piece incomplete. It represents her artist's block, but can be interpreted in a larger sense that something is missing from her life or in her identity (which would be explored throughout the film).
That's the basics of the idea, and we're working on expanding it and creating a storyboard for it. I'm really excited for this one, its visually engaging and both Faye and I are content with it. More to come soon.
After starting from scratch, Faye and I were a bit stuck. I will admit, in lack of inspiration, I tried to use a story prompt generator as way to just throw ideas out onto the wall and see if any of them would stick. However, not much inspiration was being drawn from "they had been together for 25 years" or "she was carried along by the crowd." They were... okay prompts... but it wasn't what we wanted or original at all (because it is quite literally generated by a computer).
Bless her heart, Faye offered up one of her ideas that she was hoping to develop into a 10 minute stageplay, but was willing to give it up for the sake of this project. The story would follow a young lawyer meeting Death, and seemingly attempt to bargain with him.
Immediately I jumped into the idea, beginning to imagine what a meeting with Death looks like:
We imagined a scene with low but dramatic lighting, similar to that of a detective interrogation.
The ideas were starting to form and we began making plans. Faye's dad could possible play Death, as he already owns a large hooded Grim Reaper costume, while Faye could play the young lawyer. Since the meeting needed to be filmed in a dark area, we thought about clearing out Faye's garage and setting it up with a table and a light. We were imagining our own take on the afterlife, considering ways to make the background look completely black, almost as if the two characters were suspended in mid air, floating in a void, as this lawyer tries to bargain for their life.
In terms of opening the film opening, I wanted to establish this young lawyer as very successful, working in a city, and clearly going places with their life (which would give reason for why the lawyer wants to bargain with Death later). I talked to Faye about potentially opening with a short sequence or montage of a city, where we could begin the credits, and it would establish the setting, then focus back onto the main character.
While business and legal attourneys are different jobs with different moods, I did imagine a big city office bustling like Wall Street, and the opening of 1987 Wall Street establishes that in its opening by clearly identifying the city of New York through its long shots of skyscrapers and monuments.
Of course, we don't have a drone or crane that can get aerial shots, but I wasn't opposed to shooting skyscrapers from a low angle as it adds to the colossal heights of these buildings. I proposed that we could drive to Fort Laudedale or Miami and realistically get enough shots for a short 20 second sequence in the beginning, however, I could tell Faye wasn't really loving the idea. Driving out to the city didn't seem like something she was that fond of, especially because we scrapped the old idea partially due to the fact that we wanted to film inside in a controlled environment.
However, we decided to refocus and work out what exactly the story was. Originally, we discussed that the ending of the opening would find that the lawyer has found a way to come to a compromise with Death, or a challenge where they try to switch jobs. The lawyer would agree to having to reap souls all day, while the arrogant young lawyer challenged Death to deal with one day in the law firm. Though, this got us thinking that maybe we could introduce Death's job earlier, alongside while we introduce the lawyer's job, and cut back and forth between the lawyer's office and Death's office, until the lawyer ends up in Death's office after dying. But incorporating the city sequence would have to be scrapped if we wanted to compare and contrast between the two character's jobs since we need enough time for a scene with dialogue during their meeting. This is where that two minute limit constricts us and has us pick and choose.
Anyway, we weren't able to discuss much after that, but we have yet to commit to the idea fully, as I can see that there's doubt in Faye's eyes when it comes to "the vision." We'll see if this is the one that sticks.
Oh boy. Despite my previous expression of anxiousness and indecision, I believed the pre-production phase was going well. Faye and I had already come up with a structure for our opening, and on top of that, already refined it and restructured it, to the point we believed it was ready to be storyboarded.
Come Friday however, we have class and for our benefit, we review and watch film openings created by AICE Media AS students before us. They were all very well done, and specifically used a lot of carefully crafted mise en scene elements such as set design and props. Our under construction film opening had nothing of the sort. When Faye and I spoke, she expressed the wish to completely scrap everything we had discussed for the past week and start over anew. Something that we could meticulously craft and an idea with a bit more originality, as well as possible to execute within our low budget. Since I was already on the fence about the violence of the original opening, I agreed, and we decided to start from a blank slate.
Now instead of ahead of the groups around us, we felt behind. Previously, we felt pretty good about ourselves since we already had a plot and structure planned, as well as literal shots we wanted. We were already beginning to discuss technical details we wished to incorporate. Starting over put us right back at square one, the same place many of our peers were at Day 1 of the project as well.
Hi! I’m writing this after the first ever FaceTime call I’ve had with my teammate. It was very productive and successful (well up until the point that my phone died that is). But we were able to discuss a general idea of what the film opening is going to be.
I opened a Google Doc to help me keep track of what Faye was saying and the ideas she had so that later I could do more research and come to definitive conclusions about the choices we want to implement. This is what I’ve compiled thus far:
Our film opening is a drama. As Faye described her initial ideas for striking and carefully crafted shots, as well as a tense and violent relationship between the two main characters, I realized that the genre that would best suit our endeavor is dramatic. However, this led me down a road into researching what exactly a drama is, and I began to become hyper-concerned over defining the genre. I read an article that referenced “The Screenwriters Taxonomy” which says
“All film descriptions should contain their type (comedy or drama) combined with one (or more) of the eleven super-genres.”
However, when I read out a list of these super genres (crime drama, horror drama, romantic drama, science fiction drama, sports drama, etc.) none of them applied to the story we were imagining of telling. So I texted Faye about this issue and did some research.
Going back to our phone call, Faye had spoken about how she was inspired by an excerpt from Raging Bull, the opening scene that we had reviewed in class towards the beginning of the year.
This opening shot became very famous because, while the camera was still, the slow-motion movements of Robert DeNiro captivated the viewer, while the opening credits rolled by slowly, setting a dramatic tone for the film. The idea of using movement to create visually engaging shots is something we want to prioritize for our shots in our own film opening, and therefore when I realized Martin Scorsese directed this film, I decided to cross-reference his works, since we were so drawn to this one.
This brings me back to figuring out the genre, as I searched “Scorsese drama films”, more results than I could handle popped up, and I started scouring the IMBD page of each one to see what genres and subgenres they fell under. This is where I found that Raging Bull was a biography sport drama, Killers of the Flower Moon is a crime historical drama, The Aviator is a historical drama, Casino is a crime drama, Taxi Driver is a crime drama and many more fall under dramas with their super-genre that helps define the story of the film. If these were the types of films we were inspired by, as well as non-Scorsese films such as Society of the Snow (adventure biography drama), Joker 2019 (crime thriller drama), and Oppenheimer (historical biography drama) then I felt that we needed to incorporate elements into our opening and change our ideas of what we believe the film was and how the introduction of it would be, in order to better compliment a more specific genre. I believe our storytelling would come out stronger because of it, if we make sharper more defined moves early on in pre-production.
Reference: Williams, Eric R. (2017) The Screenwriters Taxonomy: A Roadmap to Creative Storytelling. New York, NY: Routledge Press, Studies in Media Theory and Practice. ISBN978-1-315-10864-3.
As I asked my friend in class for the notes from the period I missed, I realized that I really wanted to work on the Portfolio Project with her. However, our teacher let us know that for this project, most students work alone, and I knew she probably found that idea appealing. Though to explain, the reason I really want to work with her is because we made our music video together, and I think our creative teamwork on the actual video itself is what led to our success (Truly I am really satisfied and proud of that project). I admire her unique creative outlook and with my knowledge of technical skills, we make a great team.
So, I pitched a proposition to her: If she lets me work with her, I’ll help bring her creative vision to life (and the bribe there is that I have access to professional cameras and equipment provided by our school’s television club that I’m a part of, that we could probably use to work on this project). Long story short, she said yes!!!!!!!!!!!
I’m quite busy this week but in the end, I was able to organize a time to call so that we can begin to talk about ideas for genre, plot, and planning process. I think working with someone will ultimately be to both of our benefits, as we can improve each other's ideas, remind each other to blog, and overall hold each other accountable for producing the best quality work possible out of us. We’ll be calling on Tuesday around 8:30 hopefully…
This is it. It's time. The Final Portfolio Project: The Film Opening.
My current mission right now is to begin researching. I was absent last class because I was out on a field trip (WORTH IT BECAUSE I WON FIRST PLACE IN MY AUDIO/RADIO COMPETITION WOOOOO), so I have yet to see what types of Film Openings there are out there and the type I would most like to do. But ultimately it will come down to what genre I want to explore, my film intention, and the cumulation of everything we've learned this year.
What I did begin to break down today was the essentials of the project: it must include titles, the actual opening (NO RESOLUTION OF STORY!), and must be a minimum (and maximum) of two minutes. Plus the Creative Critical Reflection after the opening.
We'll see how this goes... I'm excited. Hopefully I'll find someone to work with but that's it for now. I'll come back with more research and more of a plan.
Today I was scrolling through Instagram and I saw a story posted by Shortcuts that reminded me that Palm Beach Student Showcase of Films Festival extended their submission due date. Since my group and I had just finished and submitted our Music Video projects I thought "why not", checked the website, and what do ya know, they had a music video category.
So I sent a quick text to my group and submitted our project, and since I had to make an account for FilmFreeway anyway, I went ahead and submitted our music video to my school's first annual film festival. I feel really proud of how our music video came out, especially because of the short amount of time it was completed in, so here's a link to view our submission on the official FilmFreeway website. Maybe I'll submit it to more festivals, and I hope we win :)
Over the past two weeks, I've been working with a team of my closest classmates in order to develop, not only a music video, but an entire marketing campaign for the fictional band Doldrum. This post will contain a collection of photos, clips, and my overall thoughts on the project.
