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Today in class we did something a little different. As we start week 2 of our portfolio project and our ideas begin to become concrete, it is often needed that someone else outside of our group questions how certain items are going to work, or parts of the story that are confusing. This works as a sort of "reality check" that allows each group or person working on their own project to ensure that their ideas are plausible and that their story is clear in what they want to convey. It often happens that when we're working with our ideas and our project we think we have a solid story, but then someone else listens to it and there's a key detail missing; or we have a cool idea we'd love to try to use in our project but aren't really sure on how it could be done in practice so someone else helps out, two brains think better than one after all.
So, the whole class split into 3 groups, with no one being placed with their own group or partner. My group consisted of Carolina, Andrea, Lydia, JP, Mateo, Eli, Amanda, and, of course, me, and we all had very different ideas of what we wanted for our projects so it was very interesting to see what approach everyone was taking, and, when the ideas/genres were similar, it was fun to see how each person would go about creating their own project that will be incredibly different from the others within the same genre. For example, both Carolina and Eli were working within the mystery/thriller genre but Carolina wanted to work with the idea of an asylum where her main character would be wrongly imprisoned after being named "insane" and a "murderer." Eli, on the other hand, wanted to play with the idea of a therapist seeing many patients who had witnessed a specific traumatic event, but all had different recollections of what had transpired. Carolina had the majority of her plot planned out, with only a few questions regarding flashbacks or transitions that we helped her clear up, and was even looking into some props and costume ideas that she could use such as a hospital gown. She also shared a website that has a guide for film credits to help us when including ours in our film openings. Here is the website: Click Here!. Eli had a less solid idea for her plan but knew the direction she wanted to go in.
Also within the thriller genre, JP's idea for his opening was one of a young boy who had been getting bullied, but then the bully is killed at the hands of this young kid. He had less questions about his story because his team has a very solid plan already, but they were unsure about how to go about the actual "murder scene." Carolina originally suggested that the boy could throw something at the bully's head but Amanda reasoned that only showing their shadows of this would be easier to produce, and we suggested that, so it would be clear that the bullying was the reason he killed him, they could include a voiceover of certain words that the bully said to the kid that really bothered him, as though it was his thoughts or his mind.
Andrea chose to go in a post-apocalyptic/dystopian direction where she shows the world or a city war-ridden and dead as a woman searches for food, which has become increasingly difficult to find. Then she wanted to somehow change the scene to show the past and how the world turned into the disaster that is first shown, so we said she could have this woman be the main character of the film and use a match cut to connect her to her scene of the past, which she told us was a family trying to survive the war happening outside, and she really liked this idea. She also shared this website that she found, called Copyright Alliance, to help us when we search for our music to ensure that we are using music with its proper credit, or, if we cannot get such credit, to know that it has a copyright claim to it. Here is the link to this website: Click Here!
Lydia and Mateo chose sci-fi and crime as their genres, respectively. Lydia thought of having some glasses that allow her character to see into the future, and when they do, they look to see themselves 5 days into the future, dead. So, now, her character wants to figure out how it is that they died, later finding out they were actually murdered, and find out why. We suggested that when they see themselves dead they could act panicked and show that their death really freaked them out and that she could end her opening with someone knocking on the door of their house, hinting that this person could be the probable murderer. She liked some of our ideas and I think we inspired her to include some of them into her project. Mateo wanted a The Godfather (1972) type of film where it is a crime family as they celebrate an important event. He wanted to focus his opening on developing his characters so he wanted to include a narrator voice, the main character's, explaining who his family is and what type of family is (a crime family).
Most similar to my own project, was Amanda's, who also wanted a coming-of-age film, however, hers focuses on Taekwondo. She wants her film to feature a girl who is very passionate about the sport, but as she attempts a particularly tricky move, she injures herself. As Amanda herself practices Taekwondo, she actually had a very solid idea and plan for how to produce her film opening and the only thing she had questions on was on a brief montage she wanted to include before her character performs the tricky move. She wants to use some footage she has of herself from when she was younger to portray the character reassuring herself that she could do the move by thinking of how many years she's practiced Taekwondo, but Amanda didn't know if she wanted videos or photos or both and how to include them so we suggested for her to use mainly videos with maybe a couple of photos here and there, but that she should play around with filters and color settings to give these flashbacks a more "memory" look so it's clear her character is reminiscing.
For me, the meeting was pretty helpful because the group suggested that Sofia and I should use seasons to help portray our main characters emotions and mental health. In happier moments, we should use summer and, in darker moments, seasons like winter or autumn. They also suggested that, in order to hint at the abandonment that one of the characters would feel after the passing of her friend, I should use symbols that represent each character before and after, as well as use little hints in the opening that something is not quite right with the friend, such as pill bottles or other medicinal objects.
Overall, it was a very fun and useful activity that I think we all greatly benefitted from and I'm very glad we did it! Here's us!
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