Group Meetings

    Hellooooo so today we met with others to discuss our project progress and help each other out. We went around in a circle describing and explaining our projects, like the story and the elements we had already planned for it. Our teacher decided to do these meetings because it would help us all receive some feedback, and overall just some thoughts on our project.

Others’ progress

When we started the discussions I got to hear how about different people’s projects and where they were they with it. I loved how every person in the group was working on a different genre. Some one had a coming of age, rom-com, psychological thriller, horror, and drama. It made me excited to see how all of their projects will turn out. We all helped out Kat in deciding which plot to choose and also gave her some alternatives in case she didn’t want to choose either. I think this was beneficial for everyone because it helped us know where we stand with each other and it definitely reassured me that we were doing our planning right. I also just love seeing how people get passionate when they’re talking about something they love or love to do. 

Advice I received 

Overall I spent my time describing the plot and the characters and each choice’s purpose. I did not receive critiques because all of the people in my group liked how well thought out our story was. But there was a detail that we haven’t fully developed yet which is the script especially one part of it. This part is the experimentation that the mother does on each kid. The first idea was for her to tell them to do something weird but this detail is important becase later in the opening the main character hears a word associated to what the mother tells the kids to do and for the first time ever remembers something from his past. What the group suggested is to make it more law based like from the society. For example one of the laws is that if you see a child having fun you must hit them back to reality because ‘fun’ is a distraction. In the end we decided on having the mother ask each child what o do if they see another child having fun. In which the child says “you hit them”. The protagonist will realize that when his coworker says “ow why’d you hit me” his biological mother, Beth, used to tell them to hit other children. 

Final Thoughts

Honestly I am glad that our teacher decided to do this because it helped me know where I stand in the development of my project and how many details I was missing. I am thankful that I got to discuss with all of the people in my group because they helped me figure out that crucial small detail of what the mother was going to say to the kids. I’m also glad because I got to help others in their development of their projects so I think it was a win-win. I’m excited to keep working on our project now after hearing how other people were invested in it too. Thank you to all who helped me out today!

Filming Schedule and Cast

Our preferred dates

The best days for filming would be March 9 and 10th. We decided to begin filming that weekend because it is easier for people to film on weekends and because we would be able to film in natural lighting. If we need to reshoot scenes our makeup days will be March 17 and 18th. On the first day we are going to film the files that are sent to Doran because in order to do many other shots of Doran finding the files he has to have them on his computer. We would also film the flashback scenes during the afternoon of this day. This will be filmed in my backyard and around my neighborhood because the flashbacks have a blurry bright light which the sun could naturally give the camera. The second day we would film Doran finding the files and Doran speaking with his coworkers (who he doesn’t know are his siblings).

Cast

The characters in our film opening are: The protagonist (Doran), his siblings: Fidelia, Miriam, and Sage. Doran is 17 and will be played by Sebastian Lotero. Fidelia will be played by Noah. Miriam will be played by Andrea. Sage will be played by Annalise. Doran is of Irish origin and is fearless and smart. He is the oldest of all the siblings and the one who manages to escape. Fidelia in a name in Latin that means loyal and she is the youngest of all the siblings. She speaks Spanish. Miriam is the second oldest and her name means rebel in Hebrew. She speak German. Lastly, Sage is the 3rd child who is wise and all knowing. She speaks Italian. Fidelia is 8 years old in the files, Miriam is 10, and Sage is 9. When they are all seen for the second time Fidelia is 14, Miriam is 16, and Sage is 15. They are all a year apart because their mother Beth decided that it was the easiest way to keep a pattern in the reproduction.

Filming locations

 We will be filming the first shots in a house setting where Doran is finding the files sent to him. We decided on my house because we can move files over, set up a desk and position the camera how we like. Since the first shots are close ups we do not have to rearrange an entire new set. For the videos Doran is watching we will be filming them all in the exact same spot in my living room because all of the children are supposed to be raised in separate houses with identical conditions. The second location will be for the flashbacks in my backyard and the street in front of my house. The third and final location will be recorded in the library for the workplace. We will bring files and laptops from our homes to make the area look like a workplace. 

More Genre research

 Dystopian 

Dystopian films contain specific characteristics like taking place in the future, or in a fictional society. The societies are divided by extreme social and “economic class differences, poverty, environmental devastation, and a loss of individuality.” The protagonist of these stories usually feels trapped or struggling to escape. They’re usually in a very difficult situation. Dystopian films include the hunger games, Divergent, What Happened to Monday, and The Maze Runner. Each story takes place in a different universe, but they all have one thing in common: their protagonist is dealing with a difficult situation that can be life or death and affects not only their life, but their communities, too. 

We took some inspiration from these films, when creating our world specifically from movies like What Happened to Monday, because they live in a society similar to the one in our story. The main character also has many siblings, but they all look the same whereas, in our story, our protagonist doesn’t know that he has siblings. 

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjCw9ecj8iEAxU0RjABHZ4VCMsQFnoECBUQAw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.studiobinder.com%2Fblog%2Fwhat-is-dystopian-fiction-definition-characteristics%2F%23%3A~%3Atext%3DCommon%2520elements%2520of%2520dystopian%2520fiction%2Canarchy%252C%2520and%2520loss%2520of%2520individuality.&usg=AOvVaw1eQaUc6tPdWsyjs6MGMy_C&opi=89978449

The world designed in their story is terrible like ours. The difference is that in our story the protagonist lives in a society where abnormal behavior is not tolerated and the villain is trying to create a perfect society where it is believed that the trauma will instill fear to be perfect in society.

Timeline

Structure and Approach

Today during class we discussed the plot of our film opening and the order of it. The timeline of our story is not shown in order in the film because we have structured it differently to create a more intriguing opening. In our approach we are going to establish the tone and evoke mystery of the plot. The reason we are starting off with mystery is because the protagonist of the story has amnesia due to a concussion. Since the protagonist doesn’t remember his past, it makes the audience feel the same and connected to him in the way that both do not know what is happening. The mystery will be established leading the audience confused and intrigued for further development of the story. The way we’re going to establish the tone is by the editing and speed of cuts and clips, dark lighting, and music in the background that builds up until it climaxes at the title card. We took a lot of inspiration from movies like: Perks of being a wildflower, Black Widow, and Star Wars. In the film The Perks of Being a Wildflower one of the characters had past trauma which he got reminded of when he was in asimilar situation. Our protagonist, like the character, gets flashbacks of his trauma when he hears or sees something of his past. From Star Wars, the twist at the end of our story where the protagonist finds out that the person who inflicted his trauma is his mother, is like when Luke Skywalker finds out that Darth Vader, also the villain in the story, is his father. 

Storyline

Our story is about a boy (the lost file) who is raised by his mother Beth in an unconventional way. Beth is a woman who runs a company that socially experiments and exploits children to see how children raised a certain way interact in the real world. Beth has children from different races and of different ages who she does these experiments on. One boy, the lost file, manages to escape the place but while he is running he runs into a pole and is knocked unconscious. He gets amnesia from this and the people who become his adopted parents find him lying on the road. He now lives in a loving home where he doesn’t remember anything before he escaped. He is 17 years old now when he starts to hear words that seem familiar to him, almost like deja vu. His coworkers (who are his siblings) start to hint at him that something is wrong. One day he receives an email with files of children all being told to do the same thing. He has flashbacks to blocked out traumatic moments when he sees these and calls one of his coworkers because he now knows they are related to this issue. 

Audience perspective

The audience will see this story in a different way. It will begin with shots of the protagonist finding the files with credits cutting back and forth as well as the protagonist’s reaction. After, a title card will appear with the words ‘The Lost File’ as that is the title of our film opening. The cut will lead into a scene of the siblings working together as coworkers. The way the audience will know that they are siblings is because the file shots of the kids in the old camera will have the same names as the coworkers. For example: if one of the kids is called Daisy it will say Daisy on the file camera shot and Daisy on the coworkers name tag. 

The next thing we will begin to work on is the storyboard. We wanted to fully determine the plot before we made the storyboard and shot list. Some notes from today’s class:

Plot aspects

    At the beginning of this week, my partner, Victoria and I started working on the plot of our film opening. She is very creative, and once we discovered which genre we were going for, the plot came naturally to her and we began to build our story. 

    The plot of our story takes place in a dystopian universe where a mother and her company manager create their own social experiment in which they test the mother’s kids in. It is a social experiment where each kid is raised differently with zero outside world independent variables, and limited interactions with other people. By the end of the story, one of her kids figures out they’re being tested on and that if an interaction goes wrong in the real world, they will be exterminated. Our film opening will not include all of this, but in order to have a good film opening we had to know what kind of film we were making.

    We wanted to create a story that was original and not overdone, but also a story that would actually come out in theaters, and not be too exotic. So the film begins with camera shots of all the babies in different houses with the mom talking to them. Although we have our story developed, we have a lot of research left to do on the psychology of people like the mother. 

Schedule

 During our class time this week we developed a schedule of the timeline of our project. 

Week 1-4 is research and planning

Week 5-7 is production and revision

Week 8-9 is our CCR and the overall reflection of our project

    From the start of week one we began brainstorming and discussing our initial plans and how we are going to approach this project. Week two (this week) we chose our genre and started to research film openings particularly from our chosen genres, which are: dystopian, psychological thriller, and a bit of action. Week three we are going to choose how we approach our film opening, develop an outline of our story, and develop a script. In week four we will begin our shot list our storyboard, and we will research possible filming locations as well as develop our filming and editing schedule. 

    At the beginning of week five we will develop mis-en-scene elements, began the actual filming, and if necessary continue our research. Week six we will continue filming begin editing, and begin to develop our responses to CCR questions. Again if needed, we will continue our research. By the end of week seven we will finish our editing, get peer feedback on our final edit, and research more info on our CCR. 

    By week eight we will be on spring break, but we will create our CCR projects and research info of our CCR. We are going to plan around the time that we won’t be here. Week nine is our final week where we will create our final overall project reflection and post our project and CCR to the blog. This will be our submission. 

Genre Research

    Since I am working with a partner, our first goal is to pick our genre which will help us pick our plot. We decided to begin by doing research and watching many different genre film openings in the genres that we were interested in. We used Youtube as our source for research. This was the first title sequence we viewed.

  

    We watched a few others like the maze runner and the Truman show to establish the genre we were going for. After we watched these clips and discussed a few other film openings and plots we eliminated the genres we did not want to do. My partner Victoria came up with a plot of a dystopian film so by the end of our project our genre will be dystopian thriller. 

    After conducting our research and throughly discussing our ideas we came up with the first few shots of our opening sequence which I will show in a storyboard later on. We came up with an overall plot which we will develop in the next week. We also discussed the schedule of or project and each theme of the week. 

Beginning the Project.

I am going to be honest. I have no idea what I am doing yet. We have just begun to brainstorm but I can’t think of anything that’s original or not overdone. Since we do not have many restrictions on this project, I don’t know exactly how to approach it. 

Thankfully, my teacher has many more things to teach us to help approach the beginning of this process. This project requires us to brainstorm and essentially develop the plot of a full length film but the only part that is submitted is the first two minutes of it. 

I think the way I am going to approach this is by thinking of an entire story and then all of the elements to foreshadow or hint later things happening in the story. I am not sure what genre I’d like to do but I definitely want to include many elements to hint to the major plot point of the story with colors and symbols.

Music Marketing 2

The second half of our project began with organizing the information onto the presentation and editing our music video. I was glad to have enough time to work on te presentation, film the music video, and edit the music video. Although the process was slightly intense, I throughly enjoyed the process. What I have learned in this project will definitely help immensely in the future.

Our presentation was developed by organizing our slides and making the overall presentation look cohesive. We discussed what to put on each slide and how much information it should have. Throughout the time we had to work on it we finished each step as fast as we could. Since we had conducted our research before starting on the presentation all that was left to do was apply it to our artist and organize it.

Our music video was an adventure. I definitely enjoyed this part of the process the most. Pretending to be the artist was very fun because of many reasons. First off, one of my group partners and I did a promotional photoshoot together while recording the first part of the video and since we were enjoying our time, we came up with a lot of concepts for the music video that night. I also loved playing the artist because I was able to include some of my talented friends in the video as well. Another thing I loved is seeing how our marketing was working very well! Many people would ask me if I was releasing a song and when the music video was finally released it received a lot of love. 

Overall I loved working on this project. I definitely feel a lot more prepared for my portfolio project and I learned how I work with others. It was a lot of work but I am glad that we did our best, worked hard and had fun while doing it. With every project we do I enjoy it more every time.When I will develop my portfolio project I know where to start and how to complete it now with the help of this project. It feels satisfying to receive support for your hard work.

A few marketing tools:

The Promo video: