Jumble of Thoughts is the Best Way to Start......Right?

Wow. I can't believe we are starting already. It's incredible how fast time passes when you're learning something that sparks interest; it seems like just yesterday we were learning about the different shots and angles, as well as viewing cuts and composition. Well, here we are as I begin to write my initial post to our final project. The date is March 10th, 2017. The time is 8:20 A.M. I'm ready; I'm excited; I'm nervous; I'm ready to accept the challenge.

When I first began to think about what I wanted to do for my film opening, I was headset on having a science fiction film about what happens after death, both to the people who stay and the ones who depart; this entire thought process began in October 2016. I imagined a room filled with people: mourners, family, friends, all gathered around a podium, and, on the podium, a body. Throughout the opening, the people would be seen while they went through the service and, at the end, the room would be empty, the color would change, and the corpse would jolt awake and say, "Hello?" I chose he genre of science fiction at the time because it was the Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur, and one of the main themes during this time is being thankful for everything that we have and to reflect on the year that has passed; when I began to think about the year behind me and the project ahead of me, I made a link between the death of my grandfather and the idea that I wanted my project to be a closure for myself about how my grandfather could be in his afterlife. This idea intrigued me a lot, making me think that the audience would be left hanging about happens next and be left to wonder how the story will play out, yet, thoughts change so much in such little time that my idea was bound to change by the introduction to this project.

Just as I predicted, a mere few months changed my whole view on everything. By the time that I received the "Go" for this project, my world had changed so much; so many things have happened in the last few months that my film opening itself had made a complete flip. I wanted to change my film opening to an action film, and I wanted to do this because my life is so fast-paced at the moment that action seems to be the only thing I'm taking; between school and work, friends and family, it seems like I don't have a moment to stop and breathe, and, if I'm being quite honest with myself as well as with the readers who are reading this, I honestly like the rush of my life. By the time that this idea changed to an action film, I was leaning towards a first-person-view film, something amongst the lines of the Disney film Earth to Echo, that would center around a dark area, also deriving inspiration from the children's book Skeleton Creek, by Patrick Carman, for a darker twist. Then, the camera would take the audience to a dark room where an interrogation that would follow the theme of the scene from The Avengers, where Black Widow interrogates the Russian mafia gang members for information, would play out. By the time I got to these thoughts, however, I was discouraged. 

Yet again, I shifted to another idea. Still sticking to the action genre, I imagined a scene played out in park near to where I live that has the creepy woods feel that I wanted, and, drawing the idea from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, I was gonna have a spin on the type of chase that occurred in the woods in the rising action of the movie. Then, a scene from the show, Arrow, was gonna be used as a guideline for the way that I wanted my scene to be executed. In the first episode of the third season of Arrow, "The Calm", a mysterious killing of a beloved character, Sara Lance, plays out; this death was strange because just as Ms. Lance turns around and recognizes her killer, she calls out to the unseen figure as she receives three arrows to the upper torso; then, she falls off of the roof, dead, leaving the audience without the brain-drilling information of who the killer was. I was gonna play around with this, doing a similar scene in which the main character turns around after running away from her persecutor, but I wasn't going to kill the protagonist because I wanted to leave it at a cliffhanger, tempting the audience to want to watch more. I wanted to do this in order to express, yet again, a feeling of rush and persecution, as well as a fun experience and an intriguing finale. Still, this ending still doesn't make me happy, however, and now I am left to swim in my river of thoughts in order to find the perfect film opening to present to my teacher, and to Cambridge, in order to represent the vast variety of techniques and various ideas that we have been taught throughout the year. Will I figure out how to fix this film? Will I come up with a better idea? If one thing is for sure it's that I know I will figure something out. The question is simple: When?

When?

-EC

References: 

MovieclipsCOMINGSOON. "Earth To Echo UK Movie CLIP - Where You Live (2014) - Sci-Fi Adventure Movie HD." YouTube. YouTube, 14 July 2014. Web. 10 Mar. 2017. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcFpsXzFqDE>

"SKELETON CREEK by Patrick Carman." SKELETON CREEK by Patrick Carman | Scholastic.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2017. <http://www.scholastic.com/skeletoncreek/videos.htm>

MovieClipsXD. "The Avengers - Black Widow Interrogation Scene." YouTube. YouTube, 27 Feb. 2015. Web. 10 Mar. 2017. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dB4__mvTyL0>

Pa2593. "The Snatchers Chase Scene [HD] (Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows Part 1)." YouTube. YouTube, 31 Mar. 2011. Web. 10 Mar. 2017. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYbkRq6Iw7I>

"Arrow 03x01 - Sara Lance (Black Canary) Death Scene." YouTube. YouTube, 08 Oct. 2014. Web. 10 Mar. 2017. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_j3tCdOqO3M>