Advances Advances......Let's Keep Them Coming.

Phew! My last post was so liberating. Prior to the sudden wave of ideas that hit me this weekend, I felt like Atlas, the Titan from Greek Mythology, having to carry the weight of the world on my shoulders. However, following my great realization, I feel like a giant weight has been lifted off of me; like I've been relinquished from carrying the weight of the world. The issues that worried me last week have been vanquished; still, the factors and the process that awaits the next several weeks terrify me.

The first thing that I did about this project during the time following my revelation was to picture who I wanted for my main actress. I decided that one of my close friends, Megan, would be perfect for the part if she would be willing to be my main character. This is because Megan has the vibe of a girl who is ready to set off on an adventure and she is also who I imagine when I picture my main character. I made these choices because, for my friend, she fits the part perfectly! Megan is the kind of person who has no problem in portraying the emotion that she needs to when the time is right, which makes this project more powerful, at least in my mind, because from the moment we see the main character, the emotions are the most vital part of the film opening. Megan has a nice blonde shortish hair and her expressions are perfect for the character that I want to portray. For the male asynchronous voice of the dead boyfriend, I chose to give myself the part. When I decided to use myself for the voice message narrations, I did it with the idea in mind that the voice messages would have to be an exact length to allow the images to match the voice narration perfectly, and, me being the one who speaks the messages allows me to have the flexibility to make the appropriate changes according to my personal schedule.

The next thing I did was to go on Garageband and play around with the sound editing options. I chose Garageband because I know how to use Garageband from previous experience and I find it easier to move that sound into iMovie which is the video editor I know how to use best. After playing around for about half an hour, I finally found that the "Megaphone" setting sounded really similar to what I need for a voicemail-machine sound. I played around a little and even recorded some test runs of the recording I wanted to have.

Finally, I added an idea to the film opening that I chose to do. Instead of just having the main character open her eyes the moment that the voice message from the police department finishes, I decided to add a small scene that can either be taken as a nightmare or as a message from the beyond in which the main character sees her boyfriend in the way he looked before he died. Then she is going to jolt awake and begin to cry. After all of this, she straightens up, walks over to the box, and the scene continues as planned. I got the idea for this scene from the first couple of seconds of the trailer to the television show Proof. I want to do this because I want the audience to get a view of the boyfriend and to get an image of what actually happened to him. 

I have decided to label the genre of this film opening as a realistic fiction because the film opening is about a story that hasn't necessarily truly happened but it's possible that it could in our world as it exists. I also have decided that my target audience are teenagers and young adults, most likely from the age of 15-25 years of age.  

So far, I think my project is showing a lot of promise. I just hope that soon all my ideas will be put into place and that the actual filming, which I am so thrilled about, will actually commence. 

-EC

Reference: 

Tvpromosdb. "Proof (TNT) Official Trailer [HD]." YouTube. YouTube, 16 May 2015. Web. 12 Mar. 2017. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_wK6P0DJr8>

Epiphany......Finally!

Ha! Eureka! I think I have solved my problem! I don't need to fix my ending to the latest film opening idea that I blogged about because I got an even better idea. Ideas do come from the weirdest places but I guess that gives it an extra sense of pleasure when they sneak into your mind and explode your brain, making your heart race with excitement.

Here's what happened: 

I was out with my family and we had gone to see a violinist, Itzhak Perlman. My parents were really excited to see him; I wasn't elated to go but I wasn't really discouraged either. Once we arrived, we took our seats, got ready to listen, and, as soon as the violinist played the first note of the theme from Schindler's List, my minded drifted elsewhere. I began to imagine myself running through the woods in the park near my home. I was running: running fast; running far; running for my life. Then, I tripped over a branch and fell, and, while I got up, the figure chasing me caught up to me. I could hear the branches moving, the wet leaves, every single one of them, dripping droplets of water. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Then, I was outside of my body. I saw my figure blurred in the background as a dark figure got closer and closer to me, yet the focus was on a single dripping leaf. As the final drop fell, I was back in my body. I stared straight ahead and, the moment that I stared at my opponent- Nothing.

I couldn't bring myself to think about that for one more second. It was an interesting story, but I would not end it that fast; therefore, I had two choices: 

1. Cut the chase scene into a shorter version in which an extended ending I hadn't come up with would have to be created with greater success.

2. Come up with something completely different. 

I went with option number two. 

The new story that I thought of goes like this:

Really soft music playing in the background will introduce the scene along with a beeping sound will begin to play back a set of voice messages. The camera will begin recording a bit after the sound begins. Then, the screen will fade in from black to a single-colored bedroom wall viewed from the floor. As the camera begins to move away from the wall, the floor will be seen as completely bare of anything. However, as the camera keeps backing up, the floor becomes more and more messy, filled with tissues and such. As the camera continues to back away and circle around the room, pictures of a happy-looking couple looks into the camera on printed images that lay on the floor. As the camera continues its full circle around the room, the clutter becomes even greater. While the whole room is being shown from the floor, the sound plays back "cute" messages from a male voice that is gathered to be the male in the images. Then, as the camera begins to rise onto the bed, the message playing finishes, and, right as the camera focuses in on the person laying in the bed, who just happens to be the girl from the pictures, a new message is played. The message is from the captain at the local police department and he is telling the girl about how sorry he is to inform the protagonist about the death of her boyfriend and that he hopes they can talk soon to try and lead an investigation with her collaboration. At the moment the message finishes playing, the girl opens her red, puffy eyes and looks straight into the camera, all noise, even the dim music, having had gone away. She sits up on the bed, giving the audience a semi-full view of the bedroom, and then she stands. She walks over to the other side of the room, kneels down on the floor, and opens a box. From the box, she pulls out a letter and, as she opens it and you see her eyes staring at the letter, the camera behind the paper, the voice of the boyfriend sounds inside her head saying "Dear _________". Then the introduction to my film will end.

The biggest influence I had when thinking about this idea, due to the fact that I didn't get any inspiration from any actual source of media but rather from music. The moment that everything clicked into place was when the violinist started to play the main theme from Schindler's List. That moving and highly emotional song made me want to make something about a person who, despite the death around them, manages to get up and begin the process of grieving and moving on through life. This song really helped my thoughts flow the most and they helped me focus more on what was going on in my head.

-EC

Reference: 

XXm4n0jXx. "Best Soundtracks Of All Time - Track 35 - Schindler's List Theme." YouTube. YouTube, 17 Aug. 2010. Web. 11 Mar. 2017. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VorGotjeLjM>

Martyprod2. "Theme From Schindler's List Conducted by John Williams (featuring Itzhak Perlman)." YouTube. YouTube, 14 July 2011. Web. 17 Mar.2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPRkZxlBAqI>

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>