Why am I so busy.

 SCHEDULING  IS SO HARD! 

Around this part of the project, we should be starting to film and edit. Sam and I are still behind because of our extremely hectic schedules. Now we've tried to sit down and talk about when we want to film or when things need to be done but the best time frame for us to do anything would be after the project is due. SO THAT'S NOT GONNA WORK!

The list of how much we do in and outside of school over the next month or so really conflicts with our filming schedule. Both Sam and I are competing in a national competition that requires 8+ hour practices every weekend, which is exactly how long it takes to film.. anything! Aside from this competition, another part of this club requires me and a few others to make a 20-minute weekly news magazine and while Sam doesn't have to make a video, she is one of the main producers, so she has to manage everyone else. But a quick little sidebar back to the competition I mentioned earlier, 15 days from now we leave for Long Beach California for a WEEK. AN ENTIRE WEEK. While up there we get no spare or leisure time as we are going to be constantly on the move so for that entire week we cannot film at all. That's 2 weeks before the portfolio deadline. Plus we have our schoolwork. 

It's really nerve-racking having no time to film something super important BUT we have a plan of sorts. Until we find a time frame best to film we will deeply and heavily plan parts of our portfolio project such as the storyboard, script, stage directions, and props so that when the time comes to film we are all set to go and don't have to think about ANYTHING.

haha...

Do We Have A Script?

 Yes and No. 

We don't have dialogue but we have a Screenplay..? I think that's what it's called? Where it's just what's going to happen on screen when there's no dialogue yet. 

We do have a BIT of dialogue but none for the main characters. 

We plan to work on a script within the next upcoming days, that way we can solidify the idea and how it'll be fully executed. 

ASSEMBLE !!

 Today in class our advisor put us in groups to discuss and flesh out our film-opening ideas. 

In my group, I had Josh, Mariana, and Cyrus. 

Our little group group 

I was the first to speak and tell everyone about our (Sam and I's) idea and at first, it took them a while to understand what the idea was so Josh told me to "put it in a sentence or less" to which I said "history repeats itself" which I feel was a pretty valid response, but it also made me realize it might be a little overcomplicated in words since the concept is a bit hard to describe so many we need to tone it down a bit. 

Cyrus!!

Cyrus went next and his idea was a really cool concept inspired by Creed. His original idea was about two boxers training. He said that he wanted to include more of a unique aspect to his opening storyline-wise. So Josh initially suggested including maybe a family member in the hospital so they need the money from the fight to pay for the medical bills. Now I thought that was such a good idea but then Josh said something the complete opposite of that directly after so we didn't circle back to the idea until slightly later. Cyrus seemed to really like the idea so we discussed it more and it seems that Cyrus is going to include some of the ideas discussed in his Opening!

Josh!!

Josh was next to share his idea. He had this really cool idea to make an opening focused on a basketball player and his personal story. Once we got deeper into fleshing out the little details of our ideas, Josh had the idea to include a very large yet sensitive topic in his opening but he didn't seem to want to fully focus on that aspect which I felt could've been a really good missed opportunity, so I made the suggestion that he should focus on that aspect more or just not to include it or focus on it at all. I think he took that into consideration so we shall see how it turns out!! 

Mariana!!

Mariana and I talked about the idea that her group had been full proofing and thinking of different ways to execute it. She was telling me how they'd gone through so many ideas and aren't satisfied with any so I gave some ideas on how to solidify their idea. But it seemed like the idea they had already Mariana seemed to like it so I hope they go with that idea because it was a good idea!! 

I'm excited to see all their ideas come to fruition they're all such good ideas

We are in a committed relationship with our storyboard !

Honestly, I do not like to storyboard. 

As a news package person who's usually always just on the go, our advisor makes me slow down enough to actually make a storyboard. Now I'm very well aware that they are extremely useful in keeping track of shots and such I just hate slowing down when I'm excited. LUCKILY I work with someone who loves doing storyboards, the wonderful Sam. 

We've worked together on previous projects as well as in other classes so we, for the most part, know how we work together. So our system goes: brainstorm, have an amazing idea and get sidetracked from it, more ideas ideas ideas, forget to write it all down, start writing it down brainstorm again, make an outline. So storyboarding is a very close last in our planning since we need to get everything in order before thinking of how it's going to go in the story. But this time our process went a bit differently, since our last project, Time Is Running Out, was a little rough around the storyboard we decided to get more intimate with our storyboard. 

This time we decided to be more specific on the actual storyboard itself adding details about specific shots and what to add to the edit later on in the process. Plus we both are on the exact same page with the storyboard and how the opening is going to play out. So we have a good idea of how our opening will go!

You might wanna read the storyboard to our song that'll be in the scene for a better experience ;)

Flightless bird.  

(it wouldn't allow for the video, sorry)

Character planning is the best part

Character design is easily the most fun part of any film or project. Having the power in your hands to make a personality from scratch and giving them their quirks and traits to make someone completely opposite of yourself or anyone is just exhilarating for me. 

We have a main character but also an unseen character. We decided to change the name of our main character from Anne to Layla, when we researched names Sam found the name Anne meant solitude in another language which was perfect but we later found out it means the exact opposite so we settled on Layla as Layla in Arabic means "Dark one". Layla will be set in the present time and our unseen artist, Cam, will be set in the past. 

The character Cam is seen as eccentric as they strictly stick to art and are secluded most of the time. They started out doing art as something they enjoyed as a hobby but started getting recognition through it, which was never enough, and always wanted more, ultimately leading to their downfall. We chose the name Cam as it's very gender neutral and being an artist most painters tend to be very open and free (along w VERY eccentric) so we felt that name best represented them. 

Cam Dream board:

Cam Immediately reminded us of David bowie so their looks/clothing is mostly inspired by him. They're a very flamboyant character. They're very egotistical, if their work isn't the best of the best they lose it.  They're a bit rough around the mental edges as they always strive to be first regardless of how popular they've gotten,  they always need more which will be shown in our opening through old pictures spread around the room during the credits. 

Layla Dream Board: 

Layla is the main character of our story. She's a bright-eyed excited and passionate artist. But very obsessed with Cam and his work from the past. She ASPIRES to be exactly like cam without knowing the path cam ultimately went down. Layla is the borderline stalker type of obsessed. She has all of his old artwork, old magazine interviews, and newspaper pages with Cam's name/face on them.   

Mise-en-scene Outish-ine

 Our story revolves around art and artists. 

And art tends to be very messy and disorganized (which greatly symbolizes our characters). So our set design will be very messy and chaotic, we are renting a small blank studio to mess it up (not damage it because we can't afford to pay for damages) and making it look to how it would fit each of our characters.

We plan to spend an entire day when we aren't busy to just paint a bunch of stuff and probably our main needed prop which, you guessed it, is a painting. In our opening, this main painting is going to be in both stories but be the main subject our story revolves mostly around.  

Our characters will also be covered in paint it's only natural 

Maybe not as dramatically placed as these two images but definitely covered in paint (and blood) :) !!!

Inspo 1

Inspo 2 

Shots Shots Shots !

 As a camera person, shots are so fun to plan since through camera work ideas come to life and get portrayed almost exactly how we plan. 

Since our idea is a psychological piece a lot of our shots and what happens in them are going to mess with the mind, for both our characters. In the beginning, we open with the end of Cam's(our main unseen character) story and the beginning of Annes(our main character). At the end of Cam's story, we see his downfall, his mental collapse so as to drive the intensity of his situation most of the shots in this scene are going to be handheld tracking movements. 

We are going to be going through many of cams paintings and work as he tears them up throws them and demolishes his life work so during that chaos we would glaze of one of his untouched paintings maybe the main centerpiece and the title of the film would be on the corner so that would be our name of the film and it would cross dissolve to one of the eyes of our characters which then they would match cut to each other, one with blood and one with paint in the same spot, to symbolize they're kinda about to be in a similar situation. 

Psycho (1960)

Now Sam and I have watched a lot of films similar to what we want to try to do in our opening, and one that stood out the most was Opal, a demented version of Penny from Peewee's Playhouse in my humble opinion. Now Opal was a claymation short film by Jack Stauber where a young girl named Opal was living in a false reality to escape from her very bad one.

Opal (2020)
She's so cute and silly looking I love her

But I loved the look of the claymation shake like stop motion shake where it's not completely smooth with the movements and it made me think of films/shows from the 1940-50s where since they filmed on a reel, not all the movements were smooth, especially for horror films, the zooms weren't smooth but they were still unsettling. So I talked to Sam about it and Sam loved the idea so we would definitely incorporate that into our opening so we can try to achieve it.

I like research until I don't

Sam and I did some research while we waited for ROAR to get back to us to kind of pinpoint our idea down, Sam had this vision of Jack Stauber type of warped reality like the short film Opal and Baby Hotline (mostly at 0:22) which is just demented versions of Penny from Peewee's Playhouse in my humble opinion. But we wanted to focus a lot on the psychological aspect since that's the route we want to take so we researched a lot of psychological thrillers and suspense films such as Fractured, Opal, Whiplash, The menu, and black swan, to really get the feel of how to produce a psychologically aimed opening/ film. 

We took at least one thing from each film to include in our opening that adds a sense of discomfort. From Fractured and Opal, we wanted to showcase the two realities of each artist and show the different perspectives of the situation, a sort of warped reality. In Whiplash, the artist tortures themselves since one of our main characters goes down a path where they eventually kill themself unknowingly just like in Black Swan while trying to kill a doppelgänger for themselves only to end up hurting themselves. 

WHAT JUST HAPPENED.

 OK, so crazy thing happened today. 

In the last post, I brought up how sam had a song that inspired our idea: "Flightless Bird" by ROAR. As we were planning today, we realized that the song would be so perfect for us to use in our opening, we also came up with the idea to make it diegetic meaning it's incorporated in the world of our film. But anyways THATS BESIDES THE POINT. This morning Sam and I decided to DM the band on Instagram to see if we could use the song for our opening. We originally planned to send an email but the only available emails provided were strictly for touring and booking. We both were fully expecting to get a response like 2-3 weeks from now, mind you sam and I have been fans of this band for a while so we were nervous to even send the message itself (we did it anyways but we had someone else push the button). 

After we sent the message we stared at the dm for a few minutes then continued on with our normal daily activities (I completely forgot about it already) AND THEN not even 2 hours after we sent the message they replied. 

OH EM GOSH. WHAT. Sam and I were fully in math class when the message came through and my mouth DROPPED, my hand covered my mouth and I sat like that for a good 7 minutes before spamming Sam about their response. It's so surreal even if they only said a singular sentence. We are both still so
starstruck. 

Our opening now with access to the song is going to be so good. The meaning behind the song and the way the song sounds itself is like the cherry on top. To open the song builds up in the beginning so we are going to use that build-up for our credits then when the beat drops and it swells is when the effects of our story take place. Eventually, it'll cut to our MC and the song would be played as a vinyl switching to diegetic sounds. 

For better context of what I mean here's the song: Flightless Bird

Lets See How This Goes !

The long-awaited project. 

Honestly, I've been thinking about what to do for this project since our advisor brought it up back in August, and for every project it's been in the back of my mind. So the fact that it's here already is very surreal to me. But I've gone through so many ideas and was worried that I wouldn't end up with one in a timely manner BUTTT the other day in class I was talking with my dear friend Sam about this project and we both weren't sure if we wanted to work alone or not but later that day we ultimately decided that it would be cool if we did so we went through a few ideas and figured that an idea sam had would be our best option! I'm so excited to start thoroughly planning the idea it's such a cool idea, Sam had brought up the fact that it was inspired by a song called "Flightless Bird" by ROAR, and the song is so perfect for the idea...maybe we'll use it who knows ;)

Time has indeed run out.

Recap 

The project's first half was mostly research and planning our video. We started planning relatively late and last minute since we waited until two classes after we were given the assignment to actually do some useful planning. The first thing we did was make the schedule of when we wanted to get things done (mind you this was on a Wednesday) and luckily we got our idea down super quick I think my group was really good with communication, especially Brooke who would bring me and sam back from film cloud 9 and give us the reality. We settled on a couple struggling with drugs; one wanted to help the other quit. The one thing that came super fast was filming.

Filming

 We decided to get filming done that coming weekend on Sunday and Sunday only since we were all busy otherwise. So that meant we had one day to film an entire 4-minute video

(me getting a shot of sam)

(since we are overachievers and wanted to do the full song). We also set in stone that the storyboard had to be done before Sunday since we needed it to film. But we ran into an issue: who was going to be our actors on such short notice. Now it was my job to recruit our actors so I was scrambling to ask people and by Friday we only had 1 solidified actor, Tristan, who would be the partner of our drug addict. Tristan was originally supposed to be The drummer to our lead singer because Cyrus said he had a drum set and Sume was originally supposed to be a band but we had to very quickly adapt since nobody had a drum we could use. But that wasn't important at the time we still needed our face for this whole thing, our lead singer. So one morning I was talking to sam about who we could possibly use,  But on that super special wonderful morning, my lovely bestie Andrew was sitting in the back of the TV room when I remembered his TV3 music video where he played the lead singer and the scream I screamed at that moment of excitement of finding our last important actor was like a holy grail.

To my surprise, he accepted my offer pretty quickly without many details or questions. I thought he was joking, but he pulled through in the end.  So now we had our lead singer but who was going to be our main actor.. Sam and I had asked about 5 people and nobody could work with us so Sam decided to step in, now we had our whole team and we were ready to film. Come filming day we decided to meet around 12 so had to move very quickly since Andrew had to be home by 5 and Tristan by 6. Our first stop was Markham park. We chose Markham to film the outside scenes because it had the woodiest look to it and we wanted it to feel kind of desolate. We spent 20 minutes driving around Markham to find a good spot to film and we ended up choosing an area near this frisbee throwing course, which in retrospect was not super safe with flying projectiles everywhere but we got the shits so it's fine. Once we picked our specific spots we started filming, Brooke was in charge of keeping us on track with the storyboard, Sam and I were directing and poor Cyrus was helping with what he could, we had to move so fast because of time he was probably confused 85% of the time. We got some shots of Andrew singing outside that we never ended up using but we had them just in case, then we moved to a very woody area we came across to film the rest of sams scenes which took a lot more time than we expected we left around 12:30 and finished closer to 2:30. During this filming period we all discussed props that we needed to pick up and food since of course we had to eat and Brooke decided to go run those errands once we got back to the house. While we awaited our knight and shining Brooke we started setting up for all of Andrew's scenes since he had to leave soon.

We had a very specific look we wanted to achieve with colors, where Sams character would be red to show aggression whereas Tristan's character would be in blue to show passiveness with tints of green for that psychedelic look and every now and then we'd have some purple in between to show togetherness so we wanted to show both of those on the lead singer since in our campaign he's struggled with drug addiction so he knows both aspects of each character, we were lucky that a friend of ours had RGB(red green blue) lights that we could use to achieve our goal. Once Brooke returned with our “drugs” and a sidequest of Publix popcorn chicken we started to really get into filming. Unfortunately as great as Andrew was it took a while for him to warm up to everyone watching him, which is why in some of the beginning scenes when he shows up in the music video he's stiffer than in the end, which honestly worked out in our favor making it seem as he was getting angrier as the story progresses. But after a few takes, I had the grandest idea to make it slightly more dramatic: to have the lights rapidly change color and have Andrew's hair blow effortlessly through the wind of a hairdryer. After we wrapped up on Andrew, he left immediately after.

Now it was time for Tristan and Sam’s scenes. At this point, it was already 5pm so we ended up making Tristan stay longer than intended. Cyrus ended up leaving around 6pm so I and Brooke took over directing we got a lot done during this time since both Tristan and sam work well on camera but as the night went on and the delusion of being exhausted started to hit everyone plus all of the “drugs” (candy) we had eaten it was like prime time to film since we had the motivation to finish as quickly as possible. Right as we almost finished filming, around 8pm Tristan had to leave and with him Brooke so I and Sam finished up the music video since it was one scene and it was the last scene. 

(taken after sam and I finished)

Editing 

So we all decided that since Sam and I have the most editing experience we'd be the main ones to edit. I was the first one up to edit from Monday to Wednesday then sam would edit from Wednesday to Friday since on our personal schedule the edit had to be done by Saturday for us to practice our presentation on Sunday to be prepared for Tuesday. After we wrapped filming Sam quickly transferred all the files to a flash drive for me to start editing right away.

I realized when I got home to start editing that we were NOT specific enough on our storyboard and I was missing a few files since we filmed on two separate cameras so I was mostly lost for the first few hours of editing and would have to ask sam where things would go, but I got a basic line edit out and then come Wednesday sam would take over the edit for final touches. 

Presentation 

Editing for the most part went smoothly on

both ends, The last Friday before filming we started the presentation and put information into it while also dividing up who gets which slides to do and present. We each did 2 slides, not including the music video slide but we found out nobody could practice the presentation on Sunday so we moved it to Monday over facetime. On Monday we got A LOT done it was supposed to be mostly just for practice but we ended up sharing more ideas with each other to include in our presentation and you can't make a group presentation if everyone is not on the same page so I feel Monday was good for all of us. Our small group presentations went really well. We presented, then discussed things we should change and add. Come presentation day we originally planned to hand out “drugs” (candy baggies) as a way to interact with our “investors” but I think we all just froze at the last minute. We all had so much to say but I think the only one who got everything out thoroughly was Cyrus, he basically carried all of us since we were so nervous.

I realized right before we went up to present, that my information was all out of order so when it came time for me to speak it didn't sound concise or “right” I guess, and ended up being completely lost in what I was saying. Now I knew what I wanted to say and how we wanted it done but the nerves and having messed up my information just threw me for a loop. I think overall we did well on our presentation regardless of what happened.

Closing thoughts

(A still from our video)

I learned that communication is key even if your team has good communication! It was the most important part for us. I also learned that we need to write down specifics in our storyboard so editing will be done easier and that I should check my information before presenting. So these are all things I will be taking with me from here on out on any project.