Flying Popcorn Everywhere

 Today we were able to meet with our advisor, Mrs. Stocklosa, and speak to her about how our project is coming along. She makes sure that she meets with each group in our class to make sure that we're staying caught up with all parts of our project.

Initially, when we went up to her, we believed that this meeting would be more negative because we thought that we were slightly behind compared to the rest of the people in our class. The opposite was true, however, because after having a fun conversation with Mrs. Stocklosa about flying popcorn everywhere, she assured us that our project was moving at the correct pace. 

Along with the timing of our project, we also discussed some ideas of how to visually show our character's wants without explicitly stating it in a script. Since our character wants to be the owner of an inn, Mrs. Stocklosa suggested that we create a corkboard and include it in a few shots to establish our character's goals.

Lastly, she said that she agreed with our decision to change from a period piece to our current idea, as it would have been challenging to create the proper environment needed to make it look realistic. She also said that our current idea seems to have the potential to be good. Overall, this meeting was very educational and successful and I'm glad that it was as positive as it was.

A Long Week

 This week, we were placed in a lockdown on two separate occasions. This made it difficult for my partner and me to meet up in person, so today we decided to FaceTime and create a mood board for our film opening. 

The first thing we wanted to figure out was our character's name. We know that she is going to have a determined, hardworking personality so we wanted her name to reflect that. I went onto the internet and looked up some names that could roughly translate to hard-working. A name that we immediately both agreed upon was Amelia, which means hard-working in German. 

Next, we designed one of the rooms Amelia will be cleaning in our opening so we could get an idea of the vibe we were going for regarding the mise-en-scene when we get closer to filming. After this quick design, we worked on Amelia's mood board. We know that since she is going to be cleaning during the opening, her clothes need to match that activity. We decided that our character will have her hair in a ponytail and be wearing a plain t-shirt and jeans. 

Additionally, we changed our idea for Amelia's goal. Instead of it being a hotel, it will be more of an inn, as we felt that a hotel is too large for the personality we've been building for Amelia. We were inspired by the Dragonfly, and inn from the show, Gilmore Girls. 

The beginning of our mise-en-scene

Our mood board for Amelia

Group Collaboration

 Today, our advisor put us into groups without our partners to give each other advice about our projects. As a group, our main goal was to visit each person's vlog and have them tell the group what they had planned so far for their film opening.

I went first, I told my group about our plan to do a period piece and how we are starting to rethink it. However, I told my group that we are most likely going to work with the slice-of-life genre for our film. My group agreed that it was probably best to stay away from the period piece and liked the genre we had chosen to focus on.

Moving on to the other groupmates, we went to each of their blogs and helped make the backgrounds better, change the link, etc. if it needed anything. Each group member went through their ideas individually and we all tried to make helpful comments either supporting or opposing an idea. 

After the fact, my partner and I met up and shared the information we each learned during our time with our groups, although I didn't have too much to share, it was helpful to know that the decision we were making was the correct one and that we are headed in the right direction with our chosen genre.

Just A Slice

After many conversations with my partner, we realized that making a period piece dated so many years back would be highly challenging due to our lack of budget. However, we knew that we wanted to stick to the slice-of-life genre within our movie. But then comes the question, what exactly is the slice-of-life genre?

This specific genre focuses on relatively normal people and the day-to-day issues they may face. This down-to-earth genre allows viewers to become extremely involved with these issues because, most likely, it is something they can relate to themselves. Additionally, unlike action, horror, or sci-fi films, most of the plot is character driven rather than more unordinary/fictional problems.

One popular example of a slice-of-life film is Moonlight. This film follows a boy, Chiron, throughout the stages of his life and how he deals with the rather challenging circumstances that he must face around him. This film is a great example of how slice-of-life films are because the problems that Chiron faces aren't driven by unlikely/impossible things. This movie, although an extremely heavy subject, is something that many people can relate to in one way or another.

Although our film won't be addressing the heavy topics that Moonlight did, we can still learn from it. Our film will likely be targeted toward teenagers, as most slice-of-life films are. Our film will most likely include a coming-of-age aspect to it and might have a few jokes scattered throughout, especially because of our target audience. 

Overall, we thought that this category would be the best for our budget, we will continue back to the drawing board to find more specific ideas, but for now, we have decided on our genre.

Sources:

Kench, S., Sam Kench Sam Kench is an internationally-awarded screenwriter, & Sam Kench is an internationally-awarded screenwriter. (2022, June 6). What is the slice of life sub-genre - characteristics & examples. StudioBinder. Retrieved February 26, 2023, from https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-slice-of-life-definition/#:~:text=SLICE%20OF%20LIFE%20DEFINITION&text=Slice%20of%20life%20is%20a,coming%2Dof%2Dage%20genres.

Cleaning Up Our Minds

This past weekend, Mariana (my partner) and I were talking about what we wanted to do for our film opening. We realized that we probably wanted to do something in the slice-of-life genre with a target audience of 16-25, but what?

Watching many Disney movies while growing up gave us an idea, The Princess and the Frog was where we drew some inspiration from. At the beginning of the movie, Tiana has a dream to build her own restaurant but doesn't have the funds to do so. Through hours of hard work and multiple jobs, she is finally able to afford to buy her own building and make her dream come true. 

We wanted to rework this hardworking character into something of our own. We liked the idea of there being a goal to own something, so we decided that our character will be working to become the owner of a hotel. She will work jobs cleaning around peoples' homes and eventually have enough to buy her own hotel. We believe that we will include her reaching her goal financially in our film opening and the rest of the movie will be based around the process of her creating her lifelong dream. 

Looking Into It

 Today we started to look into what it would take to create a believable setting for a movie set in the 1950s. The thing that we looked into first was costuming because clothes can show a character's mood and give a proper introduction to the entire mood of the story, which an intro should do. 

As women in the 1950s had just gone through a major depression just a few years prior, in a prosperous time for the US financially, people were able to afford nice clothes. Our character will be more middle class, so no outfits too over the top. However, with this newfound financial freedom, women were able to acquire a variety of large skirts. Anything that accentuated the waist was considered to be "in" at the time. Along with this, women began to wear more casual items like trousers and shorts. Since our idea places our character on a date, we will most likely dress her in a dress with a tight waist and long skirt.

Some research is started in class

We needed to research again for our male character. Famous male actors and singers like James Dean and Frank Sinatra set the trend for men in the 1950s with, like women, an increasingly casual style. Hat wear made a resurgence in the 50s and bright colors became very popular. Additionally, waxy hairstyles became very popular. Sunglasses were a sign of wealth, so their popularity rose in the decade as well. T-shirts also started to become more common as men were able to afford more than just their dress shirts. 

An in-depth video about 1950s menswear

Sources:

Fashion history: Women's clothing of the 1950s - bellatory. (n.d.). Retrieved February 20, 2023, from https://bellatory.com/fashion-industry/Fashion-History-Womens-Clothing-of-the-1950s

Schneider, S. R. (2022, August 22). What men really wore in the 1950s. Gentleman's Gazette. Retrieved February 19, 2023, from https://www.gentlemansgazette.com/what-men-wore-1950s/

A New Idea

 Today, my partner and I were texting about our project and I had an idea pop into my head. Earlier this week, I attended my history class on Friday where we learned about WW2. The topic really interested me so why not include it in our portfolio project?

American WW2 posters

After I brought up the idea of doing a period piece with my partner, we both really liked the concept of it. So we started to discuss the logistics of doing a video set in the 1940s-1950s. The project would be a look into the lives of Americans, specifically a couple, who got split up because of the draft into the war. 

Our intro would consist of a girl getting ready to go out on a date with her boyfriend and once they get together, he breaks the news about his draft to her. The rest of the movie, although it wouldn't be filmed, would be about how this girl deals with her loved one leaving her and the hectic life around her during wartime.

However, going back to the logistics of it, we discussed that it might be challenging to create the proper mise-en-scene for this specific time period since it was so long ago and the environment we live in has changed completely in the last 70-80 years. Although this will be a significant challenge if we decide to settle on this idea, I believe it can be done with enough effort. Tomorrow we will begin research on outfits for the time period so we know what to look for as we create costumes for our actors and other important mise-en-scene elements.  

A Decision Has Been Made?

My partner and I talked in detail the last time we saw each other. From this, we came up with a few ideas. We decided that we would lean towards the coming of age genre. We decided that our ideas would not be final, and we would discuss them further before we decided what we officially wanted to do. 

Since our ideas are just the first ones, they might change completely. As we were brainstorming, we wrote all of our ideas down in a GoogleDoc to keep track of the different storylines and titles we were coming up with. 

As we were discussing our ideas, we were overhearing that most of our classmates had come up with theirs. It was slightly disheartening to overhear these conversations and I think that may have affected our ability to come up with a concrete idea.

Over the weekend we will be in touch with each other discussing possible stories to pursue. Additional research will go into our genre in the form of watching different introductions in coming-of-age movies. Hopefully, between research and communication, we can come up with an idea that we are confident in sticking with for our final portfolio project.

Who Will It Be?

 For the last few days, I have been thinking about my project and whether or not I wanted to work in a group. Throughout the year, we have been given a variety of projects, most of which were group-based. I decided to take what I have learned and apply it here to my portfolio project. 

However, with this decision to work in a group comes another one. Who will be my group member(s)? Thankfully, the variety of group projects went hand in hand with meeting multiple people within my class. 

This gave me a general idea of my options in a group and I asked if anyone else was interested in working with me. One of my group partners from earlier in the year, Mariana, agreed. I was glad she had accepted my offer as we had worked well together in the past and I knew her diligent work-ethic and organization skills would benefit me.

We began to brainstorm today but none of our ideas really stuck. We will be texting throughout the next few days trying to figure out what we want to do in more specific detail, from there we will begin our research and planning. 

The Beginning

 Hello, blog!

On Thursday we began our portfolio projects! I'm super excited to start working on it, but I don't have many ideas. Hopefully, some will come to me soon. I'm going to continue to brainstorm and start to schedule when I want certain parts to be done because it needs to be finished by the start of April. I will be keeping my blog updated with new information as I continue to work on this project. See you soon!

Music Marketing #2

 Planning

After we got our group together, we knew it was essential to lay out a plan for when we wanted parts of our project to be done. So as our first step, we created a calendar to set up dates to record and practice our presentation. We discussed which dates would work for everyone within the group and assigned a day to finish our research.   

We also thought about who we wanted our artist to be. We decided on a darker topic, drug addiction, and recovery since our selected song, Time is Running Out by Muse, spoke about addiction within its lyrics. We also decided to make our artist a recovered addict, so that this music video would make sense.

Research

We knew in our research we would have to find two different record labels. To do this, we split our group of four into two groups of two. Each person would focus on a specific band from their respective record label within these groups. My partner and I researched different labels and tried to pick one with a variety of artists, especially artists in our genre (electronic rock). The label my partner and I chose was the Radio Corporation of America, RCA for short. When narrowing it down to specific artists, we looked at artists that made music within our genre. I chose the band Cage the Elephant and my partner chose the band The Strokes.

After choosing my band, the research began. I first went to all of the bands' social media, as I was most interested in how they marketed themselves to their target audience, which I discovered was young adults. I added all of the information I found on the band to a chart we had made where each group member added what they found, this way we could all learn about different information from each band. I specifically found that Cage the Elephant gained a lot of fan interaction using their social media by reposting content that used their music. I pitched this idea to my group, and they thought it would be good to include it within our marketing strategies for our group.

Production

We filmed our entire project in one day as we did not have another opportunity to do so. With the generous help from some friends who were willing to be in front of the camera, we were able to film the entire video in about 8 hours. 

Filming the video was a long process, but very rewarding and fun. With the addition of some candy and popcorn chicken, filming was a process filled with smiles and laughter. However, we knew the topic of our video was going to be a serious one, as our entire project was based on addiction and recovery. The video itself was a darker tone about overdosing and choosing drugs over the people who are trying to help. Our two main actors did a fantastic job of portraying their specific roles as the addict and the loved one who is trying to help. We also used a lot of different lighting to help set the tone for different scenes. In the end, we were happy with the footage we were able to record.

Post-Production

Although I wasn't the one to specifically edit the video, everyone in the group saw the video in its raw stages and tried to help bring it along with different ideas and suggestions for how the video should look. In class and over the phone we would talk and text each other ideas that we had about how to fill black spots, how the lighting should be changed, etc. After the footage was done being edited, we decided that we wanted an animated title to close our video. So one of the group members, who knew how to use AfterEffects, gave us different fonts and layouts to choose from and we all settled on one. This was the effect seen at the end of our music video.

Presentation

For our presentation, we created our slides using the website, Canva. From here, we each individually decided which slides we wanted to present and created them together on FaceTime. Although sometimes the internet was spotty, we got our presentation done and developed each of our notecards on what we were going to say when we presented. We FaceTimed a couple more times and ran-through our presentation a few times and made some minor adjustments to our presentation.

On presentation day, we had originally planned to pass out candy to the class but decided against it at the last minute. When we got up in front of the entire class, the rest of my group did pretty well in presenting what we had practiced throughout the week. However, for some reason, I became extremely nervous when I stood up in front of the class and began to stutter badly. It's a shame because I feel that I let my group down, and I didn't perform as well as I had when we were practicing. Regardless, the rest of my group did a nice job and I feel that, even though it was hard, I learned about my stage fright and that I need to practice even more to fix it. I enjoyed creating this project, it was a lot of fun and a learning experience for my group and me.