And the storyboard continues...

  Remember when I mentioned that the dialogue might be too long? Yea well we had to make some changes to the storyboard and the dialogue because we felt like it was going to surpass the two-minute mark and some information was unnecessary to include so here are the changes that we made. 

Now as you can see we didn't cut that much of the dialogue but we did cut the part when they mention the death of their father because we felt it was unnecessary for the plot, it wasn't adding any meaning to our film opening. Also, we still think it is going to be long, but we decided that we are just going to film it as it is and if it's too long, then we edit and make some cuts. 

Now, since we made some changes, we had to redo the storyboard with the information that we now want to include, here is what we came up with.

 

The storyboard shows the kinds of shots we want to use plus the dialogue that goes along with it so we know what to say when we're filming each shot and in what order they go to make the editing easier. 

Next on this week's list is costume creation and planning, keep on reading !!

Storyboard pt1

 Storyboard

Like I’ve mentioned in the preview blog posts the last task we had for this week was to make our storyboard so we could have a clear idea of what kind of shots we want to use and organize how the storyline will go. Here is what we came up with.

It is not the best storyboard, and it is not completely finished but now we have a clear idea of how we are going to film this movie opening. So stay tuned for what we do next and more of the storyboard!! 

Creating our script

Today in class we worked on the script for our film, like I mentioned before this was one of the other steps, we had to get done this week. And on top of that, we started working on our storyboards, however; we did not get to finish it, but we have a pretty good idea of all the shots we want to include in our film.

These pictures show the script that we came up with. Now, we ran into a little problem because we think the script is too long, and if we decided to include everything, we might go over the two minutes. Now, we must think about how what we are going to cut out and which parts are important and necessary for the plot. If we do have to cut some of the scripts, it is going to be challenging. 

Character Background

 Character background

As I mentioned in my last blog post, one of my tasks was to create a character background and for that I made mood boards for the main characters of the film opening.

Our opening is about two sisters, I won't give the plot away yet but you only have to know that they are sisters. Sarah is the younger sister, she loves to have fun and has a very extrovert personality. In addition, she is into fashion and she is always dressed up for any occasion and always ready for anything. She loves to party and have fun with her friends and has quite a lot of friends. She has brown hair and brown eyes as well.

 

Maddie is the older sister, and she has a more serious personality since she has her life put together. She doesn’t like to dress up if she doesn’t need to and likes to keep a more natural look. Unlike Sarah, Maddie likes to stay in and read books because that is what she is into and only has one friend. She doesn’t like to party at all because she has a serious life with a serious job. She has brown hair and brown eyes as well as her sister. 

The two sisters are completely different from each other which helps us develop the plot in a better way because this opposition will be part of the conflict in the film.

 

 

Developing our plot

 In-class Victoria and I completed our plot for the film opening. We had a big discussion of what we wanted the story to be about but we didn’t really have characters, the plot, shots, angles, etc. But now we do and it is time to finally get started on the production process, after all, I completed the research. 

This is a picture of our google doc that we shared to discuss what we wanted to do for the project. As you see it's just a brainstorming of ideas that we came up with. There are no character names or the relationship between them or anything like that. Also, there is not like an official plot, they're just a few ideas that flow together but today we finally made up our minds of what we wanted to film about. 

This is the screenshot of the final plot we came up with. In addition to that, we added a bit of script and character development. The next step of this process will make character mood boards that will explain the characters, their background, and personality. Moreover, to develop a script for the dialogue of the opening and lastly, a storyboard to come up with the shot list, angles, etc.

Stay tuned for all those steps we need to accomplish this week!

Color Schemes

 An important factor for developing a story is the color scheme that comes with it. The colors help develop the mood for the film. Also, every color is related to an emotion so when we see something in a film with a certain color we might relate it to that emotion, like the movie “inside out” that each emotion had a different color to represent them. In addition, the color schemes might affect us psychologically as well as emotionally. This YouTube video explains how the color scheme affects the audience while watching and make the movie better. As well as this article.  ARTICLE

Now let’s dig deeper on the color schemes and patterns for mystery movies because after all that is what our film opening is about. The mystery films tend to keep their color schemes on the dark side. Although they might not be a dark color like black, they use bright colors but turn the saturation down to make the color a darker shade. Here are a few examples,

 

Shutter Island directed by Martin Scorsese 

Us directed by Jordan Peele

Get out directed by Jordan Peele

As you can not all the colors are the same, however, the tones are. All the movies have the same dark shades, you don't see any bright colors that stand out. They're all dull and bland because mystery is not a happy subject so it wouldn't be right to include bright colors. 

Target Audience

 Target audience

Every genre has a different target audience, for example romantic comedies are more appealing to women while Action movies are more appealing to men and young boys. The mystery genre has a broad target audience since typically there is the subgenre of thriller. Mystery has a target audience of men and women that have a wide range of age, nonetheless, 18-40 would be around the range, pretty much every age group. On the other hand, the thriller genre has a more adult audience because of the physiological factor involved in these films. And they often involve mature themes.

Now, after I research about the target audience, I asked myself; why do people watch mystery films? Usually, people are attracted to mystery films because it challenges our brain, and it makes us engaged. We like to guess where the plot is going and even more when we get a plot twist. That is why people enjoy these films because of that factor and my partner and I will focus on this main factor, leave people guessing and wanting more because in the end it is only the film opening and that is all that they’ll get to see. 

Genre Research

 As I dig deeper into the genre, I find more things that I need to include on my film opening to make it successful. I want people to feel heart race and intrigue. And as an article I read said “The first scene of a film is an integral part of its storytelling. It establishes the tone, the setting or sometimes introduces the central characters. It gives the viewers motivation to keep watching” (Minton, 1). When I read this, I found this to be crucial in this process because it is true, the film opening is the most important part because it gets the audience hooked. Therefore, I’m going to keep this in my mind as I go through this process.

 I learned that the two have to give the audience enough information to keep them on their toes without revealing the full plot of the film. This helps keep the audience engaged in the film and makes them not want to stop watching. Also, there has to be a crime and it was to be introduced as well because this whole genre revolves around someone investing something, so by introducing the crime in the film opening the rest of the film will be the main character solving the crime. Article! 

As I was reading an article that followed Michael Green who co-wrote “blade runner2049” without knowing anything about the mystery genre. And he said this “Your average viewer — any viewer who approaches a mystery, be it an hour-long TV procedural or a film that’s taken many people many years to concoct — they will look at it and automatically, subconsciously be able to see the decision tree of where the story can go”. This made me think about our film opening because even though we’re not making a full movie I still would like the audience to have an “oh my god” moment while watching those two minutes, kind of like ending it on a cliffhanger to leave people wanting more because that is what mystery is about.

 https://www.vulture.com/2019/10/the-secret-to-a-good-mystery-movie-it-isnt-the-surprise.html

 

 

 

Picking a genre...

 I found picking a genre hard because there are many of them and since we can do this project about whatever we want it is even harder because we have so many ideas. Nonetheless, my partner and I were in between two genres which were coming of age and mystery. After doing research on both genres and looking at multiple examples of each we decided to do mystery. The ideas just kept flowing out of us when we were talking about mystery and what we could do for the film opening so it was a no-brainer. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jw_ysaoVlt4

This YouTube video helped us come up with an idea and helped us brainstorm so i think you should check it out. Also, here are some examples we looked at while researching. 

This one helped us see what kind of shots we could use for the film opening. In addition to the color scheme and the mood in general related to the film. 

In the end, we finalize our idea for our project that I’ll talk about later on, I’m not going to tell you everything just yet. 

After we talked about our idea we came up with a plan, we will do more research on the genre but not only that we have to keep researching material such as the lighting we’re going to use to set the mood and make the audience feel the mystery and tension just by watching the film opening. On top of that the color schemes used in mystery film so we can build off that and make our film opening top notch. So in the end now that we have the genre we need to do more research about the other aspects of the genre characteristics.  

Stay tuned!!

 Hey! welcome to my blog! this is where I’ll be sharing the long and 

Meticulous journey of this project. I will describe here all the obstacles and accomplishments, in this blog. 

We only got the explanation and directions for the project but this project is still kinda scary. To create something from the bottom and to do it about whatever I want is a lot to process. My brain has so many ideas I don’t even know where to start but that’s why I’m gonna go one step at a time to make the process easier and my mind a little more organized so the whole process is uncomplicated. 
 
The first step is to figure out what type of genre is want to make this about. Romance, Mystery, Action, etc. So many to pick from. After that is to research that genre so I have a greater understanding of what I want to create. And I have some guidelines for what I would like to do. And then just brainstorm ideas of what the film opening could be and hopefully land on a simple idea because I don’t want to make the project more complicated but at the same time I want people to be impressed when they watch what I create. 

So stay tuned for all the updates and the project!!

BLOG POST #2

 Blog post #2

Once we got our folder the first two things, we had to pick the song and research the genre. the first thing we did our project was research the genre and all the trends involved with it. For example: Marketing trends, distribution trends, social media trend, etc. The research took about two to three days since we wanted to really know the genre and all the things involved with it, we wanted it to be experts, As we kept researching. It was easier to develop the full marketing brand for a band because the research gives you guidance of where to go. So, it is safe to say that the research was a significant part of our project. The planning process, to make ourselves organized and make sure we had everything by the due date we made a schedule of when everything that should be done which made everything a lot easier for us. After that we planned of what slide each of us are doing for the presentation and what information each of us is in charge of.

After the research part, we started brainstorming. Now that we knew more about the marketing and distribution in the music industry and the genre, we got it was time to start thinking of what we wanted the bands image to be like. In addition, to think of ways of how we could make this brand-new band different from all the other ones, how we are going to make our band stand out and how we wanted people to remember them. As we started brainstorming, we made a google doc where we all wrote down ideas, however, the brainstorming process was mostly discussed as a group, such as that we talked about more than we wrote it down. We had to brainstorm the colors that we wanted for the band’s vibe and aesthetic, what social medias we wanted to use and the logo for the band.

Nonetheless, after the brainstorming for the marketing brand because that is where we decided to start, we brainstormed for the music video. So, the first thing we did was try to produce an idea of a video that could represent and, in a way, express the lyrics of the song. This part was one of the hardest parts because the lyrics of the song was extremely hard to express so it was hard to produce an idea but nevertheless, we produced an image for the music video. When finalized our sketch for the music video we made storyboard to helps us organize the sequence of events.

Production process was uncomplicated for us because we decided to an animation video for our music video. Like I said before, the song had a complicated lyrics and we did not think it was possible to make a storytelling music video or a promotional one. So, we ended up picking an animation video that had a little bit of promo and a little bit of artistic. Nonetheless, the whole video was not only animations we had to film some parts too and that is when we ran into a setback because we could not find a place that would fit the vibe and aesthetic of our video. We thought for a couple of days of where we could fine one and we ended up filming at the bottom of the stair of the 800s building which fit the vibe perfectly. The filming process did not take very long so we had enough time to edit the video. For the Post-production process one member of our group took care of it since he is the one that drew the animations as well, the rest of the group worked on the presentation and helping him and giving him advice on how we all wanted the final video to look.

The final aspect of our project was the presentation and I thought it was difficult. First, we had to figure out what we wanted to put on our presentation to show the class, what the necessary information was and if it was enough. Next, we had to add all the research we made which was extensive and narrow it down to present. And lastly, split the slides into the group so everyone had a chance to present. We did not have time to practice our presentation, so that is why I thought it was difficult, because I did not know if everyone knew their correct slides and the correct information. However, the presentation went great in my opinion considering we did not have time to rehearse it.

To conclude this blog, I learned a lot doing this project, I learned everything that goes behind a marketing brand and what a marketing team does and to say the least I was very intrigued and would love to do another project like this. And although it was a lot of work, I learned how much work is put behind a music video not only for the production and post-production part but also for the creative part, how to come up with a brand new idea that represents the song or how they want an artist or band to look some type of way for their brand, and I thought that was fascinating. I think this would help me with my Cambridge portfolio because I know have an idea of how to get started with everything and go from there. Such as the planning process first, then brainstorming and so on. Overall, this project was fascinating and exciting for me, I learned quite a few new things.