CCR

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ey91VBPjxX0

The link above is just for the creative critical reflection.

A reflection

So we finally finished our project, even though we had to change the idea not once but twice. It was really an infuriating process but overall I really enjoyed this experience and it gave me just a taste of what pursuing a career about film would be like. I am still in love with our first idea if I’m being honest, I wish we could still make it but it’s far too late now. In the beginning when we had our first brain storming session, it was amazing, everyone was talking about their favorite films and what we could use from those films to inspire us to make our opening. Obviously Birdman has been stated countless times because our opening really related to that film highly. It wasn’t all easy though, we had many arguments regarding how it should be filmed and what the actual story should be, but I’d do it all over again, after all that’s the creative process. At one point I’m sure it became an obsession to them as it was for me. We actually had a discussion regarding the idea of trying to make it into a short film during the summer as a little side personal project, so hopefully one day you’ll see it. Anyway our actual project didn’t have nearly as much passion poured in but it still well made and we’re proud of it. I really would like to thank my entire group, Nick, Ryan, and Edward for their hard work and genius ideas that really helped us all spitball ideas and let’s our minds race around together. I just wish Edward would stop talking about David Lynch and that monkey. Obviously due to the virus epidemic that’s taken over the world at the moment, filming became a complication, we couldn’t be together while filming so creativity was in fact dulled our quite a bit, I can guarantee if we filmed together the opening would be ten times better but as states before we are still proud of it. Overall I’m greatly appreciate of the opportunity to work on this project with such free will and more projects are to come.https://drive.google.com/file/d/194EuEeWpBgOihGjDIE32NBFSaeqMAct0/view?usp=sharing

A return

Well it’s been a while since I actually wrote one of these mainly due to the fact that there’s really been nothing to write about. If I’m being honest I would I have been writing about disappointment after disappointment because of the whole coronavirus epidemic. We had to adapt to the situations and we made multiple new drafts but everyday the conditions got worst to the point where people can’t really leave their houses so we couldn’t film anything together. I’m going to write the overall view on the project right after this post so I hope we could suffice with what we could do.

UPDATES

Well a lots happened  since I last wrote a post, including this while coronavirus epidemic that’s keeping everyone indoors. We’ve had to pretty much scrap our entire initial idea for the project so that’s a good 2-3 weeks gone down the drain due to the circumstances. We have a new idea that is relating more to horror which is simpler and easier to do, at least we think. Honestly we’re all pretty devastated at having to scrap our entire idea, we put way too much thinking and we were really passionate towards the subject. Now we’re gonna have to settle for a Netflix worth horror movie that is going to be towards the boring side. I was honestly hoping that this last project would redeem the whole year for me considering I’ve been pretty silent in class all throughout the year. I guess our SHOWTIME idea will have to be something more like downtime.

Horror movie idea

So now that showtime has been scrapped we’re gonna have to do with what we’ve got and we’re making a horror movie and it’s going to be completely filmed in markham park. This is perfect regarding the whole coronavirus problem that’s going around. Ryan made the initial pitch since I’m just too burned out and kind of depressed at the idea that showtime won’t happen. He essentially said that we should try to make a generic horror movie intro but add style and technique to show it’s truly ours. We plan on going to markham sometime soon but we still need to flush out all the details which we will do while we all FaceTime later today or possible Tommorow. Honestly with this whole coronavirus thing going on it’s caused a lot of confusion with schools and classes and honestly I still don’t know if this project is gon

Progress on horror idea

So we discussed the project and now edward has been contributing ideas as have I. Basically we’re trying to do something mystical maybe even supernatural with the relation of the forest. Sort of like the Blair witch project we want the forest and the surroundings to be a character themselves. We will most likely only have the protagonist shown we don’t really want to show the threat early on. The idea is that our main character is camping or hiking through the forest and he gets alerted, either by a scream or a trail of blood, we don’t know yet. But we’re sure we want it set in the forest and it will be a simple following of a main character then a quick title card flash. Title is still being determined.

Horror movie research

So I took the time to do some research in the horror genre and realized that most movies are catered to the younger audiences such as young adults. Although most of horror movie ratings are R by logic.
I did some research regarding the highest grossing horror movies to see what direction we could take on the project and I stumbled across a Forbes article listing the top 25 grossing horror movies of all time. I’m only going to show the top ten seeing as they are far more important.

As you can see from the post above, the horror movies that bring in the most amount of money are movies that  are relating to the supernatural and to the unexplained. 6 out of the 10 films in the top ten deal with either ghosts, demons, of Clowns that are from another galaxy. 

research regarding audience and distribution

We were talking among the group today regarding the target audience intended for our film/opening. Mainly due to the fact that the CCR presentation gave us a few pointers regarding what to post about and what to research. We determined the age of our audience will be mostly 17 to 25 year olds but realistically everyone above 17 will be able to watch and learn and connect with the characters struggles. We thought since its set in the 80's, it will attract a younger audience since people really seem to enjoy the 80's era nowadays with shows such as Stranger Things. The distribution was also another thing we had to put thought into. Obviously youtube would be our go to for posting an independent film opening but I wanted to research maybe production companies on youtube that might be of use and lend a hand. One really intresting channel I found was called Omeleto, theyre an independent studio that helps aspiring filmakers create without the burden of festival and creation fees. 

This is just an idea and another option but if we were to make a short film this is most likely where you would find it. The image above is the companys mission statement.

A complication

This weekend sadly we could not complete anything and I completely forgot to post the two other posts I had in queue for this week. So anyway since we didn’t do anything the entire weekend there reallly isn’t much to speak of, essentially all the same ideas are still in place but the montage idea mis going to be discussed Tommorow in class. Ryan made a new schedule since we didn’t meet up this weekend to this coming week will pretty much be crunch time for the group. It should also be noted that Monday afternoon we plan on doing all of our scouting and costume shopping.

The green on the schedule is when we are set to begin filming so that would be this weekend.

Credits montage idea

A really big topic that’s been clouding the group throughout this whole process has been to locate where we could apply the credits and how we could have a montage without making the opening too montagy. I presented this idea that I thought would make it both not really montagy and keep it grounded with the idea that we’re trying to portray, it also keeps the entirety of the scene in one area whereas if we wanted to do an an actual montage we would have to go out and film more locations. My idea pretty much is based on the fact that we wanna portray that Keith deals with heavy alcohol and drug abuse, basically substance addiction. So to portray this I thought of just making a montage with certain objects that could potentially be laying around the room. The best way I can explain this is if I could show you.

The remote and the water bottle are meant to be place holders for props in the opening, I’m just trying to provide my idea through these simple pictures. I would like to point out the fact that the background is blurry, this will be done in the shoot intentionally and we might incorporate a couple of focus pulls and pushes. I can confidently say that we plan on experimenting a lot with our shots in this project.

Shooting schedule

Ryan thankfully made a schedule that we will all follow for filming and pre production. It’s Saturday now and we still haven’t gone out for scouting or costume design stuff since Ryan has obligations but nonetheless we are set to go on Sunday for all the previously states assignments. In class on Monday we hope to finally have everything ready in order to begin filming, the only problems that could potentially arise are from group members not being able to attend but we’re pretty much good to go from this point on. In a previous post I brought up the idea of maybe filming in certain color palettes such as black and white but also stated how it wouldn’t make sense so we’re abandoning the idea completely. Also In another previous post I brought in the idea of maybe attempting to film it in one shot our opening and this idea intrigued both Ryan and I, we plan on at least trying to have a take where it’s all in one take but we’ll chose from the best options. I’ll leave some videos of Famous one shot openings or even movies in the rest of this blog.

Group meetings

So today in class we sat down in group meetings to discuss what plans we had for our film openings. To be completely honest I didnt really speak much cause the ideas didnt really intrigue me. Many of the topics today were good such as school shootings, being an outcast, and even a horror film but I just felt like they already knew what they wanted to do and I didnt feel needed for help. Again I hate to sound arrogant but our idea in my own opinion is by far more complex and more mature to understand. This doesnt mean were going to be the best project, but the way were dealing with all of this is far more mature than other projects intend to be. Apart from that, this weekend the group plans on going out to buy our confirmed outfits, and we might even begin filming which is actually quite exciting. As stated in a previous blog there will be two consecutive weeks where we have a member missing member due to either travel or family problems. Thankfully I believe we still have four more weeks to fully flesh out this project. I really hope our project doesnt seem too basic or unoriginal, but I also hope people actually understand what we are trying to convey, if they dont its obviously our fault but we are planning our hardest to not convey the wrong ideas. By the way I also took some time to look around the room listening to my other group members, which explained our idea far better than me, and I was genuingly really happy to see peoples reactions to our idea and to hear their feedback. Going back to the project itself, Edward completed the poster for the fake film, Fatal Risk. Its a first draft, but for a first draft its decent, defenitely needs some work though.

Again this is probably bound to change and will look polished and have the 80’s feeling of a poster. By the 80’s feel I mean that almost all posters in the 80’s were airbrushed and I believe they were actually drawn on. The following are some examples.

Bringing inspiration

So this post is kind of going to be on the unrelated side of things towards the project because I wanted to talk about some movies that I’ve viewed recently and others that I’ve viewed again that might help me with inspiration towards how we wanna film this opening. I’ve been on a binge watching older foreign films as of late and I recently rewatched La Haine, my personal favorite French film of all time. I really was intrigued with maybe making our film opening much like the entirety of La Haine, and by that I mean in black and white, but I don’t know how it would contribute to our already made plan. And now that I play the scene in my head in black and white it looks intriguing but wouldn’t benefit the story at all so we’re probably going to stay to the normal colors.

Now back to the actual project we’re set to go out sometime this next week to go buy the outfits that we will use for the opening. Me and Edward made sure what we wanted all the characters to look like and we wanna strive for 100% authenticity when it comes to both costume design and set design.

SHOWTIME

So the group finally decided on a movie title and were proud to say that the film name is showtime. The name brings out a sort of irony thinking towards the subject that our main characters career is on the downhill. Were trying to figure out the names for the fake show and fake movie that Keith will be promoting but other than that we should be ready to film by next week. So far the names of the talk show and the fake movie will be entertainment central, and fatal risk. It might change but those are the front runners. We spoke further of what we could potentially do with the intro but that’s really as far as we’ve gotten.

The picture above is the sketch I made in class to illustrate how the opening would be filmed. 

Oh yeah, its all coming together.

So today in class we started discussing what we wanted our first initial shots would be to set the tone and feeling of the opening. Ryan started picking away at the script while Edward worked on set design. Nick was catching up on the project but was doing some great work. We are basing the first half of our opening as a press junket between our protagonist and an interviewer, it should be noted that we finally have a protagonist name, as of now hes gonna be called Keith Floyd. While they were working on their own parts of the project I was thinking more on the cinematography side of the project. The first shot of the film is going to be of a silhouette of both Keith and his manager discussing things in a dark hallway that shows the interview portion of the room at the end of the shot. Should be noted that it will be lit with a dim blue light hung above the two characters. The type of light we wanna show is in the image below from the film Joker (2019)

Also about halfway through our conversation I realized that in Junkets, there are normally movie posters of the movie that the actor is promoting. I know its not in every junket but we really wanted to give it that authentic feel that it is truly an interview. Thankfully Edward volunteered to make said poster since he has the most experience with graphic design. Another quick change that might or might not affect the "cocaine" use in the opening is that we realized it would look kind of dumb if our protagonist Keith just snorted cocaine out of his pocket, so instead we decided it would convey our point much easier to the audience if he just drank out of a flask obviously implying that he has problems relating to substance abuse. This is all going to be happening in the initial hallway scene that was stated before. After a while we Ryan finished up the initial screenplay for the first hallway portion, it was actually really good when we all started talking about it and adding and changing the script a bit. I'm really confident in my team to the point where I bet that we will probably have the best opening in the class.

Problems

So we finally ran into our first problem of production and WE HAVENT EVEN STARTED FILMING YET. Yes you read that correctly we’re still in pre production and we already have conflicts in our shooting schedules. Now realistically it is no big deal, Ryan is going to be gone two weeks and Nick is going to be gone the following 2 weeks after that. We have also run into some complications with teaching Nick how to actually post on his blog and what to write. Other than that we’ve made more progress on our character and are currently working on smaller things such as his name and where hime comes from, little things. I actually went to the mall and found an almost perfect outfit for our main protagonist that felt really 80’s to me but it does need a couple of tweaks.

Obviously it’s still really modern but with a couple tweaks to the belt and shoes and maybe add a jacket we have a serious contender for our characters outfit.

Research into character

So the team is currently trying to figure out what else our main character might have to deal with further down the film, just so we get a better idea of how to implement impactful imagery that will convey our message to the audience about what he is currently struggling with. Now I did some minor research on addictions and disorder in the 80’s and even some more research towards harmful behaviors, were going to get very psychological. I came to the obvious conclusion that a large portion of addictions in the 80’s was hard drugs, but the most common was cocaine, now we still know it sounds kind of basic our premise but with our ideas coming together I doubt it will be anything close to basic. So as mentioned we will explore how our character deals with his fame with hard drugs. I introduced the idea of maybe having an HIV or AIDS diagnosis on our character but we’re still on the fence about it, we don’t want to add too many cliches. In an article in https://news.gallup.com/poll/6352/decades-drug-use-80s-90s.aspx it states things such as crack cocaine affecting the youth and how highly addictive it was, so the addiction part is going to be easy to believe and implement. We’re still discussing wether our character will be in his early twenties and have him be a heartthrob or that he’s a man later down the path of stardom who has to face the harsh reality that he isn’t as popular anymore. I would love to do the older gentlemen but we’ll have to see after it is a group effort.

Were making progress

It is now the second week of us planning and spit-balling ideas, and im proud to say we have a great basis for an idea. We did decide to focus on more of a character study/introduction. The basis of the idea is that an almost washed up celebrity is doing an interview promoting his new film. We havent decided if we want to do a sort of 60 minutes type of interview, a junket, or just a talk show appearance. I am also attempting to introduce the idea of maybe trying to make it seem like one shot, ive noticed that "one" shot films are becoming more and more popular. And I should also include the fact that, yes, Birdman is going to be a pretty huge influence as well as other one shot films such as 1917. We also are going to try to include that protagonists problems with certain addictions, It should be noted that the film will take place in the 80's. But we dont want to make it a cheesy 80's film, it just happens to take place during this time period. For the character we also want to find a way to show some of the characters worst behaviors such as jealousy or envy, much like the film The Artist (2011) which I might recommend the group to actually view it to get some of the ideas im trying to show.                                        https://www.scribendi.com/advice/character_archetypes_in_literature.en.html
In the link provided above its just a website providing the different character archetypes because I wanted to provide input into the two character archetypes that we wanted to focus on for our character. First is the hero complex, which in turn is pretty obvious seeing as this character will be our protagonist, but the interesting thing we want to do is that the villain complex will actually be our protagonist again, but not the protagonist himself, just his addictions and his own mental health. Now, we know that this is something that has been done before but we still want to attempt to do it our own way, we believe it is one of the hardest ones to do which is why it motivates us to take it on. Some films that can relate to the idea of the protagonist being his same antagonist are Joker, there will be blood and of course again Birdman.

The choice of Genre

Choosing our Genre: So my group and I have decided to make our film opening a drama. We know its very vague but I'm sure we will give our idea a bigger identity once we decide completely on the story and what we want to do. We've all been really thinking deeply about what kind of story we really want to focus on but the only person really spitballing ideas at the moment is Ryan. We obviously can come up with something interesting together since both our past projects have been intuitive and in my opinion the most interesting in the class. Next I decided to do some research on the Drama genre and I just decided to study two of my personal favorite films, the first one being Twelve Angry Men I would really enjoy to do something that's more psychological and more character grounded like this film for our opening. But admittedly this is probably going to be a much harder one to make compared to world building or plot relation. But I know my group won't wanna just do a cop out basic idea so well see what we come up with. Also what really could be interesting is if out entire opening was in one room much like this film. We would have to heavily condense the characters, because due to obvious reasons were not masterful filmmakers with the ability to introduce 12 characters and give some backstory for all in two minutes The second film I decided to study is a more modern masterpiece in my opinion, an opinion that I believe is shared by most, Birdman: or the unexpected virtue of ignorance. What a perfect title. Anyways the reason I also wanted to study this film for the fact that it also relates completely as a character drama. In my opinion this both Michael Keatons best work and Iñaritus best work. I would like to explore arrogance and maybe an inflated ego in our film opening but again this has to be said in the group for approval. Overall I would love to explore the character conflict more that any outside world conflict. Id love to at least pay homage to some of my favorite films but also make it our own.

Genre research/ Film opening analysis

So me and my group decided to view multiple film openings on our own time. I decided to rewatch three of my personal favorite film openings from some of my personal favorite films. One of the best film openings that I think everyone can agree with is the Dark Knights bank heist film opening. Another was the casual Resevoir Dogs diner opening. Finally, the third was 2001 a space odyssey brilliant DAWN OF MAN opening. First lets start with the Dark Knight, arguably the best superhero film ever made and the best adaptation of the comic book character. The film opening is the perfect blend of character introduction and world building. The opening shot is of what we later find out is the Joker standing at a streetlight with a clown mask at his hand, and as the opening progresses we realize that he's planned a very elaborate and well thought out heist that will leave no strings attached. Through the various shots in between heist members we get a brief overview of Gotham city and are shown how vast and constantly working it is. The interesting part that Christopher Nolan uses to build the Jokers character without even really seeing him, is how he told each of the heist members to kill a certain heist member for a bigger cut. This shows the Jokers sick and twisted genius as he is the last one alive in the end, and he is left with the entirety of the money and has left no possible trace back to him. The second film opening that I viewed multiple times was the opening to Resevoir dogs, I believe its Quentin Tarantino's first film but I could be wrong. The entirety of the opening takes place in one location, a diner and specifically one diner table where there are a couple of men just casually talking. The amazing thing about this opening is the pure simplicity and Tarantino's perfect use of dialogue. You're quickly given a rundown on the majority of the characters. First were pretty much shown the leading figure of the group which is Mr. White, quickly with simple dialogue were shown that he's experienced in this type of work and is shown to be mature. Mr Blonde on the other hand is shown to be more of a smartass and might just end up bringing more conflict later in the film. The entire premise of this opening is based on the simple idea that Mr. Pink won't tip the waitress that's attending them, then a conflict arises because the other group members are calling Mr. Pink a cheapskate. The final opening I viewed multiple times was the now Iconic DAWN OF MA N introduction to 2001:a space odyssey. The opening basically depicts what human nature is and what it evolved from. Its meant to show us the natural curiosity we have as mammals and to shows other darker emotions we may feel as predators ourselves. Stanley Kubrick is arguably one of if not the best filmmaker of all time and this introduction is the perfect opening scene to one of his best films. The best shot in my opinion is the sequence when we are shown the primate showing us his curiosity with the bone remains of a creature, and seconds later how his mind shifts to destruction as he begins to bash the bone against the rest of the other bones. This in my opinion was meant to shown our natural reaction to things and how we have been hard wired to think this way since the DAWN OF MAN.