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.