Creative Critical Reflection

Final Project

There's only so many different ways I can say Hi and Welcome to my Blog and I've come to realize, as I approach my last few entries that the whole idea of trying to do it differently every time is kinda futile. regardless I'm back again with my first post since we finished filming.

Overall Not a lot has happened in the last few days, we originally had trouble attempting to change our files from the camera into MP4 but we quickly got that shorted out. So now begins the editing process. In the little time we've had we have already chosen which clips we've wanted to use for each shot and we've already assembled them in movie maker into a rough draft as you can see below.

 Obviously this is a very rough draft and we've done little to refine it so far. So for the next two days we're going to be busy editing it down to what we want and adding in things such as Foley sounds, title cards, and of course the music. Now sadly the music has been the least productive front in this entire project as nobody seems to want to email us back to even deny us use of their song. It would be a miracle if we were able to get written permission by the time we're done editing. Sadly I feel like we might have to resort to non copy right music. Ill have an update on our music acquiring and editing process tomorrow.  Hopefully everything we need resolved gets resolved by then. Ill see you all next time, for my final non titled blog post.

Welcome back viewers, this is probably going to be the most lengthy post I'll ever make on this Blog so be prepared. This post is on the on the events of our Sunday shooting.

So to start with I knew in advance that something would go wrong, something always does go wrong, and today was no exception. Two hours before filming I texted everyone involved to make sure they were ready to go, and right away we ran into our first dilemma, Darren responded with the words "I can't go, something came up". That's probably the worst phrase you could hear mourning of the only day you have to shoot a majority of your scenes, but regardless I stayed calm. Plenty of other people could push the Daly and so I asked my dad, who was already going to drop the device off for me at the filming location anyway, to help.
While my dad is on the way to our filming location, I stop by Kim's house and then my friends house to grab the camera and quickly toast the waffles, which was a lot harder than you would think. Before Sunday I had never had just a strong hate for any inanimate object but today i can say without a doubt toaster ovens are the most god awful invention on the planet. Toasting the waffles somehow took nearly 15 minutes and we were almost late to our own production.Sadly the stress didn't end there. Once we arrived to the restaurant we got settled in and waited. Before long it had already passed the agreed upon time we were suppose to start filming and restaurant wasn't even opened. Finally after 20 minutes awaiting Dario arrived and let us in and thankfully after that everything went smoothly.

   Everyone was extremely professional through the whole filming process, especially Yana who did an amazing job playing Jude. Even with the stress and time constraints placed on us I feel like everyone was able to put the right amount of dedication and energy into their role and because of that we managed to finish all of our shooting in that one day. Not everything was able to be done exactly how we wanted, for example we didn't get to do the trunk scene the same way I imagined it in the story board and we weren't able to do the window scene either due to the lighting outside but overall I liked what we did and I can say without a doubt I'm proud of the group as a whole.

Even though we were pressed on time we still had fun with filming and I don't think anyone ever allowed the stress to get to them. Since most of footage we took won't be seen in our final product I want to show you guys an outtake we had that makes me laugh every time I watch it.

Whats going on people, welcome back to my blog.

Over the weekend our group made a lot of progress so much so that I couldn't possibly fit it into one blog, so these next two blogs are going to focus on what happened on Saturday and Sunday Individually. Today's Blog will be about our preparations we made Saturday. 

Unlike most Saturdays I woke up very early with one goal in mind, get everything ready for tomorrow. So I met with Kim and a few friends who were willing to help us and I compiled a list of things we'd need for tomorrow.

Objects: 

two plates

two forks

two knives

two waffles

two sets of chicken

daly (I don't know how to spell that)

Camera (obviously)

SD card (32 gigs at least)

My car

People: 

Yana- Jude 

Nick- Alex

Sebastian- Pushes daly

Darren- Waiter

Kim- camera

Nick and Kim- Directing

Overall most of the stuff on the list was easily accessible or already on hand. The only thing I couldn't account for was the daly. Now in retrospect the daly wasn't necessary, some might say it was even useless, but at the time I believed that our first at last scene would be incomplete without it. Now obviously we couldn't buy a daly so we did the next best thing and decided to build one. Just a warning the video quality isn't the best here.  as shown in the video to build the daly we tapped a thick piece of wood and a few pcp pipes to hand truck in order to create a stable plat form for the camera operator that was also slim and mobile. the final product ended up  looking a lot like a U-haul storage cart. As you can see from the video the pcpc tubes and the handle were meant to help stabilize the camera as the daly moved. the video below shows this  process as the daly follows me.

like I said earlier the daly wasn't as useful as we intended it to be but i had a lot of fun making it and overall i liked the concept we had for it. 

Not like this.

Everything is all happening at once faster than I expected. Dario has contacted me and given me one day, or more accurately half an hour of one day to film our opening this sunday. Needless to say I'm thankful he's opened his restaurant to us but I'm also stressed on the time constraints. Dario isn't exactly a negotiating man so I have to work with what I'm given here so this is going to be stressful at the least, thankfully my cast is available for the our 10 am time slot so we have that going for us. The cast is finalized as of now as Yana playing the female lead Jude, Myself Playing the Male lead, Alex, Darren and Kim on Camera and direction, Me and Kim on editing. On top of all this we also have a finalized version of our script and we will be finished with the storyboard by today.

Script:

INT- A busy diner (bellini) in the early morning.

The camera follows the waiter of the diner as he walks to a table with food in hand. He places the food down on the table and walks away. As the fork and knife reaches for the first bite the camera moves from close shot of the food to a medium shot of the female character.

She picks up the food and bites into the waffle. She looks to the man across her and sees his distress.

Jude: (with a faint smile, offers a bit of her food) You want some?

Alex rejects the food and Jude retreats from her offer. She goes on speaking to fill the silence. She speaks with her mouth full.

Jude: To be honest (takes another bite of chicken) This isn’t the worst thing I’ve put in my mouth (faint smile trying to break tension).

Alex watches her chew, still irritated, he tells her how he feels about the situation.

Alex: (reacts to her ignorance) Why did we have to do this now?

Showing the profile of both characters and Jude being irritated.

Jude: What?

Alex: We had planned for a week, I had a car ready...In a WEEK.  

Jude slams her fork.

Jude: (Looks away from Alex, chewing and swallowing her chicken. She faintly whispers to herself) A week…(She looks to Alex) I couldn’t wait another week.

The shot shows Alex’s reaction to Jude’s outburst. He knows he’s awakened the Dragon.

Jude: You don’t understand what I have to go through...The troubles I have to face.

Alex struggles to be mad at Jude and looks down to the emptiness.

Jude: You think I enjoy having a father who doesn’t love me...Who prefers Jack Daniels over his own daughter.

Jude Begins to raise her voice making Alex feel like shit for putting her on the spot.

Jude: So I apologize if i needed to get out as fast as I could. I’m sorry I wanted to run away with the best thing that has ever happened to me...you. I didn’t mean to inconvenience you.  

Jude looks away from Alex, Hiding her face as Alex looks at Jude, wanting to fill the silence.

Alex: (nervously chuckles) (peers over to her and then looks down) So you think your dad is going to be looking for us?

Jude looks up with satisfaction knowing she has gotten what she wanted. Alex tries to get a straight answer.

Alex: Jude seriously, I need to know if he’s going to be looking for us.

Jude takes another piece from the food and is very excited.

Jude:Don’t worry...where we’re going...nobody will find us.

Alex looks blantly into Jude.

Jude:(leans close to Alex’s face) Even if they tried.

Alex: So what do you wanna do (grabs some of Jude’s food) When we get there.

Jude: What the keys? (grabs food) We can do whatever we want there...that's the whole point.

Alex: (Smiles) How long is that going to be?  

Although today has been a day full of progress, we still have a lot to plan and this saturday might just end up being the most Hectic day of my life. I have faith we can pull this off if we work diligently. However if we don't Im going to move to my second option for location.

Welcome back everyone todays Blog is going to be on getting the temporary rights to the Song Layla.

So far that process has been a mess. Finding the company that owned Layla took a bit of research but we eventually found Atlantic records, the original owners of the song. However we latter found out that warner Brothers had purchased the song so we emailed them this in the hopes of obtaining the rights.  We titled it to Atlantic records because their email redirects to Warner Brothers anyway.

Atlantic Records,

Good afternoon, My name is Darren Naville and I am contacting you in behalf of my AICE Media Studies group. I am emailing you to ask if I can use the song Layla, by Derek and the Dominos, for a non-profit school project. This project is for the AICE media studies class at Cypress Bay High school. I hope to use your song in our film introduction which is the main component of our assignment. We would like to obtain rights to use the song for this one time only, as it is the only way we can use this song for our project. This video is for educational purposes only and we have no means or intentions to make a profit off of it or the song, we hope to use. As a sincere fan of the song I hope you consider granting us written consent to use it in our assignment. The assignment will be turned into our teacher and the Cambridge board for grading and will not be sold for material gain. Once again I hope you consider granting us consent to use your music and I hope to hear from you soon.

Thank you for your time,

Darren Naville

Hopefully they'll get back to us soon. We received an automated response to the email so at least they got it. However I'm not entirely satisfied with just contacting the record company especially because of our time constraints so I decided to look for an alternative. So I decided to try and contact the band members themselves, even if they can't give me the rights they must directly be abel to contact the people who can.  

Unfortunately most of the members of Derek and the Dominos are dead or have disappeared and only two of them still have functioning websites, Eric Clapton and Bobby Whitlock.  Both of them have news letters that periodically send emails so I subscribed to both of them, but I feel like emailing a robot isn't going to get us anywhere so I went even further and Directly emailed Bobby Whitlock. I think at this point one of the entities we emailed will respond soon. Ill be back with more on that latter.

Hay there everyone, welcome back to my blog. Since I haven't been to talk to any of the Restaurant owners that I wanted to just yet I'm going to focus on something else until I can get that resolved.

So this post I'm going to dive into the process of trying to find "actors" for our film.

Originally I had the idea of casting the two leads to two close friends of Kim and I. Gabriel Hernandez was to play the male character amd Yana Markova was to play the female character. However after a elngthy discussion we decidded that Gabe didn't fit the part and we eevntually moved to the idea of having me play the part instead. I'm still not sure its the best idea since as im also suppose to be directing but I can also see how I fit the part. As apprehensive as I was to the idea at we've decided to go through with it. I guess it's tiem to learn how to act. Ill have more about that and other progress next time.

Welcome back and hello, this is Blog post number 5.

Today I'm going to be focusing on some more minor updates within the film making process the first of which being our music choice. 

If you  looked at the story board from my last post you've probably noticed that the last shot was simply the title card, Mantis. The story board does a terrible job of showing it but that show\t and 2 others before it are one continues shot zooming out, and during this shot we planned to implement a song that we think would enhance the scene. After analyzing the storyboard we got together as a group and suggested a pool of songs that we thought would fit. The only real criteria we had set was that it needed to have an instrumental opening of some kind, but i also personally wanted a classic rock song. here's the list we put together of our possible choices. 

Angel of Small Death and the Codeine Scene by Hozier
The Big Bang by Rock Mafia
How You Like Me Now by The Heavy
Paper Planes by M.I.A
Come On Eileen by Dexys Midnight Runners
Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden
I Can't Decide by Scissor Sisters

Nick Dwyer-
Layla by Derek & The Dominos
Roxanne by The Police
Just Dropped In by Kenny Rogers
Lamp Shade On Fire by Modest Mouse
Crosstown Traffic by Jimmy Hendrix
Voodoo Child by Jimmy Hendrix
Purple Haze by Jimmy Hendrix

Daren Naville-
Dream On by Aerosmith
Head Band by B.O.B
Bugatti by Ace Hood
Love Me by Lil Wayne
Alright by Logic
Fucking Problem by A$AP Rocky

Final Decisions-
Angel of Small Death and the Codeine Scene by Hozier
Come On Eileen by Dexys Midnight Runners
Voodoo Child by Jimmy Hendrix
Layla by Derek & The Dominos
Dream On by Aerosmith

In the end we all agreed on the song Layla, by Derek and The Dominoes, and I couldn't be happier about the song choice since its one of my all time favorite songs. The only concerns I have are that the intro might muffle the sounds we want to emphasize that there is a person in the drunk of the car but I have faith that we can work around that in post production. 

Another thing I wanted to talk about in this post was our possible choice of settings. Since the beginning I've had my heart set on filming in a restaurant, and unfortunately that is easier said than done. There are two possible locations I had in mind when we wrote this scene, Bellini Italian Bistro and La Torretta. My number one choice is Bellini  because I thought of this very scene some time ago when I still worked there and I still maintain a good relationship with the owners. Sometime this week I plan on discussing with the owner weather or not we will allow me to film there during the morning hours before the restaurant is open, although I'm good friends with him but there's still a good chance he won't go for it. Hopefully I'll be able to convince that we won't be intrusive during our time filming. If Bellini doesn't work out La Torretta  is our backup. Unfortunately the chances of owner allowing us to film their are about the same as they would be at Bellini, but I have faith one of them will allow us to film before they open. That's all for this post, hopefully next time ill have updates on the situation with Bellini or La Torretta.  

   

Whats going on everyone, welcome to post number four, I decided against putting titles because I like saying Hello every post so this going to be the continuous format.

This post is a follow up to my last post that focused on the script of the opening, this time i'm going to get into the storyboard that we created around the same time we made our script. once again we captured our thoughts during this period by recording our audio so ill be putting up those logs as well as the summary in this post. Here are the three audio logs 1,2,3. They are a bit lengthy, even more so than the last bunch. What we mainly wanted to accomplish with the storyboard was to have an idea of what is happening during the dialog but we also put a lot of emphasis on making sure we had a reason for doing each shot the way we did it. This was a little difficult for us at first because we mostly shooting dialog so there isn't too much that can be done in terms of camera work. A lot of the choices we made involved the position of the camera in relation to where our character is facing. its not exactly easy for me to describe what i mean in words but there's a great video from the YouTube channel Every Frame A painting that I mentioned earlier in the blog. The video is about the use of the shot counter shot technique that is often used for dialog, and it goes far in depth on how the simple technique can express a lot of different styles and emotions based on how it is done. So to end this blog post here is our first draft for our story board. If you didn't already hear from the audio clips let me warn you now, I am a terrible artist i don't know why Kim didn't do it. Also a lot of the drawings are very simplified and don't take into full account what we plan to do and the dialog line do not represent where the shot starts in the dialog but rather just allow us to understand the general idea of when we want each shot to take place in the script.

Hi everyone, Welcome to my third blog entry. I'm going to start titling these after this so I won't have to keep doing this little intro paragraph, or maybe I'll do both. I'm not sure, but hay its my blog so anything can happen.

So Today We've made huge progress in comparison to what we've had last time, so much progress in fact I might split it up covering it all into two blogs. To start with the intro  to our story has been finalized along with a rough draft of the script and story board. On top of all that I have several podcasts tapes of our thought process as we were writing them. Ill post the tapes for the script for now and ill leave the story board tapes for the next entry. Here are the first and final tapes for our script writing process 

These tapes are fairly lengthy so I'm going to give a little TLDR (too long, didn't read. Or in this case too long, didn't listen). When writing our script our first and foremost goals were to make sure that we introduced our characters, the plot and the tone. In the audio logs we made sure that before we wrote a line of dialog it would accomplish one of these objectives. Although this script is only a draft i'm glad to say I think it has reached all of these.

Hay everyone, and welcome back.

If you haven't read the first post, you probably should, and if you have I'm going to jump right into where I left off since there haven't been any major developments in our work since then.

A lot of this film is centered around character development through dialog. This film is not going to be reliant on action although there is some through the hypothetical film, it is no where near the main focus and a majority of our attention  is focusing on creating suspense, tension, conflict by pinning our characters interests against each other and only using action at the high of tension. A great drama that has a similar style in terms of driving is the Netflix original series 'House of Cards'. The Widely popular TV show relies heavily on its great script, actors and characters in order to capture its audience and just like I plan to do it uses a limited amount of on screen action. Now of course House of cards is a TV show rather than a film and it also has a completely different premise that would be hard to relate to our own, so I'm going to focus more on the films that have used similar methods to tell a story that we're trying to.

One of my greatest inspirations, and my idol, Quentin Tarantino has written and Directed several film that more closely adhere to what were trying to do with our film. None other does that more than his 1994 classic 'Pulp fiction'. Much like our film Pulp fiction focuses on developing its characters using dialog and their interactions with Tarantino's messed up world. Pulp Fiction also tells this story out of chronological order and switches between different points in the film's timeline without warning allowing for the viewer to put together what order the story actually took place and we also plan to tell some parts of our story out of order. Our Film intro, which to this moment is still in the works, actually takes place more towards the middle of the film similar to the opening of 'Good Fellas'.

Although the three previous films  and one TV show do a great job of illustrating the kind of style I plan to deliver the closest example to the movie I want to make is the 1996 Coen Brother classic 'Fargo'. The film like all the others mentioned is Dialog based and relies on acting over action, however Fargo has a glaring difference from the previously mentioned. It's Darker, Much Darker. Although none of the previous examples are light happy tales, none of them really portray everyday life as brutally as it can truly be as Fargo does. We hope to capture the bleak and eerie feeling Fargo did such a great job portraying with our story and setting although they have some drastic differences with the film.Ill get more into how we plan to do that next time when we have our opening finalized. Ill see you all next item, and hopefully I'll have some concrete work to show you.

  Hello Everyone, I'm Nick Dwyer and this is My Blog for my short film intro.

This blog is primarily for documenting the step by step process Kimberly, Darren, and I are going to go through in making our film intro, but I'll also give a little commentary into what were thinking and feeling during each step of the project. My hope is to make this blog both entertaining and informative, but just a heads up writing blogs isn't exactly my Forte.

In the beginning, long before I pitched this film idea to Kim, I had an idea about making a Tarantino esq. drama for this final project. Through the year I worked on developing this story in my head while working on other smaller film based projects and taking what I learned from them to better develop my story and the techniques I would use to present it.  The YouTube channels Every Frame A Painting and Cinefix were instrumental to shaping my process in fine tuning the story and characters.  Finally just before we started working  on the project, I pitched the idea to Kim and we decided to use it for the final and thus this blog and Project Mantis were born.

Contrary to what the title of our film 'Mantis' might infer, the film has about as much to do with insects as the movie 'Se7en'  has to do with math. We picked the title for the film for a number of reasons, the foremost begin that it's short and catchy. The title does have some significance to the plot in that the nature of our main character can be related to the breeding habits of the praying mantis (which evolves the female mantis brutally slaughtering and than devouring her male counterpart).

Now that I've covered that here's a rundown of  the plot of our movie.  Our story focus's on an attention seeking, trouble making high school age girl in the U.S. south. The girl, who's name is still in the works, gets into a fight with her father and decides to run away from home to go on a self discovering journey down to Florida. The Girl then convinces her boyfriend to steel a car and they take off, the only problem is that unknown to the couple the car they've stolen has a kidnapped man stuffed in its truck.

With that simple run through of  the plot I'm going to stop here and go into further detail on the plot and our progress.