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.