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.