What is left?

    The next task will be doing are the CCRs. Which is just a critical reflection on the project as a whole. We need to address our creative process in creating this film opening. I think I will spend this entire hour an a half  I have in Marchetti's class without Lara, trying to find a coherent idea of what I want to talk about. This blank canvas that is my blog will serve as a brainstorm place for me to throw ideas and cross them out. So let's plug in the headphones, put on some Stones and get to it!

   What I want to first address is our actual creative process. Literally how we started coming up with ideas. What lead us to the final draft of a script and everything in the early days of this project. First we started at a romance. That was the basis, the genre that we both felt was the most convenient to our budget and tools. However an interruption in the brainstorming arrived on my TV screen in the form of Wes Anderson. I watched every one of his movies in a week, his style and feel of his films just drew me in and I was hooked from my first viewing of Rushmore, his first feature length film. 

My only issue with the CCR is how I should arrange everything and what order I should present this project. I am thinking maybe I should leave the Wes Anderson stuff until the end so that I could just talk about that for a while without having to cut it down to make room for other things. However that presents the problem of introducing the story, because I can't introduce the story without talking about his films and his influence on me. 

I am going to make a list about the basic talking points in the ccr. And Freebird just came on. Great song, give it a listen.

-Genre (Crime is the basic genre, with Film Noir being a sub genre of crime)

-Setting (When is the film set? 1940s-50s)

-Creative process (Where we started, how we got here)

-Wes Anderson (I am going to have to try and stray away from making this the focus of the ccr because I could talk about him forever)

-I will also have to address the 'guided questions' 

   -How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?

 -In terms of challenging conventions, I believe that we took some inspiration from film noir films in ways such as look and feel, otherwise we took much of our influence came from Anderson and his work. I believe we did challenge the conventions of the Film Noir sub genre because the film has a quirkiness to it that wouldn't be found in the typical film noir story. Representation is another area where we took inspiration from film noir. The character of Adele Leroux is directly inspired from the Femme Fatale archetype. She is manipulating and mysterious in a way that you want to know her true intentions. We tried to portray this with the way Lara acted as her and in dialogue. She is very off putting and not very cooperative with the detective. Who is another character inspired directly from the genre. Detective Jeremy Briggs is a the typical detective, there to get a job done and ask straightforward questions. Thank God he didn't have another side to him like Adele did because I can't act to save my life. Lara on the other hand was great in portraying the character.

-How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?

-Engage with audiences? In terms of audiences I would think this if for older people, or at least adults. Preferably it would be rated R so we can have some leeway when it comes to what we can put in and what we can't. I feel audiences will not know what to expect when coming into this movie, they will assume from posters and promotional material that it will be a dark and suspenseful film but then we hit them with the opening credits and all expectations are blown out of the water. The music in the opening sets a comedic tone. The way detective Briggs fumbles with the letters also has a comedic feel to it. So the audiences will go in expecting one thing, and leave thinking another. Distribution might be an issue because the only people working on this film were Lara and I and as far as I know neither of us know a big name producer or distribution company who will be willing to distribute the film for us. What I can hope for is that the film will make it into a film festival to be shown to a niche audience. It could be picked up by a distributor or be left to become a sort of cult classic like many of Wes Anderson's films are.

-How did your production skills develop throughout this project?

-Although my dream is to make movies for a career, I had never actually held an actual camera and cut together a film with dialogue before. I do have experience in editing from a few cringe worthy movies I made with my friend in middle school. Also, I made a few YouTube videos in freshman year, probably the most embarrassing thing young me has ever done. They were video game montages that I am not exactly proud of, but I learned a lot in terms of timing and editing. Finally getting to use a camera and set it up felt like something that I had done before but haven't done in a while. I don't know if that makes sense but it felt like I was picking up a hobby that I had done in the past that I was a little rusty at. Basically I am saying that I felt comfortable using a camera and setting it up at different angles and things like that. The experience of a 7 hour shoot over the process of one day taught me a lot in terms of time management. 7 hours for 2 minutes! What? It was a nice reality check for me because if I wanted to make a 2 hour film that would require tons of man hours and a lot of help. I was able to learn the intricacies of the Nikon camera we were using. First being that if you want to shoot a movie with a camera like that it would be preferable to have a few charged batteries on hand because Lara and I had to charge the battery every 10-15 minutes.

-How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware and online – in this project?

-When editing a film its the final part, the glue that puts it all together. When you are in the middle of filming you are doing the visuals, there are no doubt minutes of unused footage that we have to our disposal, when you edit its like brushing the dust away from a fossil buried in the ground. Great analogy, I know. The bones of the dinosaur or whatever you are excavating, are the final product of your film, the dirt and dust is the rest of the crap you have to deal with to finally reach the final masterpiece. I can't believe that is the analogy I came up with but I think it fits. Editing the film is when it all comes together, you cannot just use a camera and film your movie from start to finish and it's done, no, you have to upload all of the footage from the camera to a computer and put it into an editing software. In our case we used iMovie. Then you have to weed out all of the bad footage to find the good usable takes. Once you have the takes you need to put them in order and make it make sense. In editing I like to picture and audience member's eyes as the camera. Where will they be looking at this point in time in the film? Cut to there. So after you get all the shots into a coherent order, that is where music comes in. We used bensounds.com for the royalty free music offered on the site. When it was all said and done we got to upload our film to YouTube for the eyes of the world to see. It is interesting how you can make such a thing from nothing. Going from capturing an event on a camera, to cutting it together on some editing software, to putting it out into the world. We worked so hard on it that it felt like watching your kid go out into the world. Good luck buddy!

I guess I could use these random thoughts of mine to create a script for the ccr.

Check back later.