City Day

I've decided that filming is going to be set in my neighborhood right in front and by my house.  This familiarity with the area makes it a lot easier for me to be behind the camera.  The location in itself is very symbolic as it looks like a stereotypical middle class house, similar to the house pictured below. This is used to convey the idea of living a boring, cookie-cutter life.  Leaving that house behind shows Joaquins movement into a different world of taking chances and risks.  I've realized that I do need to get a few things in order to film on location efficiently.  I need a ladder in order to get the high angle shots that I want to use, including the shot of the car driving away with the title card overhead.  I also need a flashlight in order to provide lighting that will then be dimmed in post (see last blog).  I'll probably want the flashlight to be dim enough to make the light not seem unnatural yet have the characters faces still be illu...

The time i’ve been waiting for has finally come, we are going to start filming in the next week now that i’ve worked out scheduling with everyone. The most filming we are going to get done is probably on Wednesday, March 21st since that’s when everyone has free time and no conflicts. My goal is to have majority of the filming done by next Saturday so that I can work on editing during Spring Break. Over Spring Break I am going to be taking a trip to New York to visit my family. I will be bringing my laptop in order to work on editing whatever is recorded at that point. I’ve looked at several different options for the editing of my film but I’ve decided to use Wondershare Filmora because of its simple yet effective nature of editing. I will provide a link to the softwares page on how it works at the bottom in case you are interested. I have used wondershare several times in the past and it is one of my favorite video editing softwares out there. Tonight I will be reactivating my Wond...

During our feedback session in class I was able to pick up a lot of things about how to proceed with the movie process.  One of the biggest issues for me was figuring out how to film at night while still having the characters be visible and luckily Tristan gave me the solution.  He told me that if I filmed with a light and then turned down the brightness while editing which gave me a lot more leeway when it comes to filming. Another thing that I was curious about was how I should approach the credits.  As a group we decided the best approach towards credits was having them be displayed on screen as the scene was going on fading in and out.  This is the approach that i'm going to use while doing a montage of the city of Weston.  Something else that I will be doing is having someone else play Joaquin as when discussing the future of our groups I realized that it would be a lot easier to film and perform the things I wanted to perform if I wasn't one of the cha...

So these are my final thoughts on how to end the storyboard that has been haunting me. Following the rock hitting the window I am going with my plan of having the camera show Rob waiting for a response that he doesn't get.  Once he begins to throw more rocks the camera shifts to inside Joaquin's room where you can hear the constant tapping on the glass and see the silhouette of Joaquin laying in bed in the unlit room.  As he groans and gets up the camera follows behind him as he opens the window.  The camera then cuts again to a behind the shoulder shot of Rob about to throw another rock when he sees the window open and Joaquin's head pop out.  This is where dialogue comes in, something that I'm still not 100% sure on.  I definitely want Joaquin to be annoyed but the question is how annoyed?  I'm planning on the conversation essentially being Joaquin asking Rob what he wants at 10pm (establishing time) and once Rob brings up City Day, Joaquin essentially ...

In order to actually work out what I want to do with my characters as well as how the storyboard should progress from my last post, I have decided that I want to make sure I know the relationships of these characters and what they're like first (alongside giving them names). The first character I want to establish is the one seen driving and throwing the rock in the storyboard.  I chose to essentially make him the "Ferris Bueller" of this story. I've settled on the name Robert Barons (Played by my good friend Alberto), which the other characters will refer to as Rob throughout the opening. John Hughes, the director of Ferris Bueller in an interview with VQR explained that the movie in itself centered around the importance of friendship, with Ferris being someone who is happy with his life going to far lengths for Cameron suffering from the opposite.  It's this relationship that I want to portray in the opening of the film.  I want Robert to be someone who is cle...

So I have started my storyboard and gotten the first about 30 seconds of the film thought up.  The issue is i'm not sure at the moment how to follow up this story board.  At the moment it ends with one of the characters throwing a rock at the window of the other but there is a lot of routes I can take following that.  Do I want the window to break?  Should it just make a small tap? Should the tap be recorded from inside or outside the room being hit?  Will the person who's room it is be upset at being woken up or be used to it? All of these questions have been worrying me for a bit and it's gotten me stuck at the moment. I think I want to have the first rock hit the window,  then film there being no response from outside.  Once the character who threw the rock notices that there was no response he begins to throw more and that's when the view changes to inside.  On the inside all that's heard is the constant tapping of rocks on the glass until...

I had a very busy weekend and beginning of the week this week.  I spent the latter end of last week in Orlando for Debate States which ended up being extremely distracting (I won yay!!!).  But now that i'm back and everything has settled it's time to make up for everything I missed. While in Orlando the active city life of downtown actually ended up helping me realize how City Day should begin.  Due to my want to focus on the interpersonal relationship between the three main characters I realized that the city itself should not be made part of the opening and instead show why City Day is so important to the group.  I've decided that I want to focus the opening on the views of the suburbs and how small, uniform and bland places like Weston can be.  These shots can be used to juxtapose the main subject of City Day, the city, with the quiet life of the suburbs showing why this day is needed in the first place.  Alongside this realization I found that it wo...

I've officially gotten all my actors ready for their time in the limelight so now it's research time.  As I mentioned previously City Day is going to be a teen comedy so it should be pretty obvious who the target audience is, I just need to make changes and adjustments in order to fit this target. One of the first things I realized that I needed in order to appeal to the modern teen is diversity. IndieWire explains that p opular films still fail to represent teen girls from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, considering my goal to be a progressive and current film I made sure to have a prevalent hispanic female main character introduced in the film from the beginning, not as a trope but as someone people can look towards.   UCLA’s Ralph Bunche Center reports that audiences are growing in their demand for diversity in films and to meet these demands, the cast of the film itself is all people of latino descent.  This focus on representation is going to be a b...