I Was Never A Fan of Theater Shows

 When thinking of Iris's character, the one concern I had is my ability to showcase an authentic theater student because I'm not exactly a huge fan of theater in general. I definitely enjoy musical theater, but not to the same extent as other people I know. This is the type of situation that called for more research. I wanted to make the poster for Iris's show myself digitally, so I had to start looking into what authentic theater play posters look like. These are a couple images I came across when I searched "theater show posters".

I could see this reoccurring pattern of using dark silhouettes of characters along with defining a color scheme for the show within these playbill posters, but I didn't want it to look like a playbill you'd get on broadway. I want this poster to feel true to that design standard, but something more rough-around-the-edges. And here's what I found by going past the first page of Google images:

These posters gave me a little bit of inspiration for how I want my poster to look like; simple color schemes, maybe using some silhouettes, but powerful enough to get the point across. I plan on designing the posters on Canva since it's easier to navigate or Adobe Photoshop, if I really find the need to make intricate designs. Another detail about these posters that could prove to be challenging is fitting  the numerous credits into one page. Upon further research, I found that all I really need to include for credits is the director, choreographer, writer, and perhaps main actor names. I would also need to leave room for show dates and admission ticket prices. I could definitely fit all the text on the poster, but I have a feeling it'll be challenging to find the right placement for it so that it looks cohesive with the show's theme. 

What's even more difficult for me is deciding what show I'd like Iris to do as a high school student. The show has to be culturally relevant to the target audience of young adults, so I'm narrowing down my choices to: Legally Blonde, In The Heights, Wizard of Oz, or Into The Woods. I remember seeing the performance of Into The Woods my freshmen year, but I never saw posters for it so I think it's better for me to try designing something without any influence of my personal experience. The other shows I listed are my top choices because I've either seen or heard of the films. I've seen the Wizard of Oz and Legally Blonde, but have yet to see In The Heights. I heard good reviews about since the music is written by the one and only Lin Manuel Miranda, but for now I'm going to have to make some important decisions for my storyline this next week to get the ball rolling. I'll need to decide what the show is going to be, and from there, I can start finalizing my screenplay for my opening. I don't write scripts for films often, so I'll be back next week with updates on that. Until next week, hasta la vista! 

Matt. (2023, January 23). How to make a movie poster: The Complete Guide [with examples & tutorials] • filmmaking lifestyle. Filmmaking Lifestyle. Retrieved February 19, 2023, from https://filmlifestyle.com/how-to-make-a-movie-poster/#:~:text=The%20most%20important%20thing%20to,with%20what%20you%20can%20do.

Research and Planning Galore

The first thing I wanted to do was visualize my characters when solidifying my storyline this week. Just to elaborate on the main idea: a theater student, Iris, comes home from school and we see her come home with a poster for her school's show in her hand. She then works up the courage to ask her mom to come see her show even though she's aware of her mother's work priorities. I wanted to visualize both of their characters through moodboards so that I know how I want them to look on screen. When I thought of Iris, I had a feeling she was a down-to-earth artistic girl that always seemed to have a soft smile on her face. Here's what I came up with:

The clothing examples are just an idea of what kind of colors or clothing pieces I see her wearing because, I unfortunately, do not have purple courdoroy jeans. As for the color palette, I do want to incorporate the color purple into Iris' costume design somehow because I wanted it to correlate with her name's background. I was thinking of adding a jewelry piece that would be shown at some point in the film and for some reason, I really liked the idea of an anklet. It's often associated with beachy settings and things, but I'd want it to be a thing Iris wears on a daily basis to school and anywhere she goes. The backstage theater picture along with the posters are again just examples for me to visualize the type of vibe she has as a character, but I think it would be cool to hang up some fake playbill posters in her room for production design. Ultimately, I saw Iris as a calm and collected type of daughter that raidates an artistic vibe through her fashion expression, so I'm hoping to perhaps make or buy some things down the line to contribute to that idea I have for her character. 

I decided to make a moodboard for her mother as well, even though she'll have much less screentime:

If there's one character stereotype I see a lot in film, it's the rich mom that's usually overly sassy towards anyone and everyone in her life. Although this moodboard may give off rich businesswomen vibes, I want Iris' mom to show some characteristics of her daughter because it would make sense for them to have similar behavioral tendencies. Rest assured, her mom won't be a sassy character, I instead want her to also have a collected demeanor, but her mother gets stressed easily. She's not a great multitasker, which I want to portray through her having a phone call, but perhaps being interrupted by Iris' request at the end to invite her to the play. I chose some photos to put together a possible outfit we'll see her with, like a blazer and turtleneck, gold accent jewelry, black boots, maybe a handbag, and some black heeled boots. These are all things I already own, so I think I could definitely make an outfit like this on my own. I added the type of hairdo I see her mother with, and I immediately knew it would be a low, but sleek bun, and I wanted it to be symbolism for how guarded her mother acts around Iris. Her hair being up is akin to her defenses being held up, whereas Iris will have her hair down, and is willing to take the risk of facing rejection from her mother. My favorite part about production design has to be thinking of costumes for characters, because you can tell a whole character's personality from the things they wear. Fashion is supposed to be a personal expression of who we are as people and over the years, I've enjoyed developing my own fashion sense and I hope to put my knowledge to good use for my film opening's characters.   

A Sudden Burst of Inspiration

Today, in the middle of brushing my teeth, I had an aha moment. I have a much clearer idea of what I want to do for my film opening's storyline: a theater kid in high school, Iris, simply wants to work up the courage to invite her mom to her upcoming show. The only problem is that her mother seems to always be preoccupied with something for work. I really want to portray an emotionally absent parent with a non-rebellious or non-stereotypical teenage daughter type of relationship. These bursts of inspiration come at the most random times of day, but I'm confident that I can make a story like this work to become a proper drama film opening. I have a plethora of ideas for set design, sound, and cinematography, but I'll cross those bridges in due course, so I'm going to work on solidifying what I want for my plot first. 

I chose my main character's name, Iris because it's one of those names I always found had a pretty ring to it. According to Google, it's derived from "the name of the flowering plant, which comes from the Greek iris, meaning "rainbow"."' This discovery has enabled other gears in my head to start turning for how I can hint at her name before the mother says it, ideally towards the end of my opening. The flower, Iris, looks like something I've come across before. 

There are a couple ways I can approach the symbolism for Iris, the first choice being costume design. Considering that the flower is a royal purple color, I can add something to her costume design that aligns with this color, but that'd be very surface-level symbolism. This brings us to our second choice, production design! I have a very specific decoration in my house and it's a handmade rainbow tree of wisdom. My brother purchased it in an artisan market a while back for my mom, and it could be the perfect little detail to add to Iris's room if I decide to include a scene with her room in it.

My personal tree of wisdom

I especially like how this decoration is handmade because it would play into the artistic side of her character as a theater student. The final choice of symbolism I want to incorporate when introducing Iris is lighting techniques. When you think of a rainbow, you think of the vibrancy of all the colors, but rainbows only come after a storm. The rainbows we see are soft but so ephemeral because we rarely see them, but when we do, it feels almost hopeful. I want the light on Iris to come across softly, like a soft white backlight that looks like sunshine. It would make more sense visually, but I think my next steps during pre-production are writing the script and making character mood boards. I found that making the mood boards for our previous projects allowed me to gain a much more thorough understanding of how the characters would be delivered visually and will definitely be a big help while filming to refer back to. On that note, I'll talk to you soon!

Ideas In.. Partial Bloom

 After a couple days of rummaging through my brain's ideas for my film opening storyline, I didn't get very far with any of them. The first idea was to introduce some sort of familial bond or conflict. An emotionally unavailable parent and how it may affect a child's way of expressing affection or loyalty. But, I was really attracted to the idea of portraying some sort of familial relationship. Hence how I decided to choose drama as my genre. Today, I watched "AFTERSUN", a drama from A24 Productions, that follows a relationship between a father, Calum, and his 11-year-old daughter, Sophie. The story takes place in a holiday vacation resort where Sophie spends time with her father, who attempts to hide the weight of fatherhood and 

adolescence gradually creeps up on Sophie's life. I kept seeing this particular film all over my social media and it seemed like it could prompt some inspiration for my storyline ideas. Although this film portrays the beginning of adolescence through Sophie, which wasn't what I was going for, I did like the authenticity of the film's plot and the production techniques that I could possibly implement into my opening. The way Sophie began to lose that childhood vibrance as adolescence hit her is something I feel like most young adults have experienced in one way or another. Something about the world around us seems less colorful, less vibrant, and increasingly more problematic. In terms of AFTERSUN's production techniques, my favorite parts had to be the lighting and costume design. I really liked the warmth of most shots throughout the film and how they conveyed a deeper meaning with the character's emotions.

Sophie and Calum in their hotel room

On one side is the vitality and comfort Sophie feels 

around her father, but Calum's distress is depicted

through cooler tones and separated by a wall, to further emphasize the way he tries to hide his

emotions. I especially enjoyed their costumes in the film because it subtly hinted at the 90s era of fashion: tucked-in shirts, shorts with belts, lots of patterns, and socks going over shoes. I don't think I'm looking to showcase a certain era for my drama, not yet, at least.

I'll need to decide on my storyline first and then consider telling the story in a different decade than currently. 

My only concern with my familial relationship idea for my film opening is getting an actor to realistically look like a parent. I don't think they need to look super old with wrinkles, but getting the right actors for my opening matters and there may be some issues with that area. It seems like I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself, but the point of the matter is that I'm pretty set on doing the genre of drama! Lately, I've started to notice the fact that I'm a bigger-picture person. I tend to focus on the end goal of things or think about a bigger message before working out details. Which begs the question to myself: What message do I want to relay in my story? I feel like the reason I'm so attracted to the concept of displaying a familial relationship is that I, fortunately, grew up around a large family, and I've always been emotionally attached to them. I had a loving relationship with both my parents and siblings and they've all shaped who I am today. 

Dilemma number two is if my conventionally acceptable childhood would be challenging any constructs in the media world and if it was, how I would go about doing so. More often than not, young adults have a negative presence on the big screen along with having a dysfunctional family dynamic, so maybe portraying something similar that I experienced could be challenging that stereotype, but I'm not entirely set on it yet. I want to make this opening personal, but relatable for my target audience, so there's much left to do. I'll be continuing my research throughout this week and hopefully solidifying my storyline as well. 

Hey hey! I'm Alessia

My name's Alessia and I'd like to believe that this is a safe space for my imagination to go out of its comfort zone. From the moment we started blogging this year, it felt strange to share my innermost thoughts publicly. Although it's foreign to me, it feels nice to have my own personal platform to go on tangents about my creative thoughts, processes, and journey. I'm a high school student hoping to pursue a career in journalism or film in the near future and I've become used to just making videos under restrictive parameters and standards, but I'm hoping a long-term project like this enables me to grow as a storyteller. Another thing is that I'm used to a fast-paced environment where you create things back to back without real "breathing room" between projects, so getting this much time to do one final video feels extremely scary to me.  

Just last week we were introduced to our biggest project of the year -- the portfolio project. It feels like a lot of pressure when you're given an extended period of time to complete one video, but the creative liberty is refreshing at the same time. All I've been thinking about lately is the kind of message I want to send through a two-minute video. Should it be personal to me? What kind of topics or constructs would I want to challenge in the media world? The answer to both of those is I'm not sure, yet. Before getting into all that jazz, I think baby steps, like choosing a genre is the right way to go. I'm thinking about doing the genre of drama, but I'm also a fan of romance films. However, I feel like most romance plots are overdone and cliché, so perhaps I should explore an unfamiliar genre like psychological thrillers. It's safe to say that I'm pretty torn at the moment on the first step of this project, so I think I'm going to brainstorm the ultimate message I want to tell and determine which genre it would fit into. This feels like a project I'll be experiencing lots of highs and lows, but I'm stoked to tell a story.

Welcome to my garden of thoughts. There are some flowers in bloom, others that have already blossomed, and even some withering plants, but I hope you come along for the journey. 

The Final Result: Music Marketing Blog #2

Our music video has finally come to fruition and we ended up persevering through our second long-term project of the year. I have to say, working in a group is fun but has definitely been more stressful than I anticipated. Experiencing stress is not necessarily a bad thing in my opinion because it means you're getting things done in the end. I had fun trying to make a different type of music video than I'm used to and my group and I all knew each other personally so it made life easier for us.

In retrospect, the hardest obstacle to overcome with this project was our pre-production stage. When we began brainstorming ideas for our music video, we really went back and forth for a couple of days before agreeing on one solid idea. We wanted to do a storytelling music video out of our old habits of needing to tell a story with our video, but we all agreed that doing a storytelling one would be 10x harder to agree on and it probably wouldn't work well for our schedules collectively. We did not choose a promotional video because it felt a little too much on the simple side for all of us and we didn't want to go through the hassle of synching our audio. Then, we considered an artistic music video and this is where we started to flush out our ideas -- making our video artistic would enable us to have complete creative freedom with what to put in the video as long as it has a cohesive theme to it, so this was our first milestone with brainstorming. We all really loved the idea of doing an artistic music video but then a new challenge arose -- deciding on what our concept/theme would be. This took us a while because we all had to listen to "Tonight" by Phoneix several times to understand what kind of "vibe" we got from it. I was getting funky, the 80s, and playful feelings from the song. The one thing we all were able to agree on was going for an 80s vibe to our music video because it lets us have fun with the mise-en-scène. We immediately thought of vibrant, colorful, and fun outfits for Miguel to wear and knew we could have fun with our set design as well. However, we weren't able to solidify our concept until we were forced to think about it. We had thought through what kind of things we wanted in our music video but never came to a conclusion on a purpose, so we had to take another listen. After paying attention to the lyrics and correlating it with the music, we wanted to convey that same sense of loneliness hidden beneath playful colors in our music video. 

So then came the fun part -- production! I don't think I've ever been more excited to film a project before because I enjoyed the production design ideas we came up with. We knew we wanted to include a birthday party scene, a cooking scene, and a banana as a graphic match from the first shot. It just felt so weird and out of my comfort zone, but in a good way. The biggest relief for all of us is that we were able to really focus on the artistic direction of this music video more than focusing on telling a logical story, which can sometimes be challenging. Here are a few moments I managed to capture while we filmed:

All of these photos were taken during our first day of filming. This first day was much more difficult than our second day because we filmed during the night, which made getting the lighting on point even harder. We had to be inventive with the ways we added light in our shots, but it ended up working out because we added that 80s grain to our footage in post-production, so raising the ISO didn't really affect the quality. Another obstacle we encountered while filming was using a gimbal. They're really sensitive to motion, so Matthew, as our main camera operator, had a hard time navigating its technology and getting it to cooperate. The only shot we ended up using it for was our opening shot by the sidewalk and we all spent about 2 hours figuring out how to use it. We called our other TV friends to see if they could help us but they were all occupied, so we had to take matters into our own hands. After reading a bunch of online manuals and watching videos, we only managed to use it for our opening shot and tried using it for our birthday cake scene. It was taking way too long to film that singular shot with the gimbal, so we opted for filming the entire thing handheld. Matthew and I are used to filming things handheld, so we thought it'd be a better option for our group since we could do things more efficiently by playing to our strengths. After making the decision of going handheld, things ran much smoother the rest of the day. We went to 7/11 to film one of our last shots and I tried their slushie for the first time (it was decent). After filming that scene, it was getting pretty late, so we called it a day and decided to continue the following morning. 

DAY 2 OF FILMING:

On our second day, filming went much smoother for all of us. We had about 3 scenes left to film and we knew exactly how we wanted to film it thanks to our storyboard. Storyboards are sort of underrated because I honestly rarely use them, but they make the production process 10x easier when you know exactly what shots you're getting, where, and how. We filmed our party scene, the blank room, and the cooking shot all that same day. We started filming this time in the morning and it's truly so much better to film during the day because you feel less groggy and more encouraged to be productive when you have an early start to your day. It wasn't only because our scenes were during the day, but we wanted a fresh start from the night before and this felt much more refreshing and light. My favorite scene from our video is probably the party scene because all we used was a projector and a small pocket light while filming and it turned out to look great. We had some trouble trying to make the party look realistic because some of our extra actors canceled on us, but using the projector was a pretty good choice on our part. All we really wanted to focus on was Miguel so as long as we saw shadows and party lights of some kind, it would work. We filmed the cooking scene last, but it was probably one of the easiest shots to film. It transitioned from the piano and we had to practice the exact movement a little bit, but it turned out really smooth in the end. After filming our last scenes, we were able to wrap it up at around 2 PM and it felt nice to still have some of the days to enjoy as opposed to coming home late.

Our final stage was post-production and this was again, an easier stage for us because of our storyboard. All we had to do was find the shots we wanted and align them with the sequence in the storyboard, so we finished doing our line edit in two days. Samantha was in charge of editing the final music video because she originally came up with the idea, so knew how to put it together. She would send us some clips and sequences throughout the week to get our feedback on things we should change/add and if things were running smoothly. After adding our final touches and effects on the last day, we were finally done with our music video. We added some cool grainy effects and spent the most time on color grading our footage to make it look close to the 80s funky aesthetic. 

All in all, this project was such a great learning experience for me and my group. I feel like at the beginning of this project, I was worried that we'd all face a lot of conflicts when deciding upon an idea for our music video because agreeing in group settings is extremely difficult. In the end, though, we all were able to go with the flow and just try something new for once and I really liked our end product. One takeaway I can say I gained was upholding the value of pre-production over anything else. Like I said earlier, I'm not a fan of storyboards because they're sort of time-consuming and unnecessary for me when I have my own vision of things, but spending that extra time in pre-production makes every other step 10x easier. The fact that we were forced (it's a good thing) to make that storyboard enabled me to visually understand how much smoother things go with putting a little more effort into planning. Similarly, I was able to grasp how much quality matters over quantity -- one of the debates we went through in pre-production was how we'd incorporate a variety of angles and shots if we were gonna do graphic matches with continuous shots. We were able to incorporate the specific angles and shots we wanted within our continuous shots within only a few scenes but were still able to convey a concept and that's what I really liked about making an artistic music video. Although we had to be extra resourceful and inventive with our shots and production design, it definitely came out the way we wanted in the end and produced a good product. These are both things I hope to apply to my Cambridge portfolio project when we get to start on it this year and hopefully, I'll be able to come up with an even better story to tell for my portfolio project through the use of mindful planning and inventiveness with production. 

Rising to the Occassion: Music Marketing Blog #1

It's our second long-term project of the year and creating a marketing campaign from scratch is a challenging endeavor, to say the least. I immediately knew I would work with Matthew, Samy, Mya, and Miguel and I was truly excited to work with them all to see how we all function together collectively. We sent Miguel to get our music genre and we were all equally confused about the genre we were supposed to do at first. The songs all seemed to have a very different tone to them, but it just seemed like all of them were meant to be within different genres. We listened through each song together to see which one we "vibed" with the most and we chose Tonight by Phoenix, featuring Ezra Koenig. I had actually listened to the band Phoneix before, so it felt relieving to see one artist I knew on the One Drive with the song choices. Our group loved the playful, upbeat, but melancholy message of the song and we thought it'd be something we could make a story out of. 

However, our music video wouldn't be a storytelling one. Considering we're all part of CBTV, we were always required to do a storytelling music video at the end of the year, so we wanted to let go of the hardwired routine we fell into for music videos and wanted to be more experimental with an artistic music video. With that decision came brainstorming a concept we wanted to convey, and we wanted to stick to the loneliness theme throughout the song. In terms of a tone for our music video, we wanted to make it funky and weird because the melody of this song feels like it's embracing both of those things. We were all spitballing our ideas during class, but none of us were able to come to a consensus about how we'd convey the loneliness concept, which made pre-production much harder for us. Samy and I kept going back and forth about the logistics of the vision she had, and some people in our group weren't particularly fond of it. I wanted our video to feel lonely with an illusion of a vibrant atmosphere, but we kept going back to minute details. Eventually, we all decided to put the concept for the music video on the back burner and work on a schedule to follow instead, going through the details first and then thinking about the bigger picture or message for our video. 

After agreeing on a schedule to follow in class, we took baby steps to work towards solidifying our artistic approach: thinking of locations, props, equipment, and going through things we wanted to happen in the video, in other words, an action list.

After an intense and confusing discussion about our concept, we decided to follow through with Samy’s vision and let her walk us through the kind of music video she wanted. It all started to visually make sense with our storyboard: lots of graphic matches, costume changes, location changes, and a wide range of color palettes that would convey different things, sprinkling things we all wanted into the video. I feel like that was the most difficult obstacle we had to overcome — finding a middle ground when thinking of how we wanted to convey our concepts. I was pleasantly surprised at how well we were able to incorporate all of our ideas into our storyboard, and we were finally ready to start filming. So, we wanted to dive head first into the production stage and made Wednesday our first filming day. 

A sneak peek

My favorite stage so far has been the depth of our brainstorming  during pre-production. I’ve never gotten a chance to do long-term projects like these, so being able to spend more time on the planning element always works out for the better during production. Next time you’ll hear from me, our final product will come to flourish. Hasta luego!