Closer to Choosing The Genre and Storyline

 Dear Fellow Passionate Media Followers, 

   Dear Fellow Passionate Media Followers, 

    I apologize, I haven't uploaded a blog in a while. I have been super busy.  I finally have some time to sit down and write a blog and thought I would update you all on what progress we have made with our portfolio project.

    This past week, my group and I met up to start brain storming ideas for the film opening. We started by deciding the opening genre of the film we are making. With much deliberation, we all collectively decided to make a film opener for a story using the drama genre. One person in my group wanted to create a horror film, but we felt that to make a good horror film we needed a lot of resources that we didn't have access to. After we decided on the genre, our group did a lot of research.

   Throughout our research, we discovered   typical conventions of a drama movie are as follows: they capture real life situations, they have characters and the settings that  are real, and a story line that is real. Drama films are really rooted in the conflict portion of a film. They mainly focus on a character's journey. To keep the audience engaged these films usually have very intense social interactions. The purpose of a drama film is to capture a dramatic story line. This helps to move the audience emotionally. Most of the time, they capture the struggles, hardships, difficulty, and pain characters go through. These types of films usually follow the same plot line such as: the beginning of the film is usually very sad and the ending is usually happy.  Generally, it portrays a journey that a character adds to its own development. During the film, there's a lot of intense social interaction filled with climaxes to keep the audience emotionally attached to the story. We also found that dramas also could be about a specific character’s hardship through a task. Once we found this in our research, our group started to come up with a really good idea.

    One individual in our group, brought up the idea of making a drama film opening about a boy trying to learn how to skate board because he wants to fit into the popular culture of his neighborhood. This prompted me to bring up the movie, Mid-90s directed by Jonah Hill. My group really liked this idea. We all really liked the esthetic of Mid90s and thought we could create the same kind of esthetic that Mid90s had in Miami, a city near where our group lives. 

  Once my group had the Mid90s film in our heads, we all had a burst of inspiration. We started to come up with characters and the overall plot. We thought we  would need at least 3-4 characters in the film. Three of the characters would be the teenagers that have been skating a long time and were in the so called "popular crowd." The other character would be the main character of the film. He/she would be the person trying to learn how to skate. Instead of making the main character a male, we thought go making the main character a female to play with representation in the film opener. 

  After we had a basis for the characters in our film opener, we decided to discuss the overall plot, in order to properly make the film opener. We came up with the idea of making a film about a teenage girl trying to learn how to skate to be with a group of guys in her community in order to be with the "cool kids." We thought the film would be about this girls’  journey to become a part of the group, the reasons why she wants to do this and how it impacts her. 

  There is a lot more work we have to do in order to get a more concrete idea for our film opener, but this week we made a lot of progress. I am currently very satisfied with the group I am working with. I have recognized that each group member is going to bring their own skills and talents to this group to make a very good film opener. I am extremely excited to see how this project ends up. Well that's all for this time. I will hopefully write another blog soon. 

Sincerely,

Matthew Liebman   

Filmmaker

February 24th, 2019