Project Components

OH MY GOD ITS TIME HERE'S MY FINAL PRODUCT!! 

FILM FILE

GLUTTONY

POSTCARD

FRONT

BACK

SOCIAL MEDIA

TWITTER: @gluttonymovie

Critical Reflection

    Gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins, and one of the most enabled by today's society. In my film, entitled GLUTTONY (naturally), the idea of gluttony is assessed on levels past just shoving food into your mouth, namely the modern application regarding people overexposing themselves to media. 

    The idea for GLUTTONY came to me a few weeks after I watched Darren Arronofsky's The Whale in the theater back in December of last year. The tragic and simultaneously horrifying nature of having a stress-induced eating disorder resonated with me extremely hard, and it truly gave me a new perspective on the nature of people with such problems. While the crux of my film wasn’t exactly to point out the humanity in such a monstrous figure of a man like The Whale, I used certain elements from the movie to build the character I nicknamed Fat in the production process(the character was never granted or credited with a name in my piece.)

The tonality of my piece differs greatly from the tone of The Whale, as the film used the protagonist’s(Charlie) eating disorder to make the viewer feel bad for him, but I aspired to do so in a way that looks down on it. At the heart of my piece, all of my characters have flaws and the question is not whether they should or can be redeemed, it’s more about who has the MOST/WORST flaws. That being said, the opening of my film takes direct inspiration from the scene in The Whale when Charlie battles his inner voice taunting him with a Twix bar and loses, scarfing down the candy in a grotesque fashion.

    Before I initially latched onto the idea of looking down on “gluttonous people,” I was hesitant to take on this theme because it could possibly backfire and be misinterpreted as a shot at people who have eating disorders or truly cannot control themselves when overindulging in something. Though I was scared to make my food gluttony character unlikeable at first, I thought it would be cool to have the character be conditioned to believe that he has an issue, leading the audience to believe that he will interpret his bullying as a means for change, but then misdirecting them by having him succumb to it and go even deeper with it in spite of himself and the ones who bullied him. In writing him this way, I could have the character lose the moral high ground in the situation to make the audience lose their connection with the character itself and more the idea that all three characters weren’t anyone to sympathize with. 

While I would say the opposite for “Fat,” I was TOTALLY taking a dig at people who use social media or their phones too much with the character of Medea. As aforementioned, I never wanted people to look up to or seek asylum in any one of my characters being any good, I hoped they would find power in putting down the distinct yet similar types of evils within my characters. For Medea, her evil is constantly hinted at throughout the entire piece, as she stares dead into the computer and really only contributed to the conversation when she was reminded of a movie she watched. She was always meant to be a highly exaggerated version of people who are chronically online, and as such I expected viewers who could possibly relate to this character to reflect and understand that their overindulgence is just as gluttonous as people who eat too much.

    Also, if you didn’t notice, Medea is the only character named in the piece for two reasons: one is that she was the character people were supposed to come away from the film focused on, and two, because early on I had the idea that Medea is a name that is eerily similar to the word Media and that was SOOO FUNNY I had to put it in. 

    Building on the first of those two reasons(totally the most important one😳), I made the marketing centered around her so audiences could possibly go in focusing on that character in particular. To be specific, all the posts from the Twitter account for the film(except for the final promo) are from the perspective of Medea herself. I started off by posting all the characters in the piece in the order of their screentime and then twisted the final post with Medea to say “me” instead of her name/adjective given to her(FAT AND EGO ARE NOT ACTUALLY THEIR NAMES.) The tweets to follow are from a first-person perspective, just like any standard Twitter account, I would post and repost the kinds of things she would say or feel attached to if she were real, like the Mario movie, for example. 

    This tweet is possibly the most direct way I attempted to engage with the Twitter base in my marketing, asking them a genuine question from the POV of the character. Other tweets, like Medea’s living room and the “I look cute in this” tweet were both clever little ways to tease what viewers would see in the production itself. Trying my hardest to tweet like any Twitter user, I hoped they/potential fans would find the level of interactivity and role-playing to be a cool way to promote the film. 

                              

    Through my social media, I was directly able to make a “self-fulfilling prophecy” type of branding. With the main theme of the piece inevitably centering around the media-obsessed character, the social media HAD to be self-aware. The account physically follows the major media distributors of today, not only because that's what Medea surrounds herself with, but also for eagle-eyed fans to notice and realize the contrast between their marketing strategy and the one I took for GLUTTONY. 

    After finally being able to say I have wrapped production on Gluttony, I feel that same bittersweet feeling as the last time I charted my entire production process. The struggle and stress of brainstorming and thinking everything out is dehumanizing, but it really does make the final payoff seem all the more special. I hope you enjoy my film, because I enjoyed finishing it(less making it.)

Looking Back

 

    Now that I have made it to the finish line, I can't help but look back and reflect on the journey. I managed my time pretty horribly, but I did get everything done the way I wanted it to by the end, and I am pretty proud of the final product. Shots I didn't like and lighting that bothered me didn't quite end up being major issues once the editing came around, as those things were less bothersome once all of my footage became an actual narrative. I'm always so mesmerized when I see all of my clips amalgamate into one realized story. 

    If I were to do this any differently, I would probably have updated my social media much more and (as aforementioned) managed my time better. Even though I have a social media that does what it needs to in regards to building the idea that the perspective of all the posts is from the media-oriented character of the piece, I would have liked to build on it more and posted more regardless. I wish I filmed earlier because not having anything to work with prohibited me from making the progress I desperately wanted around 3/4 into this process(building on that social media and editing earlier.)

    I am so insanely pleased to be able to say that I am finally done with this production; it became one of the more stressful things I have ever done in my life but putting as much thought and effort into it as I did made it all the more fulfilling once I was able to look back on it.

Postcard

Now for the last piece of the puzzle, the postcard. I developed a mock up in class one morning on a whim for the kind of poster image I hoped to achieve. Here’s what it was.

While this mock up had no literal connection to the footage I shot or what would happen in the piece, it is a thematic representation of the levels of gluttony I aspired to target in my film. The first and most obvious, gluttony of food, is represented by the huge man dominating the cover. The second level, gluttony of ego, is represented in the man eating a smaller scale version of himself. Lastly, gluttony of media, the last level portrayed in the film, is represented by the two eye sockets of the man being smaller versions of himself, as people who overexpose themselves to media “eat with their eyes.”

As of today, I managed to pull together a final product based on this mock-up. Here is the front.

   I naturally found it fitting to give the man more details and color him in. Even though the big man and the smaller mouth and eyes men are kind of cartoonish, I don’t think it really takes away from the piece’s effectiveness or delivery of its theme. I found that darker color matched with the darkish tonality of the piece and as such incorporated black and crimson red for the titles(the white is kind of just a contrast to the black.)

   I didn’t plan this side like I did the front, but here is the back of my postcard.

    This background graphic is a turkey leg with a big, ugly eyeball. Though it’s simplistic and once again very cartoonish looking, the meaning one is meant to deduce from imagery like this makes it a fitting choice. The eyeball being on the turkey leg is almost like saying that we consume what we see/ are exposed to in the same way that we consume food. Aside from the graphic, I have the dates for the Tribeca film festival showings on this side together with the social media. I was originally just going to put the Twitter account because that's the only real promotional social media, but I also figured that I would upload the full film to Youtube eventually so my friends could see. 

    Now with the postcard done, I AM FINALLY DONE WITH EVERYTHING!! REFLECTION AND FINAL POST IMMINENT!!

Editing + Title Font

   

    My experience editing this project was much more complicated than it had to be, more so than I have ever made it before. 

    In my last post, I said I would use iMovie to edit rather than premiere because of time reasons and because I was curious to see if it really was as bad as I'd heard. I was not regretting my option while editing, it honestly wasn't that bad, but there were certain perks from Premiere that I was really missing from Premiere. Among these perks are the ability to separate clips at any rate I wished(iMovie smashes every clip in the timeline together) and the obvious one, keyframing. The entire title sequence and credits were impossible to make in iMovie(in the way I wanted it to look,) so I cut my losses and used one of iMovie's crappy title fill-ins to make my title sequence...

No, I didn't. Nobody should ever do that.

    I edited as much footage as I could in iMovie excluding the Title sequence and the end credits before exporting and shooting it into Premiere to do those two things. While I was there, I had some sort of creative explosion in my head and ended up keyframing a ton of stuff, fixing sound problems to playing with lighting effects and opacity. I also decided I wanted to insert a few voiceover lines to fix some bad line deliveries from my actors, and I edited those up real nice to sound as natural as possible. 

    As for the title, I found a font that I thought complimented the piece pretty well. The font is called "ROMANA" and it's really big and fat. I felt like the idea of overindulging/stuffing yourself was communicated in the chunky line width of the font, so I ended up using it. I will use the same color and font on the postcard I have in the works. 

    The editing of this project is something I'm fairly proud of; it's not anywhere near some masterclass editing job but it did the narrative justice. I was way less confident in my footage going into the editing job, and once I finished editing I feel kind of stupid for thinking it was irredeemable. 

Which (soft)Ware Would I Want

 

    I finally get to talk about editing! After considering the simplicity of my film and the complete lack of any real special effects like I had in my last big project, I might not need to go through the stress of trying to learn and insert all kinds of editing effects into my piece this time around. As such, I am unsure if I even need to edit in Premiere for this particular project.  

    The only real alternative would be iMovie, as it's the software I am the second most versed in(second to Premiere.) To many, it is the poor man's Premiere, having vastly less effects and a much simpler way to organize clips. In this case, simpler means worse, because it limits the editor in what they can do. However, what about when there is no need to go that hard at all? Is it worth going with the easier option if all I need to do is easy edits? In my eyes, the answer is yes.

    For the first time in my editing career, I am consciously demoting from Premeire to iMovie to edit a professional project. It sounds kind of stupid to declare it, but this rationalization poses a fairly convincing argument for making the change. Hopefully I won't regret it. 

FIlming Day 2

    So I did end up scrapping everything I had before to shoot everything again. The result?

30 TIMES BETTER THAN BEFORE!

    The shoot was infinitely better than the one from before. I was much more prepared than the last time I filmed, knowing exactly what I wanted out of my actors after seeing what worked and what didn't the last time we filmed. I even made a new, much more detailed set of storyboards for the new shoot.

    There were many shots that I wasn't a fan of in the first version of my storyboard after seeing them visualized on video, including this one of Erick's character(not named.) Given that he is meant to emit a menacing presence, it made sense to frame him this time around from a low angle to show his dominance rather than at this random angle I thought looked good at the moment. 

Day one shot

 

Day two shot

       

    Not only did the cinematography get better with better preparation, but I also was able to coordinate my shots and shoot the entire film on the same day. What this tells me is that even though I messed up the first time, my theory about filming it all in a single day still followed true in the end. I filmed everything that required daylight so fast that I was able to hang out and relax before filming the scenes with Natalia in her brother's dark room at night. 

The second shoot was less stressful than the last and gave me all the footage I needed to truly depict my creative vision for this piece. It wasn't perfect, but it was so insanely worth starting from scratch.

Nice decision Manny!!

    

Group Meeting: The Squeakquel

   

    Today, I met with a group of filmmakers in my media class to discuss our progress and current status in regards to our short film. At this group meeting, a friend of mine gave me some helpful insight on the social media aspect of the project, and some reassurance about what I would consider being behind.

   I told them what my plan was for the social media aspect of this project, it being based/from the POV of the media obsessed character in my film, and what my friend Wade helped me do was get an idea of how to incorporate the “Behind the Scenes” footage I was hoping for. Once I have all my footage recorded, I could take a picture from the POV of the character and caption it the way the character would act in the production itself. This would act as a more straightforward way to communicate this theming than merely reposting and reaching out to other popular media distributors like I had planned.

I was firmly under the impression that I was incredibly behind and everyone else, and this isn’t to say that I’m not behind schedule, but it seems now based on this group meeting that I am not drastically behind. This isn’t something that beats me from trying any harder because my progress is similar to others, it just lifts a bit of stress off of my shoulders.

Epic Filming Announcement

     

    The location we filmed our first day of footage, Natalia's house, was tricky and inconvenient given the lighting and the fact that her parents were home. Today, she notified me earlier today that her parents were going to be gone for the entire weekend and we are allowed to film in the daytime while they are gone. The convenience of this blew my mind, and immediately I said that we would do that once the weekend came. 

    However, that's not the announcement. The news instilled in me a crazy thought that seems pretty wasteful but could prove very useful:

"How about you just start filming from scratch at her house?"

    Not the brightest idea considering I filmed a lot already, but HER ENTIRE HOUSE IS EMPTY! That paired with lighting not being as big of a problem if I timed it well in the middle of the day makes this idea have some merit. I'm going to see how I feel the day of filming, but there's an 85% chance I am going to just start over this Sunday. Hopefully, I'll make a smart choice!

Filming Day!

 Today, I finally managed to get some filming done. Even though I assumed I would only need one day, I definitely I need a second day to reshoot some shots. One major problem arose during the filming, testing my ability to improvise. 

    The house we were filming in was honestly pretty horrible in terms of lighting.  The living room I wanted to shoot in had a long window- strip above a set of blinds(could be considered a skylight.) I wish I got a clear picture of it to put in this blog, but all I have is the hellish, blinding light that it produced in the picture above. 

    The first idea I had to combat this lighting was to simply close the shades and lower the amount of light in the room(the one I filmed in was the one on the right,) but doing this only made the skylight more blinding as it stood out more against the dark. Next, I decided that it would be better to just start reshooting all of my footage in the other living room in the house, but that was problematic because there simply wasn't enough light in that room. What resulted from this was a full inability to find some sort of perfect lighting in either room and a choice. I would either keep shooting in the room I had been, or scrap everything and possibly try again a day without a beating sun. Though the second choice would have been a smart "live and learn" type situation, I knew that I needed to stick it out and choose the first option. 

    The majority of the shots looked fine, but a few are slightly disjointed and regrettably a bit lower than I would have liked because the awkward lighting would create glares that would disrupt the entire shot. I filmed around 60% of what I needed to(intentionally,) and the second day was only going to require one of my actors, but in case the lighting isn't as bad on the second try, I might as well try to get some reshoots done. 

Power in Paper

    Storyboarding is an important part of the pre-planning process, and something that is necessary to evade difficulty/confusion on filming day.  The storyboards I made in preparation for my shoot are completely unprofessional, but I found them to be pretty helpful regardless of what they looked like on paper. 

    The storyboards started off pretty tame, abiding by the structure of the organized worksheet I was handed to me. Through these, I would be able to insert bits of character expression and plan detailed background elements for each shot. 

    When the times got rough and I was out of organized boxes, however, I became lazy and decided to just start doodling on the back as opposed to printing out some more pages. These shots were super lacking in detail and weren't able to paint a scene as well as the other ones, but I didn't exactly try to do anything like that in these storyboards. They mostly became a way for me to write down a digestible list of shots I needed to have (better than looking at my script and crossing off every line that was shot.)

    Looking back I kind of wish I had the paper to have drawn everything on the bigger printed boxes, but the drawn ones are still going to do me right. Plus, I had much more fun drawing on those than the printed ones.