Advice on Writing a Story

    Today, I watched a video that did end up helping me understand what the planning process of brainstorming a story consisted of. Though it seems kind of corny or unintelligent to derive information from such a quick video, I really only wanted to hear what he said about how to target the starting point of creating a short film. 

    This video gave me a great tip on the importance of creating value and meaning through a specific audience one would like to target. The creator had this to say about it:

    "This may sound a little counter-intuitive, but rather than originality when you're writing your short film, I want you to focus on entertaining yourself or a really close friend of yours. Make your audience specific so that you can make your film more specific."

    While I still cannot say I have fully formed ideas as a result of this video, this quote really resonated with me for the rest of the day enough that I felt the need to comment on it. Where I initially tried to take a concept and reverse engineer a film from whatever concept could come to my head, I have now adopted the strategy of taking stories and conversations I can remember having with my friends in the past to formulate some sort of story behind it. I don't plan to adapt a story a friend has shared with me or anything like that, I had many interesting 3AM conversations with friends that I know I can base entire stories around.

    Additionally, the video stressed the importance of writing the entire story before jumping into pre-production. Before thinking about cinematography and stylistics, I need to detail a definite beginning, middle, and end to my story. For an effective product as a whole, it's important to have the entire story defined before I begin thinking about how it will be filmed(for foreshadowing in the beginning and making the story that comes full circle.)

    I didn't finish the entire video because the only real part I was looking for in my research was advice on brainstorming, but I do plan to turn to this video for advice once I get to the pre-production and production stages of my short film. 

36 Dramatic Situations

 

    In pursuit of a possible narrative, my research brought me across a very interesting concept in the realm of storytelling- George Polti's 36 Dramatic Situations. George Polti was a 19th-century writer primarily known for writing a book detailing the concept, that every narrative follows one of 36 archetypes with variants based on the physical content of the story. As hard as it may seem to accept that "all stories are the same," researching this topic blew my mind once I started looking into it. 

    While the list of dramatic situations is too long to list, I forced myself to do research and read every single one of the archetypes, and it ended up showing me primarily what I didn't want in a story before showing me what I might want. For example, I knew that I didn't want to make a story about adultery, love, or the crimes of a loved one, as I feel I'm too young to understand love enough to make an entire narrative based around it. Also, I feel like making any adventure-type story about supplication or deliverance is not something that could be fit in a mere five minutes. I could be wrong on that, but it seems like a hassle to think about fitting it into such a small amount of time.

    Despite the post I made last week about tonality, I am slightly being pulled once again toward darker subject matters. Reading specific situations like abduction, madness, and ambition. I have ideas I will update you guys on later, and this concept of 36 dramatic situations helped me begin fine tuning my ideas. Thanks George. 

Tonality

    

    Even though I lack a direction in terms of a narrative yet, I have given thought to the kind of tone I hope to convey in my production. No matter what genre this short film becomes, I would rather it be a bit more lighthearted than something darker. It can be dark with some cheerier elements to contrast the dark, but I would instead not make something dark and gloomy. 

    Coming off of a psychological thriller route for my last big project in the film opening, I would find it to be redundant if I went ahead and made some dark and mysterious production again. As much as I enjoy the kind of media that haunts me or has a darker tone to it, I feel like trying to make something of the sort again will honestly turn me into a darker and less cheery person. 

    This all could be a dumb little itch I have and not end up being how I feel once I get an idea for my narrative, but this is just how I feel at this stage of my brainstorming. 

Project Schedule

    I have developed a timeline for the short film I plan to create. The process began this week, and the full project is to be completed in the middle of April. Here it is:

Week one

• Choose project genre(short film)
• Brainstorm narrative of said short film
• Research genre
• blog(2)

Week two

• Cont. Brainstorm narrative(finalize?)
• Cont. researching genre
• blog(4)

Week three

• IF NOT DONE: Finalize narrative this week
• Begin developing a script
• Think about technical elements of piece(look into microphones, editing, etc.)
• Think location, time, actors, wardrobe
• blog(4)

Week four

• Begin storyboarding
• Find actors 
• Buy necessary tech for production(based on week 3)
• IF actors found, develop a filming schedule
• blog(4)

Week five

• if not complete, finalize storyboarding and script
• Film
• blog(4)

Week six

• IF NOT DONE: continue filming(reshoots?)
• Begin editing
• blog(4)

Week seven

• Continue editing
• blog(3)

Week eight

• IF NOT DONE: finish editing
• Research ccr
• Begin ccr
• blog(3)

Week nine

• Finalize ccr
• Make sure all elements are exported and prepared BEFORE Week 10
• blog(3)

Week ten

• Post final drafts of everything to blog/youtube
• Reflection post

    In my roadmap, I believe I have given myself a sufficient amount of time to brainstorm and flesh out my ideas to their greatest heights. I feel like the initial creative process usually ends up being slightly harder than the actual execution for me, so giving myself three weeks to really sit on ideas for a narrative will work well in my favor. I usually binge edit for projects I need to edit and end up finishing them in roughly two or three very painful days, but given that this project is much more important and is foreseeably a video with a longer duration, I am going to give myself 2-3 weeks for it. The time I allowed myself for my CCR is pretty limited as a result, but I predict it will be the easiest component of my entire project so I am in no way worried about time. In general, I doubt that there is too much that will change in my schedule while it's working itself out; I feel I have much more time to flesh out certain aspects of my project this time around. 

I'm Baaaaaaaaaack

 

    It's official: yours truly is back for some more media production updates. I'm starting work on a new project for the second level of my media class, this time a FULL SHORT FILM as opposed to a film opening like last time. I am not sure what I will end up doing just yet, but based on my experience with my last big project, I'm already eager to jump straight into this. My head may be empty, but my heart is full. This is gonna be a fun next ten weeks. 

Back Like I Never Left

 

Hello.

     I have not interacted with my blog for a few months now, even though I assumed I would based on how much I enjoyed creating posts during my film opening production earlier this year. I haven't stopped creating my own projects since then, I actually have a few projects I could have documented my process on, and I'd like to detail how the most recent of the few came to be. 

    Last month, I planned out a documentary about how people tend to attach such unexplainable yet profound meanings to small trinkets that come into their possession. It was the first time I had ever tried my hand at creating a documentary, and I had the help of two friends in my media class. We planned out four interviews with people who had different stories about their collecting of trinkets and baubles, whether it was someone who collected a ton or could connect a specific feeling/memory to one object.

    The documentary did not end up being on the topic we initially planned out, though. During the second interview in our series of scheduled interviews, we interviewed a friend and aspiring filmmaker named Alex who wanted to talk about a corrupted SD card that he claimed was the reason he pursued film. While we were shooting B-roll, we had the idea of shooting a clip of him scrolling through all of the corrupted footage, and while we did it, we were both dumbfounded when we saw the lost footage magically reappear before our eyes. The meaning Alex found in his useless broken SD card that he had so thoroughly explained in the interview was no longer real to him, and finding the moment and the shift in meaning as a result of a new context so riveting, we decided to change our documentary topic to just this moment. 

    With the pre-recovery interview as well as another extensive interview post-SD recovery(together with an interview of Alex's Mom,) the total footage we had filmed came around to a whole hour. The cutting process for this hour's work was tough and unlike any editing job I had ever done. This being my first documentary ever, I was surprised to realize that most of the time I would spend working on it would be editing and structuring the interviews. The process was very grindy and resulted in a 3-day long headache, but I eventually managed to create something I was moderately proud of. The final doc ended up being 7 minutes and 42 seconds long, and it had a discernible narrative structure with a beginning, middle, and end. I named teh documentary Recovery and you can watch it right here. 

Critical Reflection

    

In our documentary Recovery, we aimed to deliver a story about a shift in one’s perception of an object that held so much meaning to one person as the object lost the meaning it had before. While spotty in some regards in terms of editing and cinematography, the narrative structure of the piece created was able to deliver what it needed to in a cohesive manner, one that proved effective in demonstrating a clear takeaway for the subject of the doc after events played out the way they did.

Going into the documentary, we had a broader focus on our topic. Instead of focusing on one person’s experience with their object, we initially hoped to interview a variety of individuals and their different outlooks on the meaning of their trinkets. The sudden change in focus was the result of an interesting turn of events during the second interview in our schedule; the corrupted SD card that our interviewee had grieved over after years of it not working magically fixed itself during the filming of the interview. This revelation seemed like a much more interesting avenue to take the documentary, and as such, we decided to ditch the trinket idea and wholly focus on how the broken SD card shaped Alex’s life. In retrospect, I believe we could have done a better job in delivering the gravity of the moment, specifically by using the footage from the first interview we filmed and subverting the narrative within the documentary. Similar to the odd and everchanging narrative structure of Exit Through the Gift Shop, we could and should have made the audience think the documentary was just going to be about trinkets and then hit them with Alex’s reaction to the SD card fixing itself on-screen and shifting to his story. 

The target audience of the work is 16-30-year-old media creators, ones who understand the basics of how cameras work and who are old enough to relate to the theme of having a deep-rooted connection with an object that has no real purpose. Certain stylistic choices, like the lingo used in taking viewers through Alex’s story as well as the language allowed/used in the doc, define the appropriate demographic of the work. The music and editing of the piece(or the lack thereof in certain moments) work well in allowing the project to breathe a bit after major interviewee dumps on the viewer. Also, moments where the music takes a backseat to the visual storytelling on screen, most specifically the moment Alex realizes his once corrupted files are no longer corrupted, artfully allow the onscreen emotion to navigate the way the viewer engaged with the documentary.

The documentary filming and editing process was uncharted territory for me coming into this production, and as such, I did not know what to expect. The result of this inexperience was a lot of stress during post-production while I tried to find exactly what bits of the interview footage were deserving of a place in the piece. In addition, the structuring/ ordering of the clips from each of the interviews was even harder to do, considering I needed to bind interviews from two individuals together. The product came out as very amateurish and not too exciting visually since my goal first and foremost was to create something cohesive in nature, but I am not exactly disappointed in what I was able to accomplish with this project. The production process for a documentary is fairly different and arguably much more difficult than anything I had ever experienced in my past productions, but I am glad I was able to have experienced it. Now with the knowledge that the editing portion of documentary-based filmmaking is the most crucial part, I can place greater importance on allowing myself more time to play around with clips I’ve collected in post if I were to create another documentary.

Smile, Inc.

 Here lies the final installment in the mannyspace Smile Inc. series: the opening itself. 

I can't believe we have come this far, it's unreal for it all to finally be over. That grind I was talking about came and went, and now I can finally rest. Farewell for now, but I hope to do something like this again in the future. 

Manny

Out. 

CCR

 This is the CCR of my film opening, it's a long one but I think it came out great. I hope you enjoy it as much as I "enjoyed" making it. 

WATCH WATCH WATCH WATCH WATCH WATCH WATCH

CCR Editing

 

        Today was the day I started and finished the editing of my Creative Critical Reflection for the film opening, and heres how it went. 

    Using the script I had made the day prior, I was easily able to film my footage. I kept a smile on pretty much the entire time but not a forced one so that the info I was spouting was engaging and not boring at any rate, and I even tried to incorporate a few jokes to give the CCR a youtube video essay type feel. One thing I had fun with while shooting footage was my intro. Even though its literally the least important part of the CCR, I was sold on finishing my open with a no-look backwards shot at my plastic basketball hoop behind me.  While I was filming the actual meat of the presentation I had a general idea for what I was going to do in the intro, but at one point between takes I was just staring at myself in the webcam and I decided to try shooting it backward and...I made it. Had I not done that, I would not have included that element in my CCR.

    As you will see, however, I end up not making the shot at all in the final cut, but it wasn't out of laziness or anything, i literally could not make the shot again. In the image above you can see all the takes I have of the project, of the roughly 40 videos I took I would say at least 15 of them were takes of the basketball shot. It was a total bummer that I could not make that shot again, because it would have made the intro cooler, but missing is also another way to play for laughs, so either way it went it added to the overall vibe of the project. 

    When it came time to actually edit the entire thing, it took numerous hours, given that it was nearly nine minutes long. My editing process involved a lot of spur of the moment ideas as to what I should play over my voice-over every now and again, like visuals and screen recordings of my computer screen. Where I thought the opening was kind of fun to edit, I have to be honest-this one was way too long to edit in one day and it came at the expense of my sanity. I did not enjoy editing the CCR by any means. It has to be said, though, that it is wholly my fault for restricting myself to one day of editing, so my pain is my own doing. Next time I will surely plan more accordingly. 

Title

 While editing (a bit late but better now than never,) I had been brainstorming ideas for what i could possibly title this production. I decided on one, which is clear to take away from the title logo I made directly above this, but here is a peek into my mind during this process:

    I was really hooked on the idea of a one-word title for a work like this; it doesn't really change anything if the title surpasses one word for films in this genre but most thriller dramas are only one word. Also, in a stylistic sort of sense, it seems cooler to be able to call it by a single word(i don't have any logical way to back this up it's just cooler.) I was stuck on a single title idea for so long because I couldn't think of anything better, and that title was sadly already taken-Euphoria. Euphoria is such a fun word and with the right theming and font it would have made for a very fitting title for this work. Zendaya ruined my life. 

    But, fret not, I soon thereafter thought of the next best thing, a title that would give insight into what would happen in the rest of the film, Smile Inc. This title was beneficial in two ways: one it is probably even more fitting considering a name like that gives audiences a general feel of what kind of film they are getting into before watching it(ala Squid Games or Fight Club,) and 2 I was able to easily make a logo with a smiley face incorporated onto it. 

    Though I don't think I'll ever lose my disappointment in not being able to use euphoria as the title for this opening, Smile, Inc. is more fitting and is not half bad.