Week Two - 1

Plot Development Cont. -

Sadly my group member is not in class with me today, but last class period we sat down with my teacher who suggested we "beef" up our plot due to the fact that it was going to get repetitive and wont be engaging enough. I intend to develop new scenes that uphold the commentary on technology, such as one where the postman comes to the door and instead of answering it face to face, a video display is used to communicate. We were also recommended adding another character because of the fact that the text conversation will not be able to engage the audience to the fullest extent.

So i spent the day refurbishing and refining the plot in order to make the theme and tone much more directed, and in that way we can direct our marketing strategies way better. My teacher suggested that we include more audible dialogue and the other character to drive that layer of the plot, so my team member and i decided to make the new character a best friend who serves the purpose of giving the main character girl advice.

Now even though the plot is beginning to thicken, i didn't want to lose sight of our original message, so we established a neutral and monotone color pallet to be used for our misc en scene in order to uphold the dry aura of the dystopian society. We also brainstormed a few more gadgets and other props we could show off in order to establish the futuristic setting most effectively, and again we continued with the theme of deterioration of human connectivity through lack of face to face communication. We developed the idea for a video intercom system to be present on the front door of every home in our short film, again reinforcing the ever-growing distance between human beings through technology.

Week One - 2

Plot Development -

So as I mentioned in my last posting, my partner and I planned to stray from any action or SFX due to the fact that we don't have much available to us for use. Together we agreed that a perfect timeless, cheap, and immediate setting that was available to us would be a bedroom. We also chose to work in a pair as opposed to a group so we only had two members, and thus we decided to make our short film include only one actor. The entirety of the film would take place in the bedroom of this character, and the audience watches him/her as they are presumably alone and at their most vulnerable. This is another common postmodern characteristic. We hope the situation we create forces the viewers to feel everything the main character is feeling.

As for plot, we wanted to develop a story that was emotionally heavy, yet simple. We also wanted to create a sense of familiarity, as this man or woman will be in their most naked or "human" state when alone in their bedroom. So a conflict that we felt was dramatic and relatable, yet also easy to portray was a text conversation between a young boy and a girl he is trying to ask out. We felt it would be very interesting if the dialogue of the entire film was delivered through a series of texts, and overall we hope to eventually use this technique to critique humans incapability of engaging in real life conversations.

Week One - 1

Brainstorming -

Hello, My name is Jonathan Galante and i'm a senior at Cypress Bay High School. I am starting my final portfolio project in AICE Media Studies A Level with a classmate of mine and together we are creating a short film along with a website and postcard to advertise our work.

My partner and I both thoroughly enjoyed the unit on postmodernism in our class, so before we began developing a plot we established some basic postmodern principles we were going to incorporate into our short film, such as challenging meta-narratives and critiquing technological progression. This helped us establish a genre early on as Si-Fi however the majority of science fiction media is also classified within the action/adventure genre, which requires specific and expensive misc en scene. Since our budget is low we began to brainstorm character and setting ideas that worked for our limited crew and resources.