Coming up with our Story

While we had the genre we wanted to film, when discussing how we thought the film should proceed there were very obvious differences. It makes sense since each of us will have a different experience of the genre based off of the media we watched, but we needed to come up with a congruent story line that we all agreed on. We started rattling off ideas, but overall the story wasn't getting written by talking about it, so I decided that we should all free write how we think the story should go for 10 minutes. 

The screenshot is of the final product that I had typed after the free write. As the editor, I wanted to visually see what was going to be in frame so that way I knew how much editing I would have to do and what type of shots I would most likely frame together. We all read and discussed each of the stories typed up and ultimately chose my story as our final product. From this point on we chose Kim as our mafia actress since she has a suit for the costume and acting skills from theatre, not to mention she's the only POC in our group and we needed on-screen representation. We also chose myself as the other actress to play the minion since we couldn't cast Bella since she's cinematographer and we didn't think Brendan accurately embodied the character we wanted.

Genre Research

 Since we had the basis of what we wanted our film's genre to be, a mafia action-comedy, I did research into the genre conventions of action-comedies. I worked with the cinematographer of our group while researching since I found a lot of sources saying fast, sudden cuts are typical of this genre. 

I took inspiration from this video since I had in mind extreme close-up shots and sudden zoom ins to up intensity of scenes. While what we have in mind for our chess film doesn't involve fighting scenes for the time being, I still wanted to make sure our film has that feeling of high stress or anxiety when you watch it. 

During the class we were also reminded this was going to be a silent film. This means most, if not all of the interpretation of our film comes from our imagery. I researched genre conventions of silent films to check ways to create meaning in film without dialouge since a lot of this will come in post-production editing. I discovered multiple films including Nosferatu (linked below) that showed dialouge through cutting away from visual acting to text to show what the actor just said. This is typically what I think of silent film as, but I felt this would take all intensity away from our film.

I researched typical conventions of action and found myself looking at comic book panels where it's typical to have more than one shot on a page, making scenes seem quick and fast-moving even on paper. I think we can take inspiration from this and when I edit, I can add multiple shots split on the screen, just like a comic book panel. Since having multiple photos split on one page is a typical element of action comics, it automatically invokes this feeling in the audience.

Brainstorming Genre

 When I first heard we had to make a film involving chess in a meaningful way, my first thought process was 3 things:

1. Action film

It would be easy to have an intense scene of 2 people playing chess. Maybe something is on the line like some money, a love interest, maybe their own life. Since there is a lot of subgenres of action as well, I thought this would be a beneficial genre to choose right off the bat.

2. Comedy

Going back to my last post where comedy was one of my main genre's I watched, of course I chose something I'm well-versed on. One of my favorite comedic moments in film is when there's a scene with high-intensity- the camera seems to move quicker, the characters are fully focused, the sounds and music are at a higher level- when suddenly the camera quickly cuts to frame farther zoomed out than it was, bringing the intensity down and making the previous moment seem absurd in hindsight. I feel like this could be easy to pull off as on paper, a game of chess realistically shouldn't be as intense as it could be made.

3. Martial Arts

Technically this is a subgenre of action, but I fully felt like this could be an aspect that ties in both genre's to a familiar classification. You could have that high intense scene, the camera zooming in on both of their eyes, then cut back to the board, cut to one of the character's who's sweating with hands shaking, cut to the other character who looks just as nervous but is attempting to hide it. Suddenly both character's quickly move the pieces around until there's only 2 kings left on the board, both hopping around their kings trying to outplay the other. This visual easily ties in aspects of action and comedy that I think could work for this film.

As the editor of the film, I was trying to picture what I would have to do in post-production to see these genre's through. How would I frame shots, would I have dual-shots, etc. When we were discussing as a group, Brendan brought up bringing in a videogame subgenre with special effects. I've never used programs other than iMovie or VideoLeap, so I knew the editing going into the genre would be too complicated for me, so I shot down this idea. All of us ended up agreeing on the idea of a mafia-based plot where our character is playing against a mafia boss in a battle for his life, as previously discussed under my action point. I feel like we have the basis of our vision for the film down and are all on the same page for how this short film will play out, we just need to research into this subgenre more.

So, who am I?

 Hi! I'm Sophie, a rom-com addict who has barely seen any other genre. I really should broaden my horizons, but I'm only entertained by media that has aspects of romance or comedy in it, which will probably reflect over to my media outputs. Most of my media consumption is in the form of Instagram or TikTok- where I'm chronically online on both. I listen to music for most of my day as well, which makes sense with my wide-range of genres I listen to as well as well-versed on. My own media habits were revealed because of this course, and it was shocking to me how much time I spent communicating with friends, even though I spend a majority of my day with them.

Media studies interested me since I wanted to learn about the behind the scenes of movies, how people brainstorm them, know what camera angle to use, why certain movies feel different the more you watch them, and so on. Rom-coms typically don't have a lot of in-depth scenes to delve into, but when I have branched out to watch an action-mystery or two, I never seem to expect the plot twist. In hindsight, it seems so obvious that this was the outcome, but in the moment I was so immersed that I didn't see it. This creative process always seemed so interesting to me since the creator not only creates a plot the consumer is invested in, but makes the outcome seem to obvious, but also so unexpected. I want to learn the techniques to pull this off effectively and that was my main driving force towards entering media studies.