Post-Film Feeling

What's up everyone! Yesterday we finally accomplished our first day of filming, and I must say it was pretty interesting. My group and I met up at the Eiglarsh building on Weston Road to look around at our setting and see exactly what offices would be open for us to film. Our cast then began to roll in, and filming initiated. Well, in someway initiated. The only flaw that I found from our filming yesterday was the fact that majority of the cast is friends with one another, and this led to a prolonged filming session that wasted a lot more time than allotted. However, with all of the distractions, we still were able to accomplish everything we wanted to get done by yesterday. We decided to split up our filming into three days, and we will be done filming by tomorrow night. This allows my group to have ample time to edit the video and eventually do our personal CCRs. I am incredibly excited to show you guys our film opening, so below I will attach some photos from yesterday that we took. The pictures selected will allow you all to see a sneak peak of our costuming during the opening, hopefully getting the point across that the men shown during the office scene are all pretty stereotypical, successful, men.

In-Between Scene Picture

Pondering About Future Shots and Angles

Men At Work

In our film, we have incorporated 2 other female employees to the office scene. Something that I wish we had done was get a more diverse cast, but we had to take what was offered to us, which I do not mind as the film still gets the correct point across as I had planned prior. I also began to review our film as we were leaving the office to make sure that we enjoyed everything we filmed and that we would not have to re-film these scenes as we took many additional takes and filmed every shot multiple times until we got it as close to perfect as we wanted to. I am also excited about beginning to write the script to my voice-over portion of the opening, which will be occurring for majority of the opening. I know that my film opening must guide the film in the correct fashion that we are attempting to do, which is to display  the story in a comedic and dramatic fashion. I got to go because I am going to see Chris Rock tonight, but I cannot wait until my group finishes this filming and we can begin the editing process, moving one step closer to completion. Thanks for reading!

Golly Dolly

Hello everyone, today I will be discussing a very important aspect of my filming process, which is the use of the dolly. The dolly is used in film in order to allow for a stabilized shot that displays movement, and this will be needed in our introduction. After our film sequence, our "hallway" shot will follow a young man's walk through a business office, and we are going to attempt a master shot, but it will most likely be too difficult to accomplish.

Today I plan on discussing with you all exactly how my group and I could create our own dolly, as we do not have a large budget to spend on the film. Our first option would be quite simple, which would be placing our tripod and camera on top of a rolling office chair, while one person is pushing the chair in the direction that we would like the film to pursue. I spent some time to look up other homemade dolly ideas, just to see if we can accomplish more with a specific type of dolly.

I found that there were some homemade dolly ideas that were common, but incredibly risky. One of these options was the car. Using a slow-driving car would seemingly be effective; however, it is revealed that the shot tends to come out shaky and that is not what we would like to have in our film. Cardboard is also a very common dolly, however it would have to be moving on a smooth surface, and there is a lot of room for failure while using a piece of cardboard. The shot would also be quite low unless we place the cardboard on something elevated.

In my opinion, I think that we should just use the office chair that rolls as that seems to be the best option that allows for a clear and focused shot, despite the movement of the camera. I also feel like this best suits our options as I finally bought our tripod yesterday, and due to Amazon Prime, I believe that tripod should come to us very soon.

I also went to a few office buildings once to see what option we should use for our office setting. Our best option is the Eiglarsh building in Weston due to proximity, but we may use my father's office or Camy's dad's office. All I have to do is see when all of our cast is available, and when the office will be open for us in order to film with little to no distraction. I am very excited as I know that we will be filming incredibly soon, as I am beginning to work on our voice-over script right now. I know that we will try as much as we can to spend our time efficiently in this process. We have decided that we will begin to look for clips and pictures from our childhoods, as well as some of our friends to create a diverse opening to our film.

I hope you all enjoyed this blog, and I cannot wait to begin to show you all some clips from our film opening, and eventually the entire opening. Thank you for reading!!!

Resources:

Renée, V. "Get Pro Quality Camera Moves with These Household DIY Dolly Hacks." No Film School. N.p., 13 Aug. 2014. Web. 24 Mar. 2017.

Casting and Representation, and Schedule, Oh my!

Hello everyone, my group and I finally decided on our casting today and I believe that we will begin our filming incredibly soon. I know that we want to film the office scenes first, following that with the bench scene, and closing our film with the extra miscellaneous characters, even though the opening may not be in this order. This order of filming will be the most convenient for my group and I. I will now describe to you our predicted schedule for the rest of the project.

Schedule

Now this schedule obviously has lots of flexibility as there will be days where we have left over time or we do not have enough time. This is just the schedule that we plan on following for now, as I have already ordered the tripod and we can begin the filming process this weekend. We also began to start our casting process. We have majority of our cast decided on, which I will display right now. 

Casting

We are not done with our casting yet, as we have come into some conflicts. We realized as a team that we must represent our movie in a positive light and we need to have some diversity in our actors and actresses. We decided that we would need to have a few more females roles in the workplace, as we want our project to be described as modern, and we do not want to come off as a sexist film. We also realized we need more diversity in our cast when it comes to race. For our other male roles, we decided that we will try to find someone that is not a Caucasian. 

In this film, we will focus on a positive representation that exemplifies diversity in all forms of society. We decided that our businessmen will not come off as a stereotypical one (refer to previous blog on businessman stereotypes). We also do not want our film to display only one heritage of society. When we display our opening sequence, we need to display white children, Asian children, African-American children, as well as Hispanic children in order to allow our theme to come across properly. The centralized theme of our movie is that life should not be taken for granted and that we all have the opportunity in life to fail or succeed. If we do not display all sorts of races and sexes, we will not give off the correct representation of our film. We know that in our film we must incorporate as many elements of research we have accumulated over the last weekend, and by the looks of how our film is planning out, I believe we will accomplish my goals. I hope you all enjoyed this post!! Thanks again for reading!! 

Resources: 

Cipriani, Casey. "Sorry, Ladies: Study on Women in Film and Television Confirms The Worst." IndieWire. N.p., 10 Feb. 2015. Web. 22 Mar. 2017.

Desta, Yohana. "Diversity in Film Is Abysmal-but There's an Easy Way to Fix One Big Problem." HWD. Vanity Fair, 07 Sept. 2016. Web. 22 Mar. 2017.

Film Opening Idea Explained

Hey everybody! Today we met in groups once again, and we were allowed all class to discuss and work on our projects, and I must say that we get a lot done.

First off, I would like to start out by discussing our whole camera issue. I know I blogged about it, but we finally realized that Camila's iPhone 7 Plus has a sensational camera, and all we really need to buy is a tripod to ensure stability while filming. So, we have decided that I will buy a tripod from Amazon Prime and we can begin to film very soon. This idea also helps our budget very well, as this investment will not dig as deep into our pockets as a camcorder would.

We then decided to discuss our opening scene, and exactly what elements will be used during this opening. My group and I decided that we would love to open up our film with a short sequence of around 25 seconds of lots of baby pictures, or pictures of children going through their childhood. We want to start out our film in a similar sequence to how Love Actually does, which is a sequence that has a wide variety of characters displaying the theme of the film, and the voice-over is used quite well in the film. Below is a video of the opening I am describing above.

Our film is going to then transition from the childhood pictures to the routine of a man who appears to be pleasingly successful. The man will be followed by the camera in a long shot, showing the man walking through his office, which he is loved by every single one of his co-workers. The man will enter his office, which appears to be rather nice and very well-decorated. The audience will then be told through the voice-over that the man displayed in the office is not truly our main character at all. This will be used to show our film in a comedic fashion. The camera will then cut to a shot of miscellaneous characters discussing how the film is not about them either, breaking the fourth wall to the audience. The film then finally transitions to a shot of a dead-beat man who is sitting on a park bench who appears to be rather poor. The man is wearing no clothing other than a piece of cardboard, and the audience then realizes that this is our main character of our film, and the rest of the film will display how this man went down the wrong path in life, and how the man reacts to tragedy that is shown later in the film. 

In my next few blogs, I am going to show you all the casting of our film opening, as well as our representation of all these characters. I will also discuss our storyboard and how we will use homemade dollies to our advantage, and my filming schedule will also be realized very soon!! I hope you all enjoyed the blog and I cannot wait to see how this film will begin to play out. Thanks for reading!!! 

Resources: 

Peters, Chuck. "8 Tips on How to Use a Tripod." Videomaker.com. N.p., n.d. Web.

The Art of the Voiceover

Happy Sunday everyone! I am quite ecstatic today as one of my favorite artists released an album last night, and I have been bumping it ever since. But that is quite off-topic and I will introduce you to what I will be discussing today, which is the voice-over. My group and I all found that one thing we all agreed on was that we felt that a voice-over is a great way to open a film. However, we cannot allow our voice-over to be interpreted as a lazy decision, so I called it upon myself to do research on the art of the voice-over and how to be a great storyteller through the use of the sound. Something that I have learned about audiences is that while you must spoon-feed some information, the director must attempt to make the audience work a little bit to understand the scene in its entirety. This is something that I learned in my AICE Media Studies class after we watched a TEDTalk on the art of storytelling.

I spent my morning watching a plethora of films with the voice-over in order to see what exactly these voice-overs are attempting to do for the audience, and exactly how effective they were on me. I realized that voice-overs are seen as lazy and somewhat annoying when the voice-over is just describing what is appearing on-screen. Voice-overs are very effective; however, when the audience is receiving information that they would not be able to understand through the on-screen action. Voice-overs also allow the audience to get introduced to the character very quickly and allow the film to incorporate many different twists on their films such as humor, irony, and more. One of my favorite uses of the voice-over was in the film Goodfellas. In the film, the protagonist is the narrator of the film and gives a sincere and active insight of what is going on in the scenes, and allows the audience to grow attachment to the character. This is also shown in the film Trainspotting. In this film, the main character is a heroin addict who is trying to quit, but the film shows the character's friends and lifestyle get in the way of his goal to stop. The use of the character's voice-over gives the audience an insight on the mindset of the main character and allows the audience to be empathetic about the character's poor decisions as the audience knows about his good intentions. The voice-over can provide the audience with just the right amount of information that my group wants to accomplish in the film opening, so we decided we will do our best to perfect the voice-over.

We decided that we will also try to stick to some of the normal conventions of the drama, comedy, and romance genres. Our film opening, while using the voice-over, will focus on natural lighting to give a realistic look on the scenes. We will also incorporate low and high angles to describe the power of the characters and how the audience should interpret these characters. The opening will also use close-ups as the genre focuses on emotions and the characters' reactions to how the scenes and actions progress. These will help the film give the most realistic image to the audience, which is what our film will attempt to do. With the combination of all of these elements of film, I believe that our opening will be great as we will get our character's personality across while leaving the audience wanting more and wondering why the protagonist is the way he has become.

The next time I blog I will be incredibly excited to see you all and allow you all to see our storyboard. I cannot wait to start the filming process with you all and see something that my group and I created in our heads come to life. Thank you for reading!!!!

Resources:

Durie, Alexander. "25 Great Movies With The Most Effective Uses Of Voice-Over Narration."Taste of Cinema - Movie Reviews and Classic Movie Lists. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Mar. 2017.

Cooper, Matthew. "Codes and Conventions of Drama." SlideShare. N.p., 04 Dec. 2012. Web. 19 Mar. 2017.

Setting is key

Hey everyone! I'm back yet again for another post. My group and I have finally decided on what our film would center on and what genre we would follow in order for the most amount of success possible. As we finalized on our idea, we realized that we would need to start filming very soon. In order to begin to film, we decided that we should incorporate a "checklist" of things to do before filming, and we realized that we would need to decide on exactly where we will be filming our film opening.

We realized that we have a plethora of options to film our opening, as our film opening will not require many special effects. We decided that one of our options to open the film would be my group member's (Camy Orr) father's office. This office allows us to incorporate all of our ideas of the opening, as the office building is rather large and gives us opportunity to bring in a true "business feeling". Another thing about the business aspect of the opening of our film is exactly how people dress, so we came to the conclusion that we would also have to focus on the costuming of our scenes as well. When one comes across the stereotypical "businessman", they usually are wearing a suit and holding a briefcase. Some negative stereotypes of businessmen are their love of money and the fact that in the film industry, businessmen usually tend to not be diverse, which is a misrepresentation of the true aspects of the business world, so my group and I will strive to break from this stereotype. We believe that if we follow the negative stereotypes that have been previously stated, our movie will not follow the morals of what we wanted to stick to in the first place, and that was to leave a message with the audience.

My group also wants to end our opening sequence with a shot of a man who appears quite rugged and finds himself to be quite unsuccessful. We felt that the best way to incorporate this feeling would be showing the man to be sitting on a park bench, as this method has been used in the film industry many times, and gives the audience a great introduction to the character, as the film Hancock does. The park idea is also incredibly convenient to us, as South Florida as an extensive amount of parks we can use such as Markham Park, Peace Mound Park, Vista View Park, and more. Displayed below is a picture of the character Hancock, and how he wakes up upon a bench. The picture also creates a sense of irony as the bench states to move forward with your dream, while the character is displayed in a very weary state and does not seem motivated at all. This would be something that would be interesting to add into our film opening as well, as it gives off a comedic twist to a dramatic topic.

I am incredibly excited to begin the filming process and truly embark on this journey. I hope you enjoyed this post!! See you soon! 

Resources: 

Yasa, Aylin. "Stereotypes of the Businessman." N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Mar. 2017.

Goudreau, Jenna. "The 10 Worst Stereotypes About Powerful Men." Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 29 May 2012. Web. 18 Mar. 2017.

Ideas on ideas

Hey everybody! I am back and more tired than ever. My group and I met up today and we decided that we would have to get the ball rolling on this project a lot quicker than what we are pacing for right now, as we do not want to rush through a project that deserves to be time-consuming. My group and I realized that no matter what genre we choose, we must have a great-quality camera. We decided that we should take some time to decide exactly what camera would be best for our project as well as our wallets. We went onto Best Buy and searched for professional camcorders, and boy was that a mistake. The cheapest professional one we could find was around 800 dollars, so we decided that we would be using a traditional camcorder that would be in our budget, or not going over 150 dollars. Here are some pictures of the camcorders we were thinking about purchasing:

Sony Handycam CX405

Sony Handycam AX53

Canon VIXIA HF R80

In my opinion, if you are making a film in today's society, it is crucial to have a great quality camera that allows for the shots to be crystal clear and give the audience optimal aspects of the film. When my group and I watched films, we found that a video has to be visually pleasing in order to help incorporate the audience into watching the film. My group and I did research on tips for a low-budget film, which told us that while a camera is important, you should not spend all of your money on a camera as there are many other important aspects that come with making a film. 

Aside from learning about cameras, my group and I also finally decided on what genre we would pursue. My group and I decided that we would do the best job if we did a combination of the drama, comedy, and romance genres to create a film that will in essence make the audience express all sorts of emotions. Our film will focus on the story of a young man who seemingly was going to become a young success, but turned out to be quite the opposite. The film will follow exactly what happened to the man in his life and how his life had taken such a dramatic and drastic turn. The film will attempt to pursue films of that genre such as Sleepless in Seattle, You've Got Mail, Pretty Woman, 50 First Dates, and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. All of these films got favorable reviews from my group and I, and they also did a great job in getting a large fan base as many of these films became fan-favorites. Our goal is to strive to show an unbiased representation of many different cultures and strive to draw our viewer's attention into wanting to learn more about how our character's life had changed so much. Keeping our viewer's attention and wanting the audience to learn more about the story is what my group and I will try to attempt. Another important aspect of our film that I feel is important for our story is the role of the voice-over in the intro to our film. One thing that my group and I found in common is that we all felt like a voice-over really helps a introduction describe character and also can allude to conflict, which are two key issues when attempting to make a film opening. When analyzing a film, you must focus on why the directors did specific shots, angles, sounds, etc to create this scene and what message is getting across, and I believe that a voice-over is one of the best additions that a film opening can provide. For now that is all I have to say, tune in next time for some new research and information on my film and the beginning of our filming process!! Thanks for reading! 

Resources: 

Barrance, Tom. "Equipment for Low Budget Filmmaking." Learn about Film. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Mar. 2017.

"Best Dramatic Romantic Comedies." Rotten Tomatoes. N.p., n.d. Web.

"8 Best Video Cameras for Amateur Filmmakers in 2015." 8 Best Video Cameras for Amateur Filmmakers in 2015. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Mar. 2017.

3rd Time's A Charm

Hey everybody! This will be the final blog of the week, and I want you all to know that I have accumulated an immersive amount of research while thinking about the specific genres that my group is trying to pursue. In today's blog, I will show you all my research from the following genres: Drama, Comedy, Romantic Comedy, and Suspense.

For the drama research, I went on numerous websites to try to develop more research on the genre and establish what tendencies the drama genre has. Something my group and I realized that something unique about the drama genre is that there are many subcategories that come with the genre. Drama movies tend to deal with a social issue that is evident in society, such as the latest winner of the year's best picture according to the Academy awards, Moonlight. This may be a genre that my group and I want to pursue as we feel like it would be a very great idea to reflect on current issues of society.

The next genre I wanted to research was the comedy genre. Comedic films interest my group and I as we also feel that while it would be interesting to film a movie that discusses issues that draw importance to society, sometimes it is a good idea to just watch a film for pure enjoyment, which the comedy genre can accomplish. Comedies tend to have many ethnic or racial stereotypes, as the characters are usually incredibly stereotypical to what society believes. Comedic films can open in many different ways, but the films tend to start out by introducing the characters in a comedic fashion, whether through pure dialogue, or putting the character in a humorous situation. Comedy films; however, may have an underlying message in some of the dark or slapstick humor. One film that shows the essence of this idea is the 2016 film Sausage Party. Created by a well-known stoner Seth Rogen, most people went into his newest animation product for just a few laughs. As the movie progressed, one may come to realize that Rogen's film is actually about religion and the dilemmas that religion is facing today. I thought this would be a very excellent route to follow for my group as while we can have fun with the film, we can also give a undertone message that sticks with the audience.

Suspense films are also very intriguing to our group as something that suspense films do, and something we would like to accomplish, is keeping the audience engaged. In order to find profound research on the suspense genre, we decided to find information on arguably the greatest suspense director of all time, Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock tended to use point-of-view shots, low-key lighting, close-ups, and lots of camera movement in his shots and such. In his content, Hitchcock tends to use directional wit, and focuses heavily on loud and dramatic sounds to spike the viewer's attention. Suspense films are also quite successful, in my personal opinion, as they always leave me wanting more and on the edge of my seat. This may be a genre my group and I want to pursue.

I hope you all enjoyed this blog post, and I am incredibly excited to see what genre my group and I finally decide on. Hopefully I will see you next post!!



Resources:
"Drama Movies." Filmbug: Guide to Movie Stars. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Mar. 2017.
"Drama Films." An Award-winning, Unique Resource of Film Reference Material for Film Buffs and Others, with Reviews of Classic American-Hollywood Films, Academy Awards History, Film Posters. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Mar. 2017.
Kan, Michael. "Stereotypes in Comedy: Harm or Humor?" The Michigan Daily. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Mar. 2017.
Ricwulf, Daniel. "What Sausage Party Says About Religion & Belief." Screen Rant. N.p., 22 Aug. 2016. Web. 12 Mar. 2017.
Bays, Jeff. "Film Techniques of Alfred Hitchcock." Film Techniques of Alfred Hitchcock - Suspense, Camera Angles, Style, Editing, Basics. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Mar. 2017.

Second Day Surprises

Hey everybody; yes, sadly I am back. Today we met up in our groups in class for the first time and I'll just say this: the creative juices are flowing my friends. We decided that the best thing to do was list all possible film genres and narrow down the genres due to our resources and time management skills, and what genres would come easier to us when we were brainstorming ideas for a film. We first started out with this list as pictured below.

We decided that some genres such as horror would be a genre we do not want to pursue as horror films tend to focus on lots of special effects which we do not have. My group and I also knew right away that we would want to give a message that stays with an audience long after they watch the film, and we saw that nearly every horror movie starts out in a very similar fashion so this would not be the genre for us. As of now, we know that we do not want a film that will display itself as a stereotypical film, which is another reason why we decided to eliminate the horror genre, which is filled with awful stereotypes. This led us to venturing into many other genres that leave the mind to endless possibilities for an opening such as a drama film, as drama films can progress in a plethora of ways.

We then decided that it would be a good idea to watch film openings for about 30 minutes of our gathering to see exactly what specific theme openings attempt in further detail. We chose many movies such as How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Keith, Fundamentals of Caring, Twilight, 10 Things I Hate About You, Superbad, Everything Must Go, and Magic Mike. This large spectrum of films allowed us to see what different genres would attempt to do, as well as how some movies in the same genre attempt other ways to introduce a film, whether it was to allude to conflict or introduce character. This was a great day of discussion if I can say so myself, I am getting more and more excited to share this journey with you all and I am very interested to see where our ideas start to disperse, which will be discussed with my group members very soon. If you want to see one of the film openings that we watched in order to understand what we had attempted to learn, I am providing you all a link to the opening of the film Everything Must Go. My group and I watched from the start of the video to 5 minutes and 26 seconds, as this film opening focused on introducing the character to the audience, and within 5 minutes the audience knows that this man is an alcoholic that loses his job due to his alcoholism, as well as get in an argument with who seems to be the man's wife. I hope you all enjoy!!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgXvqzAhbh8 

Resources:
Saathoff, Evan. "The 10 Biggest Horror Movie Cliches." ScreenCrush. N.p., 15 Oct. 2013. Web. 11 Mar. 2017.

First Post Jitters

Well here it goes. Hello, my name is Sam Bialczak and I would like to welcome you to my blog. If you would like to know a little about me, I am a 17-year-old guy who lives in the privileged town of Weston, Florida. I attend Cypress Bay High School and I am currently enrolled in AICE Media Studies, which is the reason why I am making this blog in the first place. My blog will describe my journey through the process of creating the first two minutes of a film. I am excited to describe my feelings about the project with you all and I am pleased to give everyone some behind the scenes information in order to fully understand the project and the creative vision behind my decisions. When I first decided to pick a film opening, I thought I made the easier decision for the project, but after a few lessons and realizing how much I will have to do, I realized I am in for a lot more than what I had envisioned earlier this year. It is interesting to see how much truly goes into the beginning of a film. Every little decision matters, and I know my group and I will try our best to make these two minutes count. My group and I (which consists of Camryn Orr and Camila Martinez) are going to have to narrow down what genre we should pursue, what message we will try to get across, when our schedules will allow us to work on the project, and how we are going to film everything in general. My group and I have yet to meet up and discuss what our project will focus on, but I know it will be a very interesting journey that I will be sharing with you all throughout the next month. I am also the only non-female in this project, so it will be interesting to see just how far my opinions really go. I really feel like this is a unique way to get your feelings across and it is something I have never really done before. It does somewhat seem like a diary, but for the sake of my manhood I am proud to say that this will be my blog. I hope you all enjoy!!