Distribution

Hi guys!

Now that we have everything in place to film and edit, I thought I'd do a blogpost about our distribution techniques. This is a very low budget film and we are still beginners, so we decided we would upload our film onto Youtube and Vimeo. Sites like Amazon Prime and Netflix are way out of our reach since we are still a very small "business". These are both very user-friendly and convenient platforms in order to get our film out to a broad audience. To choose and understand the difference between these two sites, we did thorough research and found a lot of information on this site: https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/youtube-vs-vimeo/. We found there is no time limit for either site and the premium versions of both are not of high cost, making it a good investment for the project.

Free video viewing service, with the first video sharing site supporting high-quality video.

Youtube is easily accessible, free, and gets over 30 million visitors a day.

We want to appeal to an audience of young adults, especially people in high school or just starting college since our story is about a high school senior and her dream to become a professional dancer and attend NYU. We chose to use these two sites because they are easily navigated through a smartphone (in the U.S., 96% of 18-29-year-olds owned a smartphone in 2018) or a laptop, and we can also upload our film to this site at no cost but could upgrade for a very low cost making the benefits worth it. Making it easily accessible for our target audience and a very low cost for us, these sites are perfect for distributing our film.

Our New Storyline

As you guys know, our original storyline was going to be a musical. I even composed the music, but due to corona, the flashmob (requiring over 10 people getting together) will not happen. We cannot risk getting infected and spreading the virus. After lots of brainstorming, we decided that we would scratch the musical idea but keep our storyline and make it a drama.

Since we were originally supposed to film at school, but now we can’t anymore, we decided to have the film set during the summer. We decided to keep the idea of the music playing through the headphones and playing with diegetic/nondiegetic sound. The film opening will start off with Mia, the main character, Riding her bike and getting home. She checks the mail and sees college mail and she’s expecting a letter back from NYU but she does not have one yet. She continues to walk towards the door but before she enters her house. she takes off her pins which are representative of the LGBTQ community. As she enters her home, we kept part of the original storyline, and we are having her greet her mom and her mom neglecting her by saying “I’m busy right now “ or something along those lines. She will then enter her room, sit on her bed, and go on her computer to check email for more information about her acceptance to NYU. During this time she wanders off and daydreams about her dancing up on the stage. Janey has some footage from last year‘s dance recital so we will use that footage for the daydream scene. She eventually snaps out of it when she gets a phone call from NYU. The screen then goes black, leaving the viewers with a bit of suspense by the end of the film opening. 

I have attached a link to a voice memo of our whole process of developing a new storyline below:

Our New Film Opening

New Problems, New Solutions

Hey guys.

Unfortunately, we will not be able to use our documentary idea as we found out that it has to be a fictional film opening. Janey, Raisa, and I have been communicating back and forth for several days now trying to figure out what we were going to do. Due to the quarantine and safer at home order Broward County has officially set, it is impossible for us to get together and actually film.

However, we have found a solution to this problem. We are going to keep our original storyline but make it a drama instead of a musical. Since Janey is the main character, she will do all of the filming by herself at home while on Facetime with Raisa and me, and I will edit half of the footage and then send it over to Raisa so she can finish it. This way, everyone does some work and we can get a project ready in time. Hopefully it all works out like it's supposed to!

Technology

Hi guys!

I thought I'd do a blogpost on the kinds of technology that we will use in order to complete our project.

First off, the basic sites we use are Canvas as it is where the rubric for the project is uploaded on, and the way that we communicate with our teacher. To communicate, my group and I always use Snapchat because we can both text and send pictures as well.












For our screenplay we used Celtx. This is a great resource as it is so convenient and user friendly.

We will be filming using an iPhone 11 Pro (Raisa's) and iPhone 11 (mine). We thought about using a real camera (a DSLR), but chose to use our phones as it is more convenient, especially to export the footage, and they have great cameras installed in them. Below are the stats for the iPhone 11 Pro:

To edit, we will be using our MacBooks (we each own one), and we will be using the iMovie editing software as it is the one that we are the most friendly with and is available for free on all Macs. 

Lastly, since we have now moved to online learning due to Covid-19, we will be using Canvas conferences as well as Zoom to communicate with our class.

Our New Project

Hey guys!

As I mentioned before, we had to switch our whole project around since school was suspended due to the Coronavirus. Our idea of the musical (requiring a flash mob of 10+ people) will not be possible as we need to be in self-quarantine in order to contain this virus. Everything has been moved to a virtual platform, including class.

The idea that I came up with was switching our genre to a documentary. I wanted to showcase what is currently going on in the world with the virus and how the world has basically come to a stop - and convey the anxiety and uncertainty of the situation into a film. My group liked this idea, and so we decided to go with it. New research has to be done as we have completely switched our genre, but here is a basic overview of the documentary genre:

The purpose of a documentary is to inform the viewer, and our film will be based on informing people of what the situation is like for regular people in the midst of this chaos.

This is the basic outline:

We would have three different people, Raisa, Janey, and Andrea (me) star in the film. We would have the premise of the film be about how they were affected at the beginning of the virus and track their journey and process as they go through it all. We would touch on subjects such as how the virus affected their mental health by being locked up all day and also not being able to socialize as they did regularly at school. We also discussed covering how their health was impacted as well as their emotions. We want to include some vlog style clips documenting the process. 

We have yet to decide on a title, but I like the simplicity of just calling it "Covid-19".

Our Totally Normal Online Meeting

We had a meeting this week with our teacher, Mrs. Stoklosa to clear up some of the confusion going on with the Coronavirus. Everything is pretty crazy, and the video held through zoom helped me calm down a bit about this project.

Thankfully, the due date for the project has been moved back to April 12th. This will give us a bit more time to get everything ready (an extra week) since we had a huge setback due to Covid-19. Online learning will resume until April 15th, maybe even further. The situation is still very much unclear.

However, I quickly realized we have to restart our project from scratch. Since we cannot get together due to social distancing, we cannot do the flashmob as part of the musical that we wanted to do. I have to quickly contact the rest of my group and figure out what we're going to do.

We stay patiently waiting for news and updated on the whole situation, and I am often checking websites like  https://help.cambridgeinternational.org/hc/en-gb/articles/360006532458-Novel-coronavirus-Information-for-schools-about-the-COVID-19-coronavirus-outbreak and https://www.broward.org/CoronaVirus/Pages/default.aspx for updates.

Dealing with Covid-19

Unfortunately, due to the Coronavirus, our school has been canceled for the following week. This means that we won't have class time to get the footage we needed for our film opening. Although the spread of the coronavirus is a national emergency and I should probably be worried about more important things, my group and I are really worried because this really brought our project to our halt. Not only this, but we won't be able to get together for a while since we are supposed to be in self-isolation. I am hoping this all gets resolved soon so everyone can get on with their lives and everything can go back to normal. I will keep updating this blog as we figure out a way to make this all work.

Our Storyboard

Last class, we finally finished our storyboard. Although we learned how to storyboard previously in the year, we decided to look some extra researched. We used this website to really get a better idea of how we wanted to use our storyboard to create our film. Rather than having it be really specific, we wanted it to be more of an outline so we could be flexible if we needed to change anything while filming, especially since we have a music element to it.

Creating a storyboard was super useful to us while filming our last project, the "Trouble" music video, as it helped our ideas all come together and it made the filming process a lot smoother. It led us while filming and we kind of used it as a checklist to make sure we got every shot we knew we needed.

Below are pictures of our storyboard:

Now that we have finished our storyboard and have everything set in place, we are ready to begin the filming process next week! We will use our last A day before spring break to get all the filming at school done, and then over spring break do the flash mob scene as well go through the editing process.

Embracing The Musical Genre and Its Challenges

Hi guys!

After our team meetings, my group and I came to realize we were the only ones in our class that chose to do a musical. I got so excited because this will really give us a chance to stand out from the rest of my peers! I love music so much and being able to incorporate it into my school projects makes me so happy. Choosing the musical genre was the perfect choice for us.

The musical genre has a lot of different elements to it (as explained in my previous blog posts) and one of the conventions we chose to embrace was a flash mob. Flash mobs are when people randomly join into a song in an unusual place/setting. This is very common in the musical genre and can be seen across many movies, such as La La Land. This is what it typically looks like:

Here is the link to the film opening of La La Land, in which a flash mob is included.

However, this comes with many challenges. We will need many cameras shooting at the same time to get that flash mob scene perfectly edited, as we will need a lot of footage. Not only this, but we need a lot of people involved in this scene. Thankfully, Janey put out a casting call for her dance friends to be featured in the film opening, and we have gotten a lot of responses so far. We also have asked a couple of friends to help us film and they thankfully have agreed to help us! Filming the flash mob will also be complicated as it will be outside and the lighting changes often because of the sun - but we will make sure to have practiced beforehand in order to make it the best we can in only a couple of run-throughs while actually filming.

Another challenge we have to deal with is the soundtrack. I am 100 percent in charge of this part so it is a little nervewracking. I am continuing to work on the soundtrack this week and am estimating I'll have the finished version by the end of this week if not early next week. With school and everything else going on, life has just been a little hectic. However, I do want the music to be perfect to really make our film opening the best it can be.

Our Screenplay

Hey guys!

We just finished writing our screenplay for the film opening. The website we used was Celtx, a resource that was introduced to us earlier in the year. It is the perfect website as it is super user-friendly and makes writing screenplays a lot easier than manually doing it. We started on the storyboard but did not get to finish in class. The screenplay is really short and simple - since there is not much dialogue rather than the music playing in the background. The only dialogue we included is when Mia gets back home to the "real world" and walks into her house and says hi to her mom. Our screenplay is basically like an outline of our story and what the characters are doing, rather than more script-like. Here it is:

Composing the Music: Part Three

So, I got some demo vocals on the project. These again are DEMO vocals, so I will be redoing them. Also, the mixing and mastering are not done yet. By the end of this following week, I hope to have the demo finished! Here is an mp3 (linked) of what I have so far:

→ Little Town ←

I showed it to my mom and she said she got Disney vibes. Not exactly what I was hoping for, but the fact that she did think it was part of a musical of some sort reassured me that I'm heading in the right direction. As said previously, recording my music by myself is very new to me and writing for a musical is something I had never done before.  The music aspect of our film is so important which is why I'm spending so much time on it and why so many blog posts have been made about it. There's still a ton of things to fix and get done, but I'm proud of what I accomplished in the past 48 hours!

Composing the Music: Part Two

Hello! Day 2 of creating the music. Instead of writing out a blog post, I thought I would film a mini vlog!

Composing the Music - Part One

Hello everyone!

Today I spent 6 hours in my room composing the music... and have only gotten the piano and vocals recorded... so that's that.

I am in charge of composing the music for our film opening, as I sing, song write, and am starting to learn how to produce my music. However, I am fairly new at the recording (especially mixing and mastering) portion of it. A struggle I faced is that I don't really have a "musical theatre" voice - rather I have more of an acoustic songwriter voice (which makes sense since it is what I primarily do). I may have someone else sing on the track if I am not convinced by the time the demo is finished. Also, I have never composed anything for musicals nor participated in any musicals... so that explains why it was difficult for me to get started.

To get inspiration I listened to a lot of music from musicals and Broadway shows. I wanted to create an original song but had to somehow use similarities from what I found in these songs. I noticed that a lot of them use major chords and change keys somewhere in the song. In the demo I have made, it starts out in the key of D major, but when it gets to the chorus it switches to A major. The chords in the chorus are all major - a I IV V progression that I noticed was common among the songs I listened to. There is also a tempo change that really makes the chorus (where the flashmob will happen) stand out from the verse - it goes from 4/4 time to 6/8.

The lyrics came pretty easy, and I took inspiration from songs from musicals that are centered around the individual and personal struggles/aspirations, like "A Million Dreams" from The Greatest Showman (2017),  and "Waving Through a Window" from Dear Evan Hansen (2015). I began the song with an instrumental focused on the piano like these two songs. I also centered the lyrics around Mia and her desire to get out of her suburban town and be something more. I decided to title the piece "Little Town".

I am not ready to show you guys the demo yet, but I can give you a sneak peek with the lyrics! Here are they are - straight from my notes which is where I wrote them this morning. Tomorrow, I will try to finish the demo and hopefully upload it on here for you guys to hear!

Target Audience

For our film, our genre, musicals, will be a large factor in our target audience. Since our film is based around teens, the age range will be teens (from 12-13 years old) to young adults in college or recently graduated from college (23-24 years old). We are not only targetting them, but by adding the musical element to it, we will appeal to fans of Broadway, musicians or people passionate about music, or just musical super fans, which will be targetting an older audience, according to statistics.

In the demographic of the Broadway audience of 2008-2009 (linked here), it showed that the average age of the Broadway goer is 42.2 years. Although our film is not Broadway, the fact that our film is a musical will appeal to an older audience as well. In the demographics, it also shows that 66% of the audience was female, and since our main character is female, we will be targetting a predominantly female audience.

By making our main character part of the LGBTQ+ community and making her support of PRIDE dominant in the film, we will be attracting a large number of people who are fighting for equal representation in films for the LGBTQ+ community. The LGBTQ+ community has been known to support LGBTQ+ films, like Call Me By Your Name (2017). While it was a small film, with a $3.5 million budget, it made a box office profit of $41.6 million. Therefore, including lots of representation in our film will attract a wider audience.

Works Cited

“Call Me by Your Name (2017) - Financial Information.” The Numbers, https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Call-Me-by-Your-Name#tab=more. Accessed 7 Mar. 2020.

“Queer Representation in Film and Television | MediaSmarts.” MediaSmarts, 7 Mar. 2012, https://mediasmarts.ca/digital-media-literacy/media-issues/diversity-media/queer-representation/queer-representation-film-television.

“The Demographics of the Broadway Audience - SeatUp, LLC.” SeatUp, LLC, 28 June 2019, https://seatup.com/blog/demographics-of-broadway-audiences/.

Costume Design

Last class, we decided on our main character's name: Mia. We had only referred to her as our main character, so we decided to finally give her a name. As we have created her persona and a mood board that describes her, we thought it was time to create her outfits and fashion style.

To create her outfits, we used an app called ShopLook that allows you to pick out pieces of clothing, from shoes to earrings, to create a whole outfit.

Our film is heavily focused on representation and the fact that our main character is proudly part of the LGBTQ+ community. We also did some light research on similarities in fashion style throughout people who are part of the LGBTQ+ community. Therefore, we wanted the pride colors (rainbow) to be present throughout her whole personality, including her wardrobe. Not only this, but we envision Mia as kind of an "old soul" in a way, as she has a very 80's and 90's style - including lots of graphics, cool ripped jeans, and hightop converse. The film focuses on her identity struggle as she often feels separated and different from the rest of the people at school; having Mia not follow fashion trends and rather have a whole different style from the rest of the girls at her school will emphasize the gap she feels between her and them. After taking all of these factors into account, we created a sample outfit that would scream Mia. This is what we came up with:

Racing Against Time

THE SCHEDULE: In order to be able to have enough time to finish our project, we realized we needed to have a clear schedule since we all have busy schedules. We decided the best way to do it would be to create a google calendar that we could all share. On the right, one can clearly see what our next 8 weeks will look like. We marked all of the days we would meet in class as "A days" in pink when our blog posts were due in green and everything about the production in purple. Our filming will start tomorrow, March 2nd, and we will film until the 18th. We have to keep in account that our spring break will be March 23rd-March 27th. We hope to get most filming done during class time, but we will meet 2 or 3 days outside of school to get the shots we need that take place at an out of campus setting. We will edit from the 18th until the end of spring break; we hope to get some work done during the work as well. We also allocated time from March 30th to April 5th to do our final touches make sure our project is perfect before submission.