Final Project Idea

After multiple hours of discussing, me and my group have reached a final decision on what our idea for our final project. We were able to come to an agreement to pursue the idea of friendship and grief. 

In my last blog post, I have mentioned the storyline. For recap, it is essentially a friend group of four people. In this case it would be me, Emi, Jahzara, and Ngoc. The storyline would be where we have been friends since we were kids and are growing up together. However, Jahzara ends up getting diagnosed with cancer but she does not tell the friend group. She does not want us to worry about her so she does not tell us. Then, one day we end up texting in the group chat but she does not respond. We get concerned so we go to her house and that is when we realized she had died from cancer. Once we realize that she is gone, our lives each change significantly in their own ways. Emijola is going to be the friend that is visibly depressed and suffering from the loss of Jahzara. I am going to be the friend that acts 'nonchalant' and parties as if nothing has happened because that would be my way to cope. Lastly, Ngoc would be the friend who is trying to hold our group together because ever since the loss of Jahzara, the group has not been the same. The group is slowly becoming distant but Ngoc does not want that so she tries to pull us back together. 

With this being our storyline, this fits under the genre of drama. In order for our project to fit the genre conventions of drama we obviously have to make most of our movie opener elements dramatic. Thus, we going to do the opening scene of us crying and throwing 'ashes' into the beach. Moreover, the overall conflict in our storyline is dramatic in that the loss of our bestfriend causes us to all suffer with grief and with this grief we all have our own ways to cope. In addition, following this grief, our friend group starts to separate and we constantly get into arguments. Luckily, our mediator Ngoc, will bring us back together and we will all have character development. This character development that each of us have will add to the genre conventions of drama. 

In order to make our movie opener not being soley based on the genre of drama, we were going to add hints of romance elements within it. For example, we are going to make either me or Emijola have a side plot of us falling in love and in that way it would help us cope. For Emi, since she is in a state of depression, she would find a love interest that would help guide her way through the grief. Whereas for me, I would be "partying" and meet new friend that is a guy. Me and this guy would become close through the few months and he would be the first to learn about my true struggles of the death of my friend Jahzara. As a result, he would help me with my character development and this would slowly allow our friend group to stabilize again. Throughout the movie opener, we were also planning to create a reminiscent tone. So, we plan to incorporate flashbacks of memories of when our group was us four all together hanging out.

Lastly, we came to a conclusion that our movie opener would be based on the idea of a friend passing away in the friend group and each member of the friend group will find their own ways to cope. The grief process will be a rollercoaster for all of us. We will go through many hardships throughout the process, but in the end, we will come together again with even stronger bonds. 

brainstorm!!

Another day and more ideas develop... Last class, we were asked to decide on our group members. For reference, I decided on my friends Ngoc Huynh, Emijola O., and Jahzara M. Today, we started brainstorming ideas for our movie opener. 

As we were brainstorming, we contemplated between two genres, romance and drama. We wanted to do a romance genre because we all love watching rom-coms, and thought it would be cute to incorporate romantic elements such as the different stages of teenage love. Then, we wanted to specifically choose the subgenre of romantic drama. This is because we were thinking of doing a dramatic teenage love story. However, we soon scrapped this idea due to a few issues. The first issue was that none of us had a boyfriend or a love interest in general. With no boyfriend, the love story is nonexistent... The second issue was that even if we pretended to use a guy friend of ours as an actor, none of us would be able to accurately portray the chemistry of falling in love. Thus, we decided that we would not pursue a romance path unless we geniunely wanted to. As a result, we started to brainstorm another idea. 

Since we paused on the idea of romance, we started diving deeper into the genre of drama. We discussed the pros and cons of this genre, and we found that the pros outweighed the cons. One of the pros was that doing the drama genre would allow us to convey moral themes. We wanted our movie opener to be somewhat inspirational. Thus, by doing a drama genre, this would allow us to emotionally connect with those watching. Under the genre of drama, we were able to brainstorm many ideas, but we ended up contemplating on two specific ideas. The two particular ideas that we came up with were either grief or insecurity.

For insecurity, we brainstormed the idea of doing a movie opener on the concept of a girl who struggles with self-identity. She gets judged by those around her, and so when she grows older, she decides to get plastic surgery. Once she gets plastic surgery, she moves to a new school and essentially starts a "new" life. That was the plot or storyline we planned at first, but we also ended up second-guessing this idea because we came across an issue. The issue was that none of us knew how we would actually make a two-minute opener on this idea. In other words, we were not sure what we would do for the opening scene. Moreover, as a group, we wanted to do something more sentimental and relatable. Thus, we came up with another idea that we could possibly do and that idea would be of a dramatic grief storyline. 

Our idea of grief was that there was essentially a friend group of four girls (these four girls would be our group), but one of them ended up passing away from cancer or some sort of health condition. The death of this friend would be life-changing to the rest of the friend group. We would have one of us be the friend who is visibly depressed and struggling to cope. We would have another one of us who is basically the person who tries to look for optimism or the bright side of things. This person would be the one who holds the friend group together or the middle ground between person one and three, even though she is struggling to cope with her own personal grief. Lastly, person three would be the one who puts on a facade as if they are happy and nothing happened. Person three would be the type to act all happy on the outside in order to distract themselves from reality. 

With these two genres in mind, romance and drama, we were planning to possibly combine them or do a mix of the two, known as the romantic drama subgenre. Before that however, there is currently a divide in our group on which idea we should pursue. Me and Emi want to do the friendship idea but Jahzara and Tina want to purse the insecurity idea. 

My partners!

Another day, another class! Over the past few weeks, we have learned about mise en scene, specific lighting elements, and color psychology. However, today it was time to decide on our group members for the final project. This was definitely a tough decision, as I am very picky about who I work with, and I do not like group projects that much in general. I am someone who is very "Type A" in that I have workaholic tendencies and tend to be very nitpicky about organization. Luckily though, I believe I have found suitable partners for this project. The first person I decided to work with is my friend Ngoc (or so we call her Tina)! I was easily able to decide on working with her because she is very on time when it comes to turning in work. This tells me that she cares about school and is responsible. As a result, I know I can rely on her to get the project completed. Moreover, me and her live in the same community, thus if we needed to work on the project after school in terms of editing it, I can easily go to her house. 

It is very obvious that me and Ngoc are similar in personality and characteristics. Thus, in order to balance the group out, we needed someone creative. That is where my friend Emijola comes in! Emijola, or so we call her Emi, is very bubbly in personality and always has imaginative ideas that no one would usually be able to come up with. I believe that working with Emi will allow us to develop a movie opening that is interesting and eye-catching to those watching it. Even when we were deciding on our group members, Emi already had a lot of interesting ideas that we could use for our movie opener. Overall, I think Emi will play an important role in our project as being the creative pillar to balance the group out. 

Last but not least, our final group member is Jahzara! We all wanted to work with Jahzara because she is very techy and is the most experienced when it comes to technology. With her computer skills, I think that this will allow us to have a semi-professional video or final product. I do not expect us to have a professional-level video, but I have faith in Jahzara that she would be able to edit our video into something high quality. 

In addition, me and Ngoc both have access to Adobe programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe Premiere. This is because we both took Comm Tech I last year, and in that class, we learned how to use all three platforms and got certifications for Photoshop and Illustrator. Thus, I think we can play an important role when it comes to the editing process to help Jahzara out.

Overall, I do not want to jinx it (knock on wood), but I would say I made a good choice in choosing the people I want to work with for the final project of AICE Media Studies. Our group has a good balance between organization skills, creativity, and technological skills. All these skills will be put to good use so that we can hopefully create a memorable movie opener.