film inspirations

 Hey beautiful people! Welcome back to another one of my posts. After discussing with my group the genre conventions we are going to include to fit our film in the genre of drama, we all decided to brainstorm our own inspirations.

One of my biggest inspirations is the TV show, The Summer I Turned Pretty, specifically in how it handles the different ways people grieve. I am less inspired by the love triangle and more by the quiet aftermath of Susannah's death (the mother of Conrad and Jeremiah). The show gives us a perfect blueprint with Conrad and Jeremiah. Conrad shuts down completely as his grief is a heavy, quiet storm that he tries to carry on his own. Whereas Jeremiah is the opposite. Jerimiah becomes the life of the party, using noise to distract himself from the pain he is facing. Similarly, these two characters are parallel to the way we are representing one of us as the one who is visibly depressed with the friend's death, and the other who is acting as if nothing happened. Then, in the TV show, there is Belly. She's caught in the middle, trying to hold space for both brothers while dealing with her own loss. She is known as the connector or balance, even when she is breaking internally as well. This is a perfect model for our third friend, Ngoc (Tina). Ngoc is the one trying to keep the group from fracturing completely. She checks in on both sides, often putting her own grief on pause to be there for others. 

A few other inspirations I have in mind are the movies Up and Five Feet Apart. With these two movies, I had hoped to use them as references to capture the intimate and heart-crushing feeling of a last goodbye. The opening montage in Up, showing Carl and Ellie's life together, says more without words than any script could. We want that same emotional aspect in our flashback to our friend's bedroom. In our movie opener, rather than doing it in a hospital bed, we are doing it in her personal space, her bedroom, to make it more personal and sentimental. It is a sacred space filled with things that remind us of her, which makes saying goodbye there so much harder. However, to visually capture that intimacy, we are looking at the close-ups in Five Feet Apart for inspiration. In Five Feet Apart, a lot of the camera time is spent on the characters' faces, capturing every glance, tear, and smile. It makes you feel as if you are in the room with them. That is the feeling we want for our bedroom scene as well. We plan to use extreme close-ups of our faces and focus on the small details in the room that tell a story about our friendship. We want the audience to feel the weight of the silence and the unsaid words in that final moment. 

Last but not least, for the visual tone of friendship and loss, I planned to use inspiration from the blending of the aesthetics in The Summer I Turned Pretty (TSITP). In TSITP, there are several beautiful, wide, and cinematic shots of the beach that perfectly fit the vibe me and my group are going for. Specifically, in the show, we are inspired by the soft, golden-hour lighting on the beach, and the way it uses wide shots to make emotions feel big and landscapes feel personal. We want to use that same warm, cinematic aesthetic in our opening beach scene to make the moment feel important and genuine. Not only that, but we are also inspired by a slightly different kind of scene. We are inspired by the scene of the quiet, heartbreaking moments in Susannah's bedroom when she is sick. This scene takes place in a soft, sunlit room that feels peaceful but is incredibly sad. The camera stays close, focusing on the raw emotions of Belly and Susannah as they talk. The light is gentle but also feels heavy at the same time. It is about capturing love and sadness together. Similarly, that is the atmosphere we want to create for our flashback scene in our friend's bedroom as we pray that she is okay.