Scheduling!

     Throughout our class time, we decided to make a google calendar to plan. We put in dates such as the due dates of all our blog postings, when we want to start filming, and a date that we want to have everything finished. We also spoke about how we want to get a lot done before spring break so we can potentially take that week off without stressing. Here is the link to our calendar where you can see all of the dates planned.
https://calendar.google.com/calendar/r/week/2020/3/1?pli=1

Location Research

     During class today, we planned out the locations we would be filming in. We weren't really sure on which locations to use due to the fact that our community doesn't have many options. With our plot taking place in a small town, we tried to think of different places that can execute our visions. We came up with locations such as local townhouses, our own houses, town center, the auditorium at our school, and even at a dance competition.

    We decided we are going to have our film opening start in a classroom setting. We wanted to film Mia walking from class into the auditorium watching the thetre class in awe. You can tell that there is this fire burning inside her because she wants to get up on stage with them. We thought this would be a good location because both of these two scenes take place at our school. It would be easy to film due to easy access.

     The next location would most likely take place in the main characters bedroom. We decided that we wanted to have room decor of her dream school Pace University all over her bedroom walls along with broadway shows, dance pictures, and motivational quotes. This will help show how motivated she is for her future.
 
     We havent come up with many other location ideas, but we do have out beginning setting done. This is what we came up with in class.

   

Mood Boards

     We decided to create a mood board for our main character. We don't have a name for her yet, but we do know many charcteristics about her and the mood boards helped us make a visual of that. 

     In our mood boards, we added photos of rainbow pins, socks, bags, etc, to represent the LGBTQ+ community, which our protagonist is apart of. We added photos of a 90s asthetic for wardrobe such as tuurtle necks, high socks, and jean skirts. We want to give her a very retro vibe to her to make her stand out from the others. In our mood board you can also find many photos of professional dancers that she looks up to. As you scroll through the board you can see the type of life the main character lives vs. the one she wants to.
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Below is the link to our Mood Board!
https://www.pinterest.com/?boardId=482800091242700887

   

Our Outline!

    Originally, we wanted to incorporate the romance genre into our film. But after collaborating, we decided that we no longer wanted to use that genre as it may be tricky. So we decided to do a drama musical.We haven't came up with our complete outline yet, but we do have some main ideas that we want to incorporate. 
     
     As of right now we named our film, "Little Town." This musical would be about a dancer, who I would play the lead role as, that is trying to make it the big industry of performing arts. She is brought up in a small town with not many people that live there. It is extremely hard to make it into the performing arts industry, especially in this generation. And she knows that. Certain traits such as your height, hair color, or race can affect if you get the job or not. With her being apart of the LGBTQ+ community, she is afraid she wont be accepted. She always feels as she is an outcast, but dance is always there to save her. Her family is strict, she was raised as a christian and always had to follow her parents orders. Her family is not accepting of her being part of the gay community along with wanting to have a future career in dance. She doesn't let that get to her and if anything it gives her more of a push as to why she wants to continue this career. There is going to be a few bumps in the road to make to the real world, but she is going to find a way how. 

Brainstorming!

     The brainstorming process for us was a little tricky. Throughout the class period, we were trying to come up with different ideas that we wanted to do for our 2 minute film opening. We were hemming and hawing trying to come up with an idea that would stand out. We came up with many ideas regarding the plot, main characters, and something that we really wanted to incorporate was representation. We are still kind of stuck on what we really want to do with our film. We feel that doing a musical is really challenging, but we want to stand out from the others and step out of our comfort zone. 

We brainstormed on a bunch of different ideas. We wanted to have a "small town" setting with the main character who has an identity crisis. Taking place in contemporary time she is going to have a 90s astheitc along with being apart of the LGBTQ+ community. This makes her an outcast and stand out from the others. 

For the production aspect, we wanted to have a casting call for dancers who could potentially take part in flash mobs or be extras in out film. We also came up with ideas to use a drone for footage for something different. 

    For the music aspect, our fellow group member Andrea is going to compose orginal content. We thought it would be a good idea for us to use our own talents and incorporate it into something more. We want to use diagetic and non-diagetic sounds to introduce the main character. The theme song created will have an impact on the main character expressing her itch to make it far into the industry. 

Below is our brainstorming sheet we worked on in class:

Portfolio Project Research -Romance

Along with my reaserch of the mucial genre, I decided to research the romance genre as that usually plays a big role in the plot of musical films. While the tone of the romance genre can vary we feel it is a good fit with the musical. Romance film can be defined as a genre wherein the plot revolves around the love between two protagonists. The story usually can have themes with love at first sight or sacrifical love. We are not sure of what our plot will be exactly, but this research can definately help us with our creation.

Some examples of musical romance films are:

Mama Mia (2008): A musical romantic comedy film directed by Phyllida Lloyd and written by Catherine Johnson. Based on the 1999 musical "Mama Mia!" This film involves a romantic plot that follows a young bride-to-be who invites three men to her upcoming wedding, each one with the possibility of being her father. 

Moulin Rouge (2001):  This film is a story of a young English poet/writer, Christian, who falls in love with the star of the Moulin Rouge, cabaret actress and courtesan Satine. In this movies they would show their romance through their music, if a feeling was intense, then they sing it. 

Grease (1978): Is a film where you can experience the realtionships of teenagers in highschool through the time era of the 1950s. This is the singing, romantic, dance world of Grease. The film depicts the lives of greaser Danny Zuko and Australian transfer student Sandy Olsson who develop an attraction for each other.

Portfolio Project Research

My group and I decided to reaserch the genre of musicals for our film opening.

While researching, the filmm genre for musicals are an internationally popular film genre that futures music, dancing, and songs in different combinations. The songs in the films usually advance the plot or help create and develop the characters involved. My group and I really wanted to do this genre due to the fact that one of us is passionate about singing while I am passionate about dance. The combination of the two make a great reason why we wanted to do a musical! We get to incoprorate something we love into a film! Nothing sounds better than that!

I have researched some films that are musicals. Some examples are:

The Greatest Showman (2017): is a beautiful, engaging, original musical about the early life of Phineas T. Barnum, the extraordinary American showman. This film has fun upbeat music with people trying to aspire their dreams. 

The Sound of Music (1965): The musical tells the story of Maria, who takes a job as governess to a large family while she decides whether to become a nun. She falls in love with the children, and eventually their widowed father, Captain von Trapp.

La La Land (2016):  A film that stars Ryan Gosling as a jazz pianist and Emma Stone as an aspiring actress, who meet and fall in love while pursuing their dreams in Los Angeles. This film opening stood out to me. It has a happy tone and a good choice of music.

Music Marketing Campaign

For our music marketing project, we chose the genre of Alternative with the name Beautiful Entropy. For our band, we got inspiration from bands within the genre such as Cage The Elephant and Half Alive. While researching these bands, we noticed that they have websites that are asthetically pleasing with links to all social media of theirs. This helps market the band and it seems as if it is common throught the genre, so we decided to use these ideas for our own website. We decided to color brand as many bands of this genre do. Color branding is a great marketing technique that makes the band easily recogniazble and follows through the color theory. One of the bands we researched, Half Alive does a great job of color branding so we decided to do the same.

Beautiful Entropy Website

 Cage The Elephant

Half Alive

Entropy: physical property of the state of a system, measure of disorder. We call ourselves Beautiful Entropy to make a beauty of the chaos we have in our lives. No matter if it's your love life or mental health we diecided this fits in with our target audience teenagers and adults. We demonsrate this throughout of symbol of the red rose dripping. In research we found that a rose symbolizes beauty and love. We decided to choose one dripping to show that all things in life aren't perfect and beautiful. We followed through with the colors of red,black, and white. We use these colors as our asthetic on our merchanidse, webiste, social media, and even in our music videos.

 

For our music video, we decided to do a storyline like music video. While going through the creation process, I leanred that the more shots you take the better. This makes it easier for the editing process. I learned that you can have the perfect picture set in mind, but sometimes there are either technical diffivulties or you are unable to shoot at the spot you wanted but you have to improvise. While creating, I wish we spent more time on planning the shots so it would've made it eaiser to edit. All in all, our band did a great job of creating something in a short time span and will learn from our mistakes in the future. 

                                                            Our Music Video- Trouble