Word Clouds: Part 1

These are the word clouds! They're in the same order as the palettes, so you can correlate them. The first word cloud correlates with the first color palette. Sorry for not having them side by side, the coding is a little too complicated for me to manage.

Group Meetings

We had a group meeting in class today. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, Chelsea and I weren't able to present our own project ideas. However, we'll be meeting with Briana and Dominic on Monday in order for them to also have some discussions, so be on the lookout for another update coming next week.

However, I was able to provide my input on a lot of my classmates' projects, and I feel like along the way, it gave me a few neat ideas.

Looking to Colors for Inspiration

Sometimes you can really get a vibe from a color palette, so I decided to put a bunch of palettes together to see if any really inspired me. Below, I've attached 10 color palettes, a blog post explaining what types of vibes they inspire will be coming very very soon.

Brainstorming An Idea

So, in order to begin my quest for an idea of what to do, I decided to visit an old friend of mine: random online story generators. I might have done this last year, to be honest, but I don't recall at this moment. In order to do this, I decided to hit up FilmSourcing.

Here are the ones I considered highlights!

A conservative horse whisperer leaves her fiancée at the altar and runs off to Florida where she is transformed by colourful characters firing snappy one-liners. With little else to do, she becomes obsessed with a heart broken teacher and they fall in love. There is just one obstacle – his last name is Penis.

A gorgeous actress buys a last minute ticket to Florida where her life is suddenly full of the wisdom of the elderly. With little else to do, she becomes obsessed with an unconventional writer and they connect. But one thing stands in the way – he has a dark secret.

An adrift lawyer is forced to return to her family home in the Greek Islands where her life is suddenly full of overwhelming solitude. One day she is rescued by a charming doctor and they fall in love. There is just one obstacle – she's actually a princess and arranged to marry some royal douche.  

 

Going Over Past Triumphs and Mistakes

So, I've decided to go with the chick flick... luckily for me, the trailer project we did a few weeks ago was a chick flick romance. The first step to figuring out what kind of chick flick trailers I want to do in the future involves me looking at the one I made in the past and figuring out what I feel I did right and what I did wrong.

Full disclosure, I edited the audio after turning it in for the purposes of uploading it to this blog. The audio I got rid of was the dialogue between the two main characters. This is for a few reasons:

1. The voice actors were me and my brother. I simply could not get over the ick-factor that came with watching the romantic dialogue between us, time and time again, while analyzing what I did in this trailer.
2. I still have no idea what I'm doing with my microphone, so a lot of the audio was poorly recorded and as a result, had a lot of inconsistencies when I tried to edit out background noise and modify our voices to sound different.
3. I know for a fact that the dialogue audio is what I hate most about the project. I don't feel like I would be able to properly focus on the other elements I did if the dialogue audio was there, hindering my own criticism of my work.

Without any more fuss, the full-length trailer I made: 

So, let's go over what I liked.

• I really like the song choice. I think it fits the woodsy, romantic, artsy vibe I was aiming for, and I think my project partner and I made the right choice regarding it.
• The color grading in some clips is really bright, warm, and summery. I quite like it and I'm proud of myself in retrospect while watching it.
• Briana shot the footage, and I really like how much movement she was able to incorporate. I often fall into the trap of not moving the camera when filming, but the movement gives the footage a lot more life.
• The transition into the title card! It's not realistic because the flash doesn't come out of the camera, but do I care? No. Does the audience care? No. It looks super cool.

What I didn't like as much...

• I'm ashamed to admit it! I'm having second thoughts about my font choice for the title cards. I think the sans serif font is too devoid of character and personality in retrospect. While I still like it, I don't know if it was the right fit for the trailer.
• Some of the clips needed more stabilization, I should've run it through After Effects another time.
• The production company logo is super simple and doesn't feel as intentional as I would like.
• Shots are super repetitive. I definitely need to set up multiple shooting locations when I put together this trailer, it feels like it happens all in one day because it literally does. It's lacking full-length film vibes.
• The footage gets very warped at multiple points. Tripod for filming is a MUST!
• THE title card is very plain. Definitely need to add to it in the future.

What Do Trailers Even Look Like?

So, to start off, I'm looking at what genre I'm interested in doing and which I can feasibly do with my $11.30/hr budget in South Florida. I decided to look at a few different types of trailers and see what would best fit into my capabilities.

Starting off with... action.

I decided to look at the trailers for The Bourne Identity, Baby Driver, and Snowpiercer, which I have included in this post right below! I didn't seek out a particular trailer, I went with the first one that came up when I searched it, so long as it was a full-length trailer. 

Bourne Identity is a super important film in the action genre, marking a shift from James Bond to a more gritty, realistic version of the genre. It was literally a gamechanger in the genre. So it only felt fair to look at this trailer as an example of what action trailers look like. It's very stunt-heavy and involves a good amount of weapons and props I don't really have access to. It's interesting, but I don't think I quite have the resources to pull off something similar.

The same goes with Baby Driver. I do know a professional stunt driver who's a customer at my job. He's fond of me and I think I could get him to help me out. My issue is that it's kind of illegal to do stunt driving without some type of permit, I assume. I'm not really sure if that's the path I want to take with this portfolio project. While it would be interesting, this is time-sensitive and it would involve calling in a LOT of favors.

Snowpiercer is interesting in the sense that it doesn't involve as many stunts or weapons, it's mostly concentrated at the end of the trailer. It involves very heavy set dressing and intentional mise-en-scene elements, which I could do, but I don't want to drain my bank account, especially when I have a lot of expenses coming up soon (thanks college!) Also, I'm not sure doing an action trailer would be very school-appropriate, as they tend to be PG-13 or R-rated. As a result... let's move on.

To the chick flick!

Yeah, there's some discourse surrounding the term, but we're going to ignore that for the purposes of this blogpost. I won't be addressing romance movies on their own because I'll be categorizing them under the chick flick genre for my research purposes. Chick flick is basically a film that is marketed primarily towards women.

I made sure that all of these are more modern as the chick flick is more sensitive to the passage of time compared to action movies. I looked at Me Before You, To All The Boys I've Loved Before, Girls Trip, Crazy Rich Asians, and Someone Great.

Me Before You doesn't involve many complicated sets, mostly scenes between the two main characters bantering and a very (in my opinion) cute customing of the main female lead. It doesn't involve many extra characters, there are no complicated sets (I can simply not include a fancy gala scene for obvious reasons), and it employs some techniques I used while doing my last set of trailers. Chick Flicks are off to a strong start, I'm feeling pretty inspired.

A lot of my previous thoughts reoccurred while watching To All The Boys I've Loved Before. Though, I can't really film in a school this year... it'll also make it painfully obvious how empty the background is. However, no one said I had to do a school-based story (so I very obviously won't!) However, I love how the trailer was color graded and the attention to aesthetics in this trailer, I definitely want to be incorporating it into what I end up doing. Incorporating the traditional romance clips with a few humorous ones definitely categorizes it as a teen romantic comedy, which, I'm definitely interested in doing.

It's quite obvious that this trailer, in contrast to the other two, is being marketed to a much older audience of women. Super interesting how they fall under the same genre. While this brought a lot to the table for me to consider (especially the aspect of maybe not even including a romance and instead focusing on female friendship,) I'm not sure I'll be doing something very similar.

This brought up an interesting thought that I stupidly didn't have before: I could do some visually interesting split-screen moments because it's not actually a movie... Wow. I think it works well and I'll give it a try. The subject matter is obviously not one I can take inspiration from but some of the editing techniques create a lot of that visual interest, I'll be making a blog post in the future to show off me trying them out.

This trailer really impressed the importance of an almost "theme song" for the marketing campaign. Lizzo's song "Truth Hurts" does a lot of work in setting a tone and the general vibes for the film. A lot of the other trailers did it as well, but I feel like it's most prominent here. One thing this does prompt me to think about is, is there such a thing as going to current? A lot of what's in the trailer will be super out of date in a matter of 3 years. It's only 2 years old and feels a bit dated already. While there's nothing wrong with being unapologetically a product of your time, is that the path I want to lead myself down?

And with that... I moved onto comedy!

I only went over Once Upon a Time in Hollywood for reasons I'll dicuss below

No diss on Tarantino, but I realized pretty immediately that I wanted to go with something in the Chick Flick genre pretty immediately. Not that those movies don't fall under comedy (though, I watched Someone Great, and calling it a comedy is a bit of a stretch...) but I want to create something targeted towards women. That's just what seems more fun to me. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood obviously has a lot of technique that's interesting, but I've realized it's not what I want.

Deciding on... The Trailer

 So, I've decided to go with the movie promotion package and produce a pair of trailers. While I had the option to work in a group, I think working alone is best in order to ensure that I can have full control over my creative vision.

I was between the movie promotion and documentary package, but I decided that the movie promotion seemed much more appealing to me. If anything, I can produce trailers for a documentary. Trailers aren't confined by genre.

I'll be posting a research post soon!

Deciding on the A Level Project

 Hello all! It's been almost a year since I've posted on this blog, but I'm back with another 2 month long posting spree thanks to the lovely A-level project I'll be documenting here. So... let's cut to the chase!

What will I even be doing? Last year we all focused on the short film opening, but this year we have a lot more flexibility. This year we have both a visual and "print" component, so that's exciting! I really wanted to do the magazine last year </3 (I'm a font fanatic, what can I say?)

So, let's go over the options and think them over!

Option 1: music promotion package

So this is the one I really want to do... unfortunately I don't really have access to a local artist. My only offers were an ironic one from my friend who lives 5 hours away and an acquaintance of mine who sent me his music. The first one was a satirical rap and the second was also rap but... it wasn't school-appropriate in the slightest and wasn't very good in my personal opinion.

So, despite this being the one I want to do... I have no one to film and I don't want to dedicate myself to a package I'm not even sure I can find an artist for.

via GIPHY

Option 2: film promotion package

So, this is the one that interests me the most, after the music promotion. Lucky for me, this doesn't require original music! We recently did a pair of trailers (one full-length and one teaser) and I had a really good time doing it! It allows for a lot more creativity in post-production since you can get really funky with the effects. I was able to do this cool camera flash effect for the teaser trailer I made about a month ago. It's embedded below!

Another cool thing about doing trailers is that it allows for different sets and mise-en-scene elements, and can be very visually interesting. While, yes, you do have to think about the full-length movie as a whole, you also don't have to plan an entire, cohesive short film. I've never been very good at script-writing...

Option 3: documentary package

So, this is also a really interesting option. My favorite shows are docuseries and they do a lot of cool things with graphics and animation. Earlier in the year, I made a short documentary on how microwaves work that I had a lot of fun editing. My favorite docuseries maker is Vox Media, and their series on Netflix are very polished and visually interesting!

via GIPHY

My issue? I'm utterly uninspired when it comes to the documentary. While I think I can pull it off, I can't come up with an idea for an entire docuseries. I don't feel very inspired in this area, and I don't want to create an uninspired piece.

Option 4: short film package

I don't want to make a short film </3 I'm not very inspired with the regard to be completely honest. While I have no doubts that I could figure out a cool idea, but it's not something I'm very excited to do when compared to the other options. That's a pretty obvious sign that I shouldn't choose it.

via GIPHY

I'm going to continue thinking it over, but I think it's pretty obvious which I'm leaning towards...