Writing the First Draft... And Learning From It

 Hello! After a long day of putting the finishing touches on the first draft of my script, I'm finally done! I'm glad I set this guideline for myself because now I have a better understanding of all of my characters, the plot, and the sort of jokes I'm going for. Overall, while this may not be my final version, its good to have something rather than nothing.

Interestingly, I chose to write the first draft of this story differently than I would any other script. Instead of going with the traditional format with sparse stage directions and an emphasis on dialogue, I chose to write it as a short story, in prose. Quirky, sure, but I had my reasoning. The main reason I chose this was because I'm not very experienced in writing scripts or screenplays, since I typically lean more towards poetry and short stories. So of course, writing in such a different format and structure felt like a challenge. Now normally, I'd welcome this challenge  as an opportunity to learn and enhance my skills as a writer. However, it was really important to me that I nail the story beats over anything else, and I feared that by challenging myself with this different format, I'd focus on writing according to the structure rather than according to the story beats I want to capture.

Additionally, I don't think that I'll be publishing my first draft for my readers to see right now. While this was something I did for last year's portfolio project, I don't think its appropriate in this case. Let me explain. Last year, my script for my film opening would be the second script I had ever written, and therefore, it was important to me that I capture and publish my first attempts at tackling such a daunting step towards production (I have since blocked that draft on my old blog from being visible, sorry). Now, I have a few more scripts under my belt, to the point where it's not as new. Don't get me wrong, I'm still very notably an amateur, but I'm not grasping blindly anymore. So its just not as important to me to publish a very rough preview of my work.

Another factor is spoilers! Yes, it is a bit presumptuous of me to worry about "spoilers" for my humble little student film to be published and ruin the viewing experience of the few who will watch it. However, when I considered the amount of effort I've been putting into crafting the jokes in my script, I realized that by reading even early versions of these jokes, it sort of spoils the fun of hearing the jokes firsthand when the film is complete. So maybe its not the most valid reason, but it's important to me.

In terms of what I've learned after writing this draft, it wasn't so much general writing growth as it was gaining a better understanding of my own story. For example, for many blog posts I had long struggled with the idea of including a "straight man" character or not. However, in writing different family interactions, I came to realize that Rebecca (the teen girl character) sort of filled the straight man role naturally, since I wrote her to be apathetic to the loss of the computer and instead absorbed with her phone, therefore, whenever a family member brought up the computer, she shut them down coldly because she has no attachment to the computer. Therefore, she played off of the enhanced emotionality of the characters against her own apathy. So it's nice to have the best of both worlds regarding this matter.

Another lesson (?) was in the actual writing structure of the script. Like I said earlier, I was writing in a form more akin to a short story than your traditional screenplay. With this format I found a nice balance between my comfort zone and outside of it, writing with all of the description and language of a short story but still including directions for shot composition or camera movements. It's a quirky little mix but its one that worked surprisingly well for me!

I'll most likely spend this week polishing the script and starting to formulate the plan on shooting this film. Sure, I dread the notion of having to confront my ideas and make them reality, but I rest assured knowing I put all the prep-work I possibly could have into making it the best I can be. See you next time!

Researching Social Media Apps

 Hello there! This is going to be a little bit shorter than other blog posts, because I'm still focused on finalizing the first draft of the script. However, based off some advice that my instructor gave us earlier this week, I'm going to start my social media brand account today! How exciting!!

Ok.. But on which platform?

Typically, social media accounts meant to market films can be on either Instagram or Twitter. While each social media app has their benefits, I chose to go with Twitter for a few reasons. 

    While Instagram is known for its solid reputation as The image-sharing social media app, it has a few drawbacks. First of all, it relies HEAVILY on pictures, and visuals... aren't my strong suit. Additionally, the way you gain followers on Instagram is vastly different to getting followers on Twitter. On Instagram, people just have to kind of stumble onto your account, or have a shared connection with someone both of you are following, which makes it difficult to get the ball rolling if nobody follows you.

     However, a big plus to marketing on Instagram is that anyone involved with the production (directors, actors, etc.) can post about their experience working on it to their own follower-base, and tag (a form of linkage) the brand account, directing all of their followers to your brand. Ultimately though, I ended up not going with Instagram because, admittedly, I'm not very popular on that site... also I rarely post on it, making me not very well-versed in how to get big on it.

But John, I hear you say, You aren't popular on ANY social media app!

….shut up.

    On the other end of social media apps is Twitter. I find myself more attracted to this app because in my personal experiences, I've seen how brand social media accounts flourish in this space, as well as the fact that I more regularly use Twitter, and therefore have a better understanding of the community on that site, and I know how to get big on it. In fact, Twitter almost seems like its starting to change its layout specifically to benefit advertisers. In a recent policy change, the company added new verification badges specifically to verify and highlight brand accounts on Twitter, giving them a sense of legitimacy and specialness.

Furthermore, gaining a following on Twitter is much, much easier than it is on Instagram. While on Instagram you essentially rely on connections between people finding your account, on Twitter, its extremely easy to go "viral" and have your posts exposed to thousands of people through the algorithm, and that's not even taking into consideration how prolific hashtags are on the site, or how easy it is for brand accounts to interact with their followers on Twitter.

Additionally, I've had my own fun with brand Twitter accounts in the past. After seeing a movie's promo account's posts EVERYWHERE on my timeline, I decided to become an avid follower of the film, commenting and liking all of their posts, starting a hashtag supporting the film, and overall being obnoxiously hyped for the film. Admittedly, this was looking to be very clearly a bad movie. However, following my amateur marketing stint for the film, something very interesting started to happen...

On the joke hashtag I had made, people who followed me were barraged with content from this film, and HAD ACTUALLY GONE TO GO WATCH IT. Because of my silly hashtag, people were giving this movie a chance, and by my count, my shenanigans had pushed about two dozen of my followers to go watch it, simply based off of my hashtag jokes. This is an exceptional example of how easy it is to gain traction on Twitter, and its a great real-world application of hashtags.

Naturally, following whatever "success" I had with that movie, I decided to go with Twitter for my own marketing purposes for my film. While I haven't created the account yet (most likely next week, as I'll have the looming draft script done by that point), I can't wait to take what I've learned from watching brands on Twitter grow and apply it to my own film's account. 

I'll be posting later about my first draft of the script, so stay tuned!

Brainstorming & Bedwars

    There are two possible thoughts that may be running through your mind after reading the title. Either your first thought was "Really John? Week 4 of working on this project, and you're still brainstorming?" or you could have thought "John, what the @$#*! is a Bed War?!" Well, to the first statement, it is my opinion that it is never too late to conjure up new ideas and thoughts for a project, and for the second question... well, let me explain.

    My main task this week is to write a script for the film. It can be a rough draft, or a basic functional script so I can work it as I progress, but the goal is to have something by this Sunday. However, little known tidbit about screenwriting.... This stuff is hard. After an hour of sitting at my computer, blank page on screen with a constantly blinking cursor, I had managed to write about a minute of the 5 minute total runtime for the film. So I needed a break. Therefore, I called up my buddy Wade, who is a fellow student of this course, to decompress together and generally talk about how our projects are going, while playing some videogames together. Typical guy stuff.

    Wade isn't really a gamer type, though, so he had literally no games installed on his laptop. So we decided to boot up Minecraft (a game that needs no introduction) and play some minigames while we talked over a call (This minigame being Bedwars). While we were joined by some other friends of ours in the call as they gave us feedback and asked questions, this surprisingly turned out to be a pretty productive session we had.

    For example, in this clip below, my buddy Nick poses a fair question about how I'm going to hook the audience with this concept of a computer funeral. He shows some apprehension about the hook, and kindly suggests a sort of twist reveal to capture the audience's attention. Funnily enough though, this was already my plan! So I simply assured him that this twist was part of my plan for the film and would happen fairly early on.

    Wade also gave some nice advice on writing scripts, since he's much more experienced when it comes to writing for the screen. When I expressed some uncertainty in the structure of how my first draft of the script was being formatted (I was writing it as more of a short story rather than the traditional screenplay format), Wade was really nice and validated my concerns, stating that "That's fully a way of doing a script. Don't let anyone tell you that's not a way to do a script". However, this nice moment was ruined by Nick trying to be clever.... but the validation and screenwriting advice still stands!

My final gameplay clip is of my explanation to Wade and my friend Sebi on how the film is starting in my first draft so far. After establishing the basic premise of the characters involved, I decide to try out one of the few jokes I've written for the film on this unsuspecting audience, and to my surprise, they liked it! Finally, the validation of knowing I have the capacity to be funny.... Jokes aside though, it was really important for me to test at least one joke out, because I have no way of telling if the jokes I'm writing will land or not until I tell the joke to someone. So that bit of feedback was really valuable.

    

I'm not really sure how effective this blog was... I wanted to try something quirky and different to break up the recent monotony of my blog posts with some new, never-before-seen gameplay footage media integration to spice things up a bit. Maybe this works out, maybe it doesn't. Regardless, I had fun and a healthy amount of constructive criticism and feedback from my friends. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to keep working on that first draft of the script (and definitely not play more Minecraft....)

Group Critiques

Hello! Today's blog post is less of a update/progress post, and more of a "class assignment" post, so don't get too excited over anything. Regardless, getting into a group with a few other fellow students was a fun experience and gave me an opportunity to measure myself against the progress of other projects similar to mine, and judge if I'm doing alright. This blog will include summaries of their project's progress and what they thought about by project as well!

This is the wonderful little group I got to sit with and review our projects with! Here are their names and blog links!

From Left to Right:

Nethumi, Sachate, Sebastian, and Eugenia.

    

    First to present in our group was Sebastian, who had chosen the film promo project. His opening pitch for his film was "Teen Beach Movie... but horror." After such a captivating prompt, I was invested in learning more about his project and his progress on it, which he referred to as smooth, but stuck. His film (dubbed Double Feature) will be about a few friends getting trapped within a trashy 2000s remake of a beloved horror movie, and will end with a reveal about how they're actually in a movie within a movie, within a movie. Sebastian's main issue, as he put it, was in the film's "connections", meaning the transitions between each setting and sequence, for example the method by which the characters get sucked into the movie to begin with. While I couldn't offer him a definitive solution to his problem, I promised him that I'd let him know if I thought of anything!

    Next was Nethumi, who plans on filming a documentary excerpt, since she enjoyed making one a few months ago for our class. Surprisingly, Nethumi is lightyears ahead of any schedule I could've possibly conceived of- she's already started filming!! According to her, she wants to document the tech week and production of a musical show she worked on outside of school. However, in a crazy twist of events revealed on her latest blog post... she had suffered a crazy setback: her tablet, which contained all of her footage, had randomly broken, taking all of her footage with it. This is another difficult problem to solve... someone suggested shifting focus of her documentary to simply interviewing the people involved in the show rather than including the show's footage, but we agreed that without the proper b-roll, it was better to stick with her original plan.

    Following Nethumi was Sachate, who aimed on producing a short film, though he admitted he wasn't 100% sure he had the story fleshed out for it- only the beginning was certain, with a cloudy middle and two endings he was divided on. He sold the movie to us as having "Peaky Blinders vibes", since he described the film's genre as "chaotic gangster movie", which follows the dealings of an illicit product merchant and the dark, seedy underbelly of his industry, When Sachate told us about the two endings he was deliberating between (one ending in redemption, the other ending in suicide), I suggested that if he did end up going with the suicide ending, it would be interesting to have the main character use his own product to kill himself, since it'd provide a nice degree of irony to the ending. He liked this idea!

Finally was Eugenia, who was also interesting in co-producing a short film with her partners, Ana and Sasha. She expressed an interest in making the film about the balance between beauty and sports in her life, since in the previous projects she has worked on before, the running theme of being centered around women in sports is a constant. Eugenia chose to make a film about gymnastics, and to capture the development of a girl who grows up in the gymnastics field, and how the pressures and standards of the industry start to affect her as a person. But this idea raised an interesting issue: will she have to cast different actresses as the different ages of this one girl? While we all agreed that it would be more or less essential to be careful with the casting in this film, we also suggested the use of montage to avoid awkward transitions between the swapping of each actress.

The last person in my group to present was, well, me. While they didn't have much to offer in terms of criticism, I thoroughly appreciated their enthusiasm in my production, and they also suggested that I make MANY social media posts on my media marketing account for this film, specifically Behind The Scenes posts, since they expressed a lot of interest in processes like the building of the casket, the destruction of the computer, etc. Another great suggestion was to invite a lot of background actors with no speaking roles to simply exist in the background of the footage for my film. Not only will this make the funeral seem more legitimate and realistic, but by having so many background actors, I'd be able to afford different days to shoot with different members of the cast, instead of hoping to film everything simultaneously because the background of shots would look too empty otherwise.

Overall, I really enjoyed this short group review process, and plan on taking all of their advice to heart. I wish them the best in their own projects, and urge any readers of mine to pay their blogs a visit as well, as linked in the top of the post. See you next time!

The Search For Scenery...

 How embarrassing... yet another short blog post coming right off the tail of the last one, also a rather short post by my standards. Luckily, instead of being short as a result of a rush, it is instead because there really isn't much to say today.

In anticipation of week three of the portfolio project, where real, visual progress on the film will be made (as opposed to the last week of more brainstorming than actual writing), I want to start getting some visual aspects done before writing the script. By this, I mean looking for a place to shoot and casting the characters.

While casting the characters will be its entirely separate blog post, I do think starting to look for a set to shoot the shots at is important. Luckily, I already have a pretty solid idea of where I want to shoot: Tree Tops Park.

As I've mentioned before, I've never been to a funeral before. However, my mental image of a funeral always involves an outdoor scene, where chairs are lined up before the casket before it is eventually lowered into the ground. So naturally, I'm inclined towards shooting in a park.

I've already previously filmed here before for another media project, so I'm familiar enough with the landscape and general vibes of the park. It's important to me that wherever we shoot needs to be essentially unpopulated, both for my benefit in having a quiet set, as well as to avoid disturbing others. Tree Tops Park is perfect for this due to its sheer size- you could walk for hours without seeing another person.

This is by no means my final decision- I plan on driving around town sometime this week to scout other potential spots to hold my little funeral. However, having Tree Tops Park as a guiding idea for what criteria I need met to consider a place as an option will help me narrow my decision-making process down considerably.

Is it a little silly to post a blog where I haven't come to a solid, final decision about what I'm talking about? Maybe. But in my humble opinion, I think this is just a genuine way to illustrate my raw thought process, and an important aspect of documenting my journey in making my own short film (which I believe is the point of this blog). After all, who has their mind made up instantly all the time? I'm human after all....

The Straight Man... And Why I'm Not Using Him

 This is going to be a very short post, because following the prior posts about developing the cast of characters in my short film, I feel like I should clarify why I ended up choosing to not include the straight man character I was deliberating on whether I should add or not.

It should be noted that when I refer to the "straight man" character, I'm not referring to a heterosexual male. The straight man trope, in comedy, refers to a character that is meant to represent normalcy and a realistic reaction to comedic events occurring in front of them to contrast against other, sillier characters.

As I've mentioned before, I was apprehensive on including a straight man character because of my personal opinion regarding straight man characters in film- believing them to be the mark of the lazy screenwriter most of the time, with very few straight men being written as being their own character, rather than just being the writer's mouthpiece or the voice of reason as being their sole character trait. A good example of this is Michael Bluth from Arrested Development, who I have mentioned before.

I don't know if I'd want to write a straight man character for this film because I want the spotlight to be on the other, more ridiculous characters who represent the drawbacks of a dependence on technology. Writing in a character whose sole purpose would be to call out the flaws of the other characters would not only be boring, but it'd also just feel like I'm spoon-feeding the message of the film to the audiences, which feels cheap.

Therefore, no straight man is needed for this film! I already have a big enough cast to write for, so I don't need yet another character to busy myself with. Thanks for reading!

Developing The Characters Part Two

Let's get straight into this post, no introduction needed! For the first counterpart to this post, click here.

 TEEN BOY CHARACTER

Physical Description: Body type isn't really a point of much importance to me with this character- they can be tall and buff or short and fat, it really doesn't matter. It just needs to be understood that this guy is kind of a loser nerd type, not getting out of the house often, wearing baggier/unkempt clothes (damn this might just be describing myself), and generally appearing to be on the complete opposite end of the social hierarchy than his sister. As long as it is visually apparent that this guy is a Discord gamer type of person, any appearance is fine by me.

Satirical Representation: With this character, I want to illustrate extremely common addictions that teenage boys fall into- gaming or pornography. It is no secret that this demographic has long been known to be the most sexually repressed population, and this leads many to seek online pornography, and because of the developing teenage brain, may get addicted to the dopamine of it. When researching the different vices technology has given rise to, I found a very interesting article on how porn is affecting teenagers and even young children, and reading through this, it is apparent that this porn addiction trend has been largely thanks to the increased availability on the Internet. While I do want to make fun of porn addicts with this character to an extent, I also want to give this character some nuance and show that this teenager is a victim, not just a pervert (though these can coexist).

A different addiction common among male teens is that of GAMING. I, myself, am guilty of this one, devoting hours everyday to mindlessly play online games rather than being productive working at a job, or, I don't know, writing blog posts for my media project... Getting back to the point, if you're friends with a teen male, a parent of one, or are one yourself, you know that gaming is an almost natural thing for men to do in modern times. When once men would go off to war, conquering distant lands in the name of their homeland, they now sit at a chair all day and scream gibberish at each other through game chats as they make progress in meaningless games. We fell off.

There is some credibility to videogame addiction being a legitimate issue rather than just your standard "videogames bad" take. In this article I read regarding symptoms of the addiction, it's gotten to a point where the DSM-5 has started listing possible symptoms of videogame addiction, to help diagnose and assist people with this vice. Therefore, I think gaming is an important enough topic to address and criticize with this character as my medium to express my criticisms.

Jokes: The jokes here are pretty low-hanging fruit, if I'm being honest. The guy's a loser- jokes can be made about his porn addled mind, the fact that he's "coming out of his gaming cave for once", etc. I think I'd want to explore more comedy out of his social awkwardness, a symptom affecting both gaming and porn addicts. Having no understanding of social cues- making inappropriate, awkward jokes, and generally feeling cringe is the direction I want to take this character.

Making him cringeworthy is going to be both very fun and equally painful- he's going to be that guy. Even if you claim not to know what I mean by this, everyone understands the concept of that guy, always making awkward jokes, uncomfortable comments, and just feeling out of place (which would be especially fun in this case, imagine being considered the black sheep of this dysfunctional family). The only question is, how far will his degeneracy go for the sake of comedy? I'll have to ponder this one further...

TEEN GIRL CHARACTER

Physical Description: This character is meant to be the preppy, popular, social media addicted "popular girl" that everyone follows- illustrated through her fashionable clothing, the styled hair, and generally carefully maintained appearance. As mentioned before, she's meant to contrast both her father and brother- politically and socially. Ideally, she'd mainly be wearing a blue outfit to represent her strong liberal leaning, and to contrast her brother, she really only has to be somewhat clean and attractive (just anything that could make her immediately identifiable as the "popular girl").

Satirical Representation: With this character, I want to pull back the curtain on the ever-preppy and pretty social media influencer types- someone whose dependency on social media followers and likes for validation has corrupted her being. I'd like to depict her as somewhat neurotic, constantly monitoring her social media accounts to get dopamine rushes and validate her identity as an influencer. I may play with a Jekyll and Hyde concept for this character- when on camera she's smiling, laidback, and clever, seemingly effortless in her every action, but when off-camera, she's stressed, hyper, and obsessed with finding the next photo op, hungry for her next dosage of online validation. This will likely lead to her personality being catered toward people pleasing (to get a taste of validation after the computer has broken) or rather manipulative to people in order to get something post-worthy off of them.

Jokes: There are a lot of jokes here. However, for this character, instead of being a direct, clear joke with attention given to it, I want to have her as more of a background character with small moments between the time I dedicate to other characters. At first, I think she would be beaming, almost intoxicatingly peppy and energetic, shoving a phone in people's faces, but as the funeral progresses, her phone battery dies, and she becomes desperate to squeeze any bit of clout from the event to keep her fans interested in her before the phone turns off. Her posing with the casket for a selfie to post on Instagram may be a cheap shot, but I still find it pretty funny.

Additionally, I think it'd be both a great joke and refreshing perspective to have if she's the only family member who doesn't actually mourn the computer's loss, since her addiction is to social media, which is typically most used on phones or other mobile devices. Logically, it makes sense that she's unbothered by the computer's "passing", because she wouldn't use it much anyways, instead preferring her phone over it. There's a lot more room to joke with this concept because she can be preachy to the family mourning the computer (this may be where her liberal tendencies shine), only to be revealed as a massive hypocrite, freaking out when her phone dies. Overall, I think she's going to be the most versatile when it comes to writing jokes for, because there's just so many directions to take it in.

That's all of the main cast done! Attentive readers will have caught that I've nixed the inclusion of the old man character that I initially planned on including. I decided to scrap this character because 1) I don't have time for more characters, 2) Casting an old man simply isn't going to happen, and 3) Making fun of an old man's inability to remember things just felt a little wrong. It left a sour taste in my mouth and that's an instance of technology actually helping people, not giving them an unhealthy addiction. Therefore, no more old man character. See you next time!