Wednesday, February 17, 2010






Pitch Project

I've been thinking about our society's relationship with food lately. It seems more unhealthy than ever and I was thinking about what we really put into our bodies and how they can affect us. My proposal is about a teenage girl, Lauren, sitting at home playing video games one night. She previously purchased a really cheap, brightly colored (and cleverly marketed) bag of chips at a store. While consuming said chips she starts slowly hallucinating, first with hearing some strange noises, the colors in her television changing drastically, and finally when she goes to the bathroom, she sees spots. After sleeping off the effects, she realizes that the chips were the cause of her problems. She finds a strange ingredient listed on the bag and looks it up online to discover that it has hallucinogen-like side-effects. While she's online a chat window opens up. A friend of hers that off-screen had been with her when she purchased the chips asks her how they were. Lauren replies that it "was only a $1.50 for the worst day of your life." and that to "next time read the label."

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Elysium: Self Critique

Project Elysium

Main Idea: Our group came up with our portait project in our first meeting. We had similar ideas but our story was built on top of Joe's original idea, a terminally ill girl with expansions to the character such as the inclusion of a separated lover.
Source Idea: The source was Joe's original idea, that we all slowly added details to to make the character more complex. Not all ideas were accepted into the final idea and some people ended up with more of their ideas in the script than others but everyone was given a fair chance to have their input and vision heard. Also not all of my ideas we accepted into the story either but most of the ones that did tended to be what seem small ideas through the use of props but I felt they eventually became central to the character's identity.

Key Emotion: The focus of the project was on the idea of despair and longing of the main character. In the story as she's dying she dreams of her departed lover before finally finding peace.

Synopsis: Its the story of a dying woman who is distraught with her current situation who through a dream of being reunited with her lover is able the come to terms and pass on in peace.

Theme: Our main idea is the thought of forces beyond one's self being used as a means to help encourage or improve the life of a person.

Strengths: I think our strongest idea was in terms of lighting techniques because we really built around the idea of using different lighting sources (the lights included in the kit with blue gels and not, fluorescent lights, and even a flash light) to really set up the reality of the character and differences in plains of existence.

Problems: We started slow at the beginning of filming and we probably could have all had more practice with the equipment beforehand.
Journal Notes: I learned that I am much better at lighting and learned that each person in our group was good at different things. While we all had a hand at doing everything, I found that certain people were better at tasks than others.

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Inspirations for upcoming project

Art Direction and Subject Matter:
The Lovely Bones (2010)
What Dreams May Come (1998)
The Others (2001)
The Crow (1994)

Art Direction:
August Rush (2007)
Pride and Prejudice (2005)
Minority Report (2002)
Let The Right One In (2008)
The Matrix (1999)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)
Coraline (2009)
Where the Wild Things Are (2009)
Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004)