Character Development Research

 Hey guys! Today I am going to be building on the story idea I talked about in my last post. I realized that in order to accurately portray empathy for a villain, there needs to be character development found in the kidnapper throughout the short film. In order to gain more understanding as to how to create such a complex character, I researched the movies, Maleficent and Joker. 

Maleficent is a spinoff from the original movie, Sleeping Beauty.  This movie shows the backstory of the villain, Maleficent, specifically what drove her to become a villain. As a child, she lived an ideal life in the forest where she met a human boy named Stefan. Throughout the years they became closer until Stefan's father, the king, orders him to kill her in order to be named as his successor. Unable to kill her, Stefan betrays Maleficent and cuts off her wings. He becomes king and his wife gives birth to Aurora, whom Maleficent later places the sleeping curse upon. Despite her trying to kill the king and Sleeping Beauty, the audience cannot help but feel pity for her, especially after seeing how she became the villain she is and by who. 

Joker is a movie that presents the story of the Batman villain, the Joker. As a failed comedian Arthur Fleck tries to live his life with the intention of being praised and making a difference. However, seeing as he is mentally ill and has a condition where he laughs uncontrollably when nervous, everyone in society often looked down upon him and viewed him as a joke. It wasn't until Arthur killed someone that he finally began to feel something. He took it upon himself to kill those who ridicule him as he spiraled into darkness. Though he kills many people throughout the movie, Arthur is the product of a mistreated mental illness, which is pitiful among viewers.

The purpose of both these films was to provide a new perspective to a classic movie by humanizing the villain. Maleficent, often seen as a monster, was portrayed as a traumatized and broken creature as a result of loving the wrong person. Arthur Fleck, the Joker, was deemed as a heartless killer when he was actually a mentally ill man broken down by society. What made the audience empathize with these characters was their relatability. Villains are often hated because they appear to be evil and wicked with the intention of causing harm. These films show how there is another side to the story, and present the case of a villain who became bad due to life experiences that many people face such as heartbreak and bullying.  

This definitely helped me understand what it is I need to do for my own movie. Stay tuned for the character development of my own character!

Welcome Back!

Hey guys welcome back to my blog! 

For this year's portfolio project I decided to work on a short film because it's a project I have still not done. Last year's project was a movie intro, and the other options were to do movie trailers or documentary excerpts, all of which I had already done. When completing these projects I often thought of what the ending to these pieces would look like, but since it was never required I could not do it. For this reason, I was excited to choose the short film package, where I am able to develop the beginning, middle, and end of a topic of my choice. However, my problem lied in what I wanted this topic to be. 

After speaking with my teacher we narrowed the genre down to a drama that will make the audience realize that not everything is what it seems. My idea is to present a seemingly villainous character that will be humanized by the end of the film. What I came up with is the following story: A woman has kidnapped a kid and is stuck in her house while she is surrounded by the cops. For the duration of the film, she will be presented as cruel and heartless for having abducted a child, but by the end, it is revealed she is a broken and mentally ill woman who had lost a child of her own. What I think could be the most difficult is being able to make the audience empathize and feel pity for a criminal. In order to do this, I am going to be relying on sad music to set the tone and warm-hued flashbacks to indicate that her life was not always dark.  

I will be posting about this in more detail tomorrow, but I needed to write down what I had so far as a form of brainstorming!

Reflection

The development of my portfolio project was pretty rocky because I had to make many changes especially because of the whole lock down. It wasn't hard once I chose the horror genre to develop the idea of a stalker.. This I feel reaches out to any type of audience especially females who may not be aware it is happening to them. In the beginning I had a different view on how the stalker was going to be portrayed. I had the idea that the stalker would be following the girl. I can be a stubborn person so having to stray from my idea was difficult for me to overcome at first. I had my cast all set but I'm glad as to how it played out because it was easier to shoot with no cast or dialogue since it gave me more time to focus on the content and the props that I made. The props were a huge part of creating the tone of the piece so I made sure to pay attention to detail when creating it.

Something I really struggled with was communication. I would often work on the project but not post about it until after I finished and I guess as I went through I I started to get a little more comfortable on the page and share a little more, but that is definitely something that I needed to work and focus more on.

I'm very happy with the end result of my project nonetheless since I accurately represented my original thought. I was scared at the beginning of the project that I would stray away from what I wanted my main idea to be, which is to invoke fear, not through monsters with masks on but from the ones hidden in plain sight in society. I honestly felt kind of strange putting myself in the shoes of a stalker and as I progressed in the project I became uncomfortable putting the props together. For example I would have my dad or my brother follow me around with the camera as I was walking my dog or as I was working out and the further I got into the project the more I realized how possible it is for it to happen to any girl or even boy. I could have gotten carried away with playing around with editing or the music but throughout the whole thing I was able to keep focus on the idea and the message that I wanted the audience to capture. I feel like my final project did this and I'm very happy about the result.

Final Product!

I'm finally done! Here's the result :)

https://www.wevideo.com/view/1683883051

Editing

I started editing what I had previously filmed and am struggling a bit with transitioning between images. I had thought of doing quick pans between images but because there will be so many images this may overwhelm the viewers. This meant I had to cut those parts out of what I filmed and make tight shots of each image. This definitely calls for more props now that I need to make more screen time.

Filming pt 2

Hey guys! It is day 2 of filming and I realized that I am going to need to make more props to include in the video. With what I have now, I will not have enough for two minutes, unless each prop gets more screen time which is something I do not want to do. I would rather create too many props and cuts some out rather than making the video seem as if it was last minute or not well thought out.

Filming

Today I started filming my opening! I put all of my props and taped them to the wall and got my lamp with the red cloth and started playing around with the lighting until I found the angle that looked best on camera. I shot about 30 seconds of it. I took longer clips of each segment (each segment being a polaroid or a piece of paper) so that when I edit it later I can cut whatever I need out.