So what exactly is an EMP?

So today Rhea and I discussed what an EMP was. Or at least we tried to figure out what it was. We've been trying to figure out ways to bring attention to the object and give an explanation for why it would be making noise. So I said to maybe have a subtle mention at the start of the film from the mother saying that the power company is doing EMP tests in the area so there might be power outages. An EMP is an electromagnetic pulse, and I pretty much learned about it from comic books and movies. But right now we were trying to find out if that's even scientifically accurate and if that would make sense.  A part of me was just saying, eh it'll be fine, but the inner scientist was saying to make it 100% accurate. Like even Finding Nemo was almost 100% scientifically accurate (minus the wacky adventure) but the marine biology aspect of it was. I'll keep you updated as to what we will be changing and adjusting.

A new hope

We might have come up with something leaps and bounds better. Well not us a lot but Rhea and our friend Eugenia helped us out and came up with a new idea.

The idea is that a girl has a door in her house and she doesn’t know what’s behind it and she keeps hearing something that’s making noise and clanging in there. And when she eventually goes to check it she find that it was just a toy or something simple. I worked down the idea to now what it would be is that the toy is an old game boy or something similar. And electronic specific. And at the beginning the characters mom would mention how the power company says they are doing new EMP tests, so the power may fluctuate sometimes in people’s homes. That’s what would trigger the device to turn on and off. I’m currently trying to think of how to structure an arc for the character. How does the character grow from this? What do they learn? How does the character change from the beginning to know. I really want to include an element like this. Now as I’m typing this I’m considering maybe having them become more detail oriented. Have them start off with not paying attention to little things and maybe have random miscellaneous items scattered in their room and when it ends you see the character be meticulous with everything in their life. Have the mom at the start mention how disorganized she is to emphasize this concept. We made MAJOR progress today and I’m a lot happier than I was before. Have a great day and I’ll keep you updated.

I gave in

At this point we needed something. Anything. So I gave in to Rhea’s idea. She had spoken to our friend Cali and she said we should stick with the more simple idea of the break up one so I just accepted it. There was no other ideas I had that I could give. I had given every idea to Rhea and gave her the opportunity to take it and maybe change it but she didn’t like them. So I just said let’s go with this one. We need something so we are going to work out the story and I’ll keep you updated. Till next time.

now I’m sad :(

What I had hopped for was an elaborate story. I wanted depth. I wanted something to challenge the viewer. I wanted the viewer to think that just when they had the plot under wraps and they knew what was happening, we threw them for a loop and shocked them with the, “Ah Ha,” moment. But that’s all gone. That idea that I could create something like that. This god forsaken BeerVirus has taken that away from me. So now we are back to square one. Thinking of an idea. Rhea and I FaceTimed for over and hour and a half today and we came up with nothing. Well actually we came up with two ideas.

I had gone back to my note of story ideas and found one using the butterfly effect but Rhea thought it was still too complex of a story. She had come up with a more simple idea of a girl who goes through a breakup and uses nature as her get away and she kind of, “becomes one with nature.” I kind of hated it. But I had to go to work so we said we would resume the call tomorrow. I’ll keep you all updated.

W R I T E R S B L O C K

I CANNOT MOTIVATE MYSELF. I am struggling a lot here. I am having hard writer's block and I just can't even motivate myself to sit at my computer. The other night I was up till 5am and I'm so bored yet I struggle to complete the most simple task of writing my script. Maybe my issue is a good thing though.

Rhea and I have been discussing the idea that we might have to change our story in its entirety. Ok not entirely but adjust MAJOR aspects of it. Ugh this is so painful. We finally got a decent idea and it was sabotaged. Ok but as for the major ideas Rhea was thinking... She was discussing going back to the ignorance is bliss concept. And another idea was life stuck in quarantine, or a long journey interrupted  by disaster. Now there were just notes she jotted down. I will put my own post modern spin on them and get back to you all later on what I've come up with. For now have a great day.

AHHHHH TINAAAAA

We talked to Tina today and it was very very refreshing. Rhea and I haven't heard her voice in weeks. It was really wholesome too, like hearing Stoklosa laugh just made my day. So this kind of helped me get a better idea for how we are going to have to sort things out and the fact that we might just have to change the idea. I'm struggling here to figure this all out but I will keep you all updated.

My life is a movie

Well currently, I think a lot of people think that. This whole thing doesn't feel real. It just messing with everything I have going on;. The Beervirus has taken over all sources of news outlets and is the only thing I see everywhere. My own job has changed their policy to only allow take-out orders. So how has this affected the project? Well I can tell you that's it has screwed up EVERYTHING.

So, currently both Rhea and I are quarentined to our homes. Technically, we are allowed to be out and about but our parents, don't want us to be. And something tells me this is only going to get harder. Agh I just need help trying to figure out what to do. I can't find any actors and I think I'm going to have to swap my story. Lord help me.

I'm going in the right direction... I think?

Well I wrote something...

Look it's been a tough week. The original plan was to have the script done by today but I'm still having writer's block. Whats my plan now? Woah woah woah, slow down there voice in my head, let's not get too far ahead of myself. So what did I do today? So I wrote a much more fleshed our version of the story. Just no script. I was able to establish character motives and with the help of the resource I used earlier, define the loop much better. I'm still a little iffy on the ending so I shall keep you updated upon whats to happen with that. For now I'm going to go get Chipotle. Until next time!

I think I'm ready to throw everything out and just say, "F*** it."

What am I doing right now? Well I'm glad you asked little voice in my head. Currently I'm banging my head against my desk.

This god forsaken BeerVirus has thrown a wrench into everything we had planned.  At the current moment my brain is in no state to write anything. I sat in front of my computer for half an hour then decided to clean my desk (which might I add looks very nice right now) but did not help me write any more for the script. It's not like you can just sit down a writer and force them to write a good story. I'm sure Kaufman wasn't put at gunpoint when he wrote Eternal Sunshine. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink. Wait is that what that expression means? I'M LOSING IT. Yesterday after we got told that STN was cancelled I decided not to sleep that day cause our flight was at 6:15am to go back. So I didn't sleep till I got on the plane (almost a full 24 hours I was awake), then when we landed, my mom picked me up, we went home and at noon I went to sleep, woke up at 8PM then went back to bed at midnight and woke up at noon today. I am so disoriented and full of emotions I can't even comprehend. I'm going to go figure out what I'm going to do... with my life? Yea sure.

OK but for real I think I am EXTREMELY over this

If you've read my partner Rhea's blog, she sums it up just as I'm about to. For the past 8 months we spent countless saturdays practicing for a competition named the Student Television Network. I had gone for the past two years and won three times with this competition. This year it was being held in DC and I was already iffy on going cause I honestly don't like DC all that much. But still we went and we were there for a little over 24 hours and less than a day away from our competition when it was canceled. It was supposed to happen that next morning and it was canceled. All those practices we had prepared with and hours on end with hundreds of dollars spent. Wasted. This was supposed to help me too with this project. They have this thing called excellence awards where they allow students to submit short films they created and after STN every year, everyone has a, "honeymoon phase." This is where everyone has the motivation and inspiration to create a short film of their own, and it would have helped me push past my own sickness. Not of the BeerVirus but of Senioritis. I'm going to go jump off the balcony of the hotel. (for legal purposes, that's a joke)

A single microorganism has sabotaged the entirety of my existence

Period. That's it. I have nothing else to add.

PLOT 1101 PROF: SAVAGE BOOKS

I think the most ironic thing is that a Youtube channel, named Savage Books, does videos about the writing of movies and tv shows and no where does he mention books. Well maybe he does and I just haven’t seen the video. But anyway like I was saying Savage Books.

Unlike the name suggest he isn’t much of a Savage and is honestly quite companionate. The YouTube channel discusses different writing techniques presented well in TV shows and movies and teachers viewers these techniques. I found him one morning at 2am scrolling through YouTube delving into the concept of Postmodernism and other such ideas. And I’m not joking. I couldn’t sleep one night so I figured the best course of action was to pursue an educational route instead of lying in bed staring at the ceiling. Partially hoping I would learn something and partially hoping the video would bore me to sleek, but alas the concepts were too interesting and I didn’t fall asleep till 4am.

 This is actual archive footage of me.

But I digress. My main hope is that with this YouTube channel I’ll be able to create a screenplay that is creative and interesting all at the same time. I will keep you updated as the writing process begins. For now goooood night.

I took a trip to 2015

With my flux capacitor and 1.21 jiga-wats of power I went back to film one at falcon cove middle school. We had watched back to the future and studied it for a solid 3 months.



And after that was completed we started to look at screenplay writing. It was then that my film teacher, Eric Hengee, introduced me to the website Celtx.com .

The last time I had used it was actually about two years ago though when I had wrote a screenplay for a short film I wanted to do but never got around to finishing. And when I went on I got to look at the project I had created from film 1. The beautiful screenplay I had wrote in 8th grade. And after skimming it I realized...

What a piece of crap it was. Hey give me a break it was eighth grade. But the formatting was near perfect. The website makes everything a lot easier with making scripts and I figured it would be the best resource for Rhea and I do we could create a script. And know and behold that right after I had the epiphany Stoklosa introduces the class to the website.

So for our film we will be using Celtx in all its glory. This of course isn’t my first time writing a screenplay as I mentioned but something tells me this will be a lot better than the self proclaimed Oscar winning film, that didn’t even get a name, that I had created in with grade. More to come on my screenplay writing soon. Have a great day!

STR U CT UR E.

Is it ironic that I named the post structure and it has no form of structure considering the letters have awkward spacing. Yes. Yes it is. Today in class Rhea and I discussed the structure of our film and came up with the overall structure of how it would be.

  

The images above show the structure and the notes I made. If you can’t understand it. Well. Sorry. The main reason they are created is so that I can understand it so if you can’t we’ll guess you’ll have to see the final product. And we got this all done in one class period so high five on us for that

Anyway this is a short one but I just wanted to give you all some more details on what’s to come for the film. Have a good one!

The immaculate conception of genius

You might want to call me Einstein. Sooooo Rhea and I were discussing what would be our final idea. Holy sh*t it got hectic. In all honesty we were really worried that we wouldn’t be able to come up with a solid idea. But on Monday after school I went home and sat down to play Minecraft. No I’m not 12. No I can’t give you a reason I’m playing it. No I’m not proud of it but it’s still kind of fun so I play with my friends. LEAVE ME ALONE I CAN FEEL THE SEETHING JUDGEMENT THROUGH MY SCEEN EVEN THOUGH YOU’RE READING THIS IN THE FUTURE.



It’s all part of the process. So Rhea and I sat on FaceTime as I played Minecraft and we discussed what the plot would be and came up with a final idea. While I was dumping out concepts to Rhea she was jotting down notes and shooting down ideas faster than Bradley Cooper in American Sniper. As for the notes here’s what she wrote (these are just the notes. No need to read them. Summary is at the bottom)...



happy stuck on repeat

-stranger than fiction

-person who is happy to be stuck in the loop and they know what is going to happen. they get broken out of the loop and wish to get back into it.

-show some character’s thoughts

-how the loop breaks will be up to the audience’s interpretation

-act 1: establishing the loop (2-3 times repeated)

-act 2: loop breaks/conflict occurs (wakes up late 6:46, instead of 6:45)

-act 3: resolution

(clique) Coma idea- stuck in loop represents day to day in a coma / loop break represents bringing to wake up from coma. audience understands at the end that the whole thing was coma/dream

(backup) coming of age type of deal- have to adapt to new way of life

something triggers the break in loop/character finds out what the trigger was and brings them self back into the loop

two friends-one leads the other

person living through the loop / one is convincing the other to break out of their loop

-act 1 / 2 mins: establishing the loop between both characters/ they know each other are both in the loop (2-3 times repeated)

-act 2 / 2 mins: Presenting conflict-why one character wants to break the loop and trying to convince the other to join

-act 3 / 1 min: resolution- (inception idea) alarm clock goes off at specific time (6:45:00) every morning/takes 10 seconds to turn off alarm, time ticking to 6:45:10 for the audience to wonder if they ended the loop or continued.



But yea so in short the film would be about two characters in a loop. In order for them to stop the loop and continue the timeline they would both have to agree. But one has become overtly content with the loop and enjoys his time, while the other is ready to move on. The film would end in a sense like inception leaving the audience up to interpretation whether they think they ended the loop or not. Anyway that is the current status of the story and if anything changes I will keep you updated. Have a great day!!

Searching...🔍

Ah I continue to search for what idea would work best for my short film. Since Rhea has been sick and we've been busy with TV practices for competitions and I've had work, it's been a struggle to find a day to talk with her. So today I looked into the film, Stranger Than Fiction. 

The film's opening scene is what had intrigued me most with the way the character was so precise with everything he did that day.

The concept was similar to what I had wanted to go for with the character being stuck in a loop and the moment he breaks out of it, he wants to get back in. I was thinking that maybe the overall concept for it would be that they were afraid of being offered too much freedom. While I could make the character OCD I wasn't planning on it. I like the idea that when we present the loop all the shots have this symmetry to them. Like if you were to mirror one side with the other they would look almost the exact same. 

As for the structure one idea I had for it was that...

Act one would present the main character and their loop that they are stuck in.

Act two would present the character being broken from that loop and how the character wants to get back in

Act three would be the resolution, which I haven't figure out what it would be yet.

Other than that, while Rhea and I are a tad behind, we should be able to catch up in time especially with when we are at STN we can try to get the rest of the pre-planning done there. For now, have a great rest of your day!