Recap on our process yesterday:

So my Andreina and I's thought process is that we wanted to build from our original idea, with the whole welfare check thing. Before we even started, we knew that our plan was a little.... cliche, and we literally had NO idea how to execute it. So I thought back to what our teacher said, establishing a role for our main actor. I feel like having multiple main characters would've been a LOT easier to do and would go really well for a mystery plot. So immediately, we knew that we HAVE to have multiple main characters. We needed a crime to happen, so I went to Google "mystery genre conventions".

I saw this little paragraph, and when I read it, it made SO much sense and would be so easy to integrate into the opening.

A victim or character lacking authority launching their own investigation is something Andreina and I knew we could do, it provides LOTS of ways to build a character, their relationships, and mannerisms. 

Me and Andreina already knew that whatever crime that would be committed could NOT be exposed to the audience, as it would give away ALL appeal to keep watching. 

We know suicide is a crime where the effect is known to all but the reason may be known to none. Having the idea of multiple characters, a victim-launched investigation, and suicide for the crime, we decided the main characters would have to be EXTREMELY close. However, we knew that a victim launching their own investigation would have to mean the police were either slacking or just not caring about the crime in the area. I searched up areas that have the least police effort.

I had searched up the correlation between police funding and crime rates, to which I found this.

Now knowing that a well-funded law enforcement area leads to lower crime, that means the city has to be in a lower-class city, a bigger city. However, my city of Weston is not big enough to look like a major city, so we concluded that minimal shots of the setting would take place, and instead be implied with mise en scene. 

Me and Andreina now have our main crime, characters, and setting. We polishes our plot by going back and forth, landing on our final plot. We knew bullying could be mainly hidden, but of course some signs would show up/ A good contrast between the characters would add a good interest to the plot, so we may have a friendly, weird-ish character be bullied, and her best friend is a typical girl, making her a harder target for bullies. 

We had ruled out all chances of unnatural occurences like the characters switching bodies, mind-reading, or any superhuman qualities, as we wanted the plot to genuinely have some kind of realism to it, as if the characters and these circumstances could actually happen. 

After googling this, I knew that one of these reasons could be included in the backstory of the bullied victim. Seeing as though our story would take place in a poorer area, abusive home life, poor education, difficult homelife, and aggression could all be products of living like that. Obviously, Andreina and I chose to kind of integrate all those characteristics.

I jotted down the rough draft of the character's personalities here:

Obviously this list will probably change later on, as more detail will be explored in who they are. 

After the research and the finalization of a plot, setting, and characters, we obviously had to think on if we could actually execute this plan or not, like if it was ACTUALLY filmable. 

Me and Andreina are now a HUGE step closer to filming, and tomorrow, we WILL start storyboarding. Im thinking that we should storyboard the main scenes of the opening, then using notecards to write the important details. A summary of the scenes we storyboard will be written on the paper itself. So in the end, we will have a storyboard with our major scenes and a few sentences summarizing it, then notecards that provide extra specific details and notes on the characters, any actions that HAVE to be included, clothes, and some dialogue. 

For next week, our main goal will be storyboarding, so next NEXT week we can actually start filming. 

Bye blog, until next time!