Human Grief Research

How different genders grieve

I found this an important thing to research because it will impact my decision on the gender of my character. 

Please keep in mind that all people grieve differently. This is simply a collection of research which examines the commonly observed traits in men and women, as well as a general research on grief that is not gendered.

Women	Gender-neutral	Men
According to Tom Bekker with Green Bay oncology, women tend to accept their emotions when grieving and confide in other relationships. Bekker also writes that women often like to talk about memories and grief, because it helps “it helps them process and work through their grief.”	In this column I will be collecting research on the human grieving process, and analyzing the impact  of my research on the creation of my character. According to the National Library of Medicine, there are five well known stages of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. According to the American Cancer Society, it takes one year minimum for someone to go through the fifth stages of grief, however people continue to mourn the death of a lover far beyond that. Based on this, I’ve established that my main character’s lover died at least two years before the film takes place.	As opposed to women, who work through their emotions by communicating with others, it’s common for men to shut others out and hide their emotions in order to avoid appearing weak or vulnerable. Men also take the opportunity to distract themselves from their grief

Based on my research, I’ve decided that the gender of my main character does not need to be decided, and I can leave it up to be decided based on casting. I’ve also decided that the film takes place a minimum of two years after the death of their lover. This is because the way I intend to portray the character’s grief is not specific to any gender. However, this may be because the research I’ve collected is more closely associated or relevant to recent deaths.

Bibliography:

https://gboncology.com/blog/gender-differences-in-grief/#:~:text=Women%20confide%20in%20friends%2C%20outwardly,about%20the%20person%20who%20died.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5375020/#:~:text=In%20essence%2C%20K%C3%BCbler%2DRoss's%20stage,sometimes%20called%20the%20DABDA%20model).

https://www.cancer.org/treatment/end-of-life-care/grief-and-loss/grieving-process.html#:~:text=It's%20common%20for%20the%20grief,the%20deceased%20for%20many%20years.

Casting Problems

 Who to cast

      In this blog post I will be referring to the production schedule I posted in my previous post. I must also preface this blog post by saying I have receive permission to use the names of all people mentioned.

(message between Ale and I)

(message between Santiago and I)

(message between Fabiana and I)

    I've been thinking a lot about who to cast in my film opening. I would love to be in my own video, as I have a history of partaking in theatre and drama, however acting and directing a video complicates the recording process. So instead I went through my contacts, looking through the friends I do theatre with because I know their acting is reliable. I settling on my good friend Fabiana, also known as Fabi, who has acted in several musicals with me as well as professional productions. I texted Fabi a week prior explaining what this project would be about and asked if she was interested in acting in my production, and she said she would be happy to help. I have known Fabi for several years now and know her acting style, as well as her versatility in character types. I have seen her play both serious and comedic rolls very successfully. For this reason, I decided I want her to play my lead character, Kai. I can trust her to put emotion into the scene when needed, and I know she will put her all into whatever roll she is given. 

    Now for my other character. This is has been a decision that has been bothering me for quite some time now. This character goes by the name of Melody (all character details are in character analysis charts). The only part of the film where this character appears, will be "flashback" scenes. We see this character solely from the perspective of the Kai in memories, which is why I intend for Melody to have a very angelic feel to her. Melody was everything to Kai, and this is shown by all the moments in Kai's memories. I want Melody to have the "Disney dead mom" feel, where you see this radiant character who is just portrayed as kind and glowing. The kind of character with shots that make the audience feel like you personally knew them, despite having no idea who they are yet. That's why I planned on having Ale as Melody, because I knew Ale fit the role aesthetically. 

In Class Group Meetings!!

 So...last week was not great...school lockdowns!

    The week of February 19-25 was completely insane, yet very normal for an American public school. We experienced two lockdown procedures due to strange items being found in the school, and since my school follows an A day/B day block schedule, both lockdowns conveniently fell on the day I have Media Studies. Thankfully, no one was hurt, and both lockdowns were simply precautionary.

    However, since the lockdowns lasted around three or four hours each, this did drastically mess up our schedule for the week, and I was not able to get much work done. On the second day, I went to Media Studies after the lockdown was over and we spent a lot of time talking as a class about the event. After that, my teacher, Mrs. Stoklosa, split us all up into groups for us to talk about our projects with class mates. I'm really glad we did this because my classmates were gave be some really good ideas.

    As a refresher, I had planned to have music playing from the start of the video, and only have it turn off when Kai takes off their headphones at the picnic. However, one of my classmates brought up the point that this might be confusing because the music might cause the difference between reality and memory to not be as clear. He proposed the idea of having just instrumental music playing, and letters from Melody to be playing during the memories instead of music with lyrics. I think this is a good idea, since the cause of Melody's death was due to illness (will be explained in character analysis chart), perhaps these letters were recorded by Melody before her death.   So now I have these two possible routes to take, however my search for music still continues.

Managing my time

     Production Schedule

    This is a seven week project, so in order to properly manage my time to create a good video and have time to edit everything ad make my CCR, I've created a very rough production schedule.

Week 1: 2/10-2/18

• Thought of plot

• Research drama genre

• Research romance genre

• Research the human grieving process

• How do people cope with the death of a dead lover

• Helps establish character

• Research MUSIC!!!! 

• Non-copy right is easiest 

• Copyrighted needs permission ASAP

• Something fun doesn’t example have to be romance but I guess it’s a plus

• Continue research with character

• Plan characters

• Who is the alive character?

• Who is the dead character?

• How did they meet?

• How old are they

• Big problem- if they’re so young, why is one of them dead, how did hey have such a deep relationship, etc.

Week 2: 2/19-2/25

• Casting 

• Find out good times for actors to film

• storyboarding

Week 3: 2/26- 3/04

• Planning shot by shot

• How is the story going to incorporate the music

• Camera test - cannon vs iPhone

• Week 1 of filming

Week 4: 3/05-3/11

• Three days away because of French competition

Week 5: 3/12-3/18

• Week 2 of filming

Week 6: 3/19-3/25

• Editing 

• CCR writing

Week 7: 3/26-4/01

• CCR filming and editing

Film Opening Plot

 Here's my idea

    I came up with this idea on the night after hearing a story from a friend. He told me about how he was unable to listen to a certain song anymore, because it reminded him of his ex-girlfriend. This was a song that they would always listen, sing, and dance to together. This is a common experience for many. I decided it would be interesting to capture this emotion as the opening scene to a drama film. Perhaps the main character is a boy who hears a song in a café, or another public area, and instantly remembers a past relationship. However my main problem with this idea, is that I simply felt like it was lacking. It felt boring.

    So as I thought more about it, I though remembering a past lover who had passed away added more interest to the storyline as the opening scene to a film. I also decided I wanted the song listening to be deliberate, the lead intentionally allowed himself to be absorbed by the song and to the memories. However, the next problem I ran into, was why the lead was doing this in the first place. It seems strange that someone would do this for no reason, I wanted to show this moment as a "big deal" for the main character. Perhaps the scene takes place on their anniversary? Or the anniversary of the lover's death? But since it's February, I thought Valentines day would work the best. A day where you should be with your lover. 

    So this is my rough draft idea for the video:

• bedroom:
• Close up of calendar, marked February 14th
• Shots of lead sitting on bed, looking very upset
• getting ready sequence
• Lead brushing teeth, still looking upset
• Lead putting on formal attire
• Lead brushing hair
• Lead packing food and a blanket into a picnic basket, with a fake smile plastered on his face.
• picnic
• Close up of lead's feet as he walks across an open park field
• Lead sets up blanket and food
• Lead sits down on blanket, places headphones on
• A sequence of happy shots of the lead with another person, running together, shots showing when the two met, them on dates, etc.
• Then a shot of the lead taking off the headphones, and looking at a framed picture across from him of a girl
• Close up of lead, eye tearing up, "I miss you."

Now that I've establish the basics of the scene, I need to work on the most important element, which is the music. This is a song which two lovers used to express their love for each other, and I need to find a fun song that shows exactly that.

Genre and Plot ideas

Experimenting with plot

I don’t want to do a poorly put together overdone angst film opening. But I did have some interesting ideas for possible story lines. The first two were based off of lines from a book I recently read called the All for the Game series. The first line is “you gave me a key and called it home” (The Foxhole Court, p.168). I thought of a story where a lost boy with nowhere to call home, meets someone, a friend, who becomes a safety net for him. Who becomes his home. The second line is “you are a pipe dream.” A pipe dream means something that is an  unobtainable dream, and describing a person as such says a thousand words of how much they mean to you. I thought of a story of a person who struggles with undiagnosed psychosis or schizophrenia, and hallucinates another person who is beyond perfect for them. They listen to the person’s problems, they laugh with them, and share truths with them. But once the person is diagnosed and medicated, their friend disappears, along with the light in their life. While these both would make for interesting short films, I could not figure out how to make these concepts make sense as the opening scene to a film.

That is when I thought back to my last Media Studies class, my teacher showed us some film opening examples. All three of them stood out to be. They remain my favorite from all the past projects I watched from my teachers website. One in particular stood out to be. It was a montage portraying the "obsessed artist" trope. The student was able to capture the art beautifully, with incredible high key natural lighting. That's how I decided that I wanted to create something of this sort. I wanted to stay away from a dark or gloomy and focus on something that can leave the viewer in the same state of awe I was in.

The Beginning

Week One: Brainstorming

After learning in detail about how the portfolio project works, I must confess that I’m very excited for the weeks to come. However, I was very confused about the concept of a “film opening.” I started thinking of ideas that would make for an interesting short film, but would not work for a 2 minute long production. So I accepted this doubt and decided to just go on my teacher’s website to watch past projects by students. In my media studies class, we have done countless projects, and I have worked with many different people in my class. My partners for my most recent project, the music video and marketing, wanted to join once again for the portfolio project. However, knowing how important this project is towards my final exam grade, and how much of a perfectionist I am, I decided to work by myself

Humans love stories about tragedy. Especially people within my age range. I watched countless videos on depression, death, police reports, all of which were dark and ominous. However, none stood out to me, because they were all different, yet completely the same. While I’m not against typical character tropes in any way, it’s the way the character is played and shown that makes them unique. When these characters are purely written based on their trope, they become lifeless and less human. These stories about tragedy are hard to put together in a good manner with a budget of…. zero dollars. This left me stumped. If everything that comes to my mind of a “cool” and “interesting” story is the exact same as one that comes from everyone else’s, where’s the individuality? I decided to talk to my friends about this, asking their opinions on “interesting” possible film opening scenes. “Oh! Start with a character running, or being chased!” “Maybe a character crying in the rain!” All the same. When I asked my best friend, she simply gave me a list of words which…well they did not help me in the slightest. 

After explaining to her that these don’t give much information, she gave these suggestions for plot: “Girl is getting stalked in the rain, Girl gets poisoned and died, Boy asks girl out and the video ends right before the girl responds.” I then proceeded to tell my beloved best friend that she is of no use to me, but I love her. 

After establishing that I wanted to avoid the horror and thriller genre, I'll do some research on genres that work with low budget films.

Beginning of Portfolio Project

     As of Friday February 10th, I will be working on my portfolio project.

Music Marketing: R&B and Rap

     

Stage 1: Research

    The first stage of the Music Marketing project mainly consisted of research. After receiving the R&B and rap genres, we focused on companies that were popular within this field. Since my group consisted of five members, we decided to have one person write the history on both record labels, and then the other four would research one artist from their respective label. We chose Atlanta Records and Universal Music Group as our companies. I was in charge of researching the rap artist Cardi B. I was able to find a detailed history of her rise to fame and how Atlanta records has impacted her career on her business' website, and later made observations from her social media, primarily Instagram and Twitter. Cardi B maintains a very bold appearance in order to showcase her confidence and pride in her roots, in order to inspire her audience.

Stage 2: Music video planning

    After completing our research chart, we started the planning for our music video. Out of the three songs given, my group decided on using "Cmon Talk" by Bernhoft for the video. We found the song interesting and uplifting, and over all just fun. We started by analyzing the lyrics of the song, and found that Bernhoft speaks about a past relationship with a lover, and wanting to rekindle their love, but expresses a lack of communication between the two. Based off of this, we decided to create a storyline following a man trying to move on from his relationship, and his best friend who does his best to support his friend through this and convinces him that he must move on. 

    I took on the role of co-director with one of my partners. As a group, we decided on name Marz for the band, because mars is said to be the planet of passion, which follows our band's theme. Two of my partners would take on the role of band members, one being the lead singer and guitarist, while the other is the drummer. We were able to get all the shots needed for the video in two days fairly smoothly. In order to properly convey that the singer needed to get over a relationship, I took on the role of the past lover. My partner and I took several photos which conveyed this message, while paying attention to the individual message they give off. In each picture, My character was facing or looking off screen, while the singer's character looks at me. These pictures captures glances which show the relationship between the two, and how the singer was in love with the girl, but she did not care as much about him. We included these pictures in an over the shoulder shot of the singer scrolling through pictures of him and his past lover, then cutting to a close up showing the man being frustrated and rubbing his face.

    Stage 3: Presentation

    I worked with another partner in building the marketing for Marz. I developed an artist Instagram page for the band, where I included pictures introducing the members, "sneak peaks" at Marz' latest title track "Cmon Talk" for their album "Resile," and behind the scenes footage of the music video in order to interact with our audience. We named the album resile because the album was to theoretically have a theme of abandoning toxic relationships and moving forward. I designed an album cover by screenshotting a clip from one of the band shots for the music video, and editing the picture to show a deeper and more vibrant blue color.

    My partner and I at first wanted to center the band around bright flashy colors, creating a fun and energetic attitude. However, after further discussion, we settled on darker, deeper shades of blues and purple, because it created a more mature attitude for the artist. While I created the Instagram, my partner designed a website which included merchandise for fans to purchase.

    After building our PowerPoint, we presented the music video and slides to the class. Overall, I learned how important proper communication is between group members. Miscommunication can lead to confusion in artistic ideas.