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.