The Start Of It All

 Hi guys, it's Paula!

Today seems to be the start of a very long, but exciting process: the creation of an opening scene. And it is all under my control and creativity, pretty nerve-racking. In just the matter of a few weeks, you will all be able to see what I come up with, but, luckily, you are all also going to come along with me on the journey. I will be posting here multiple times a week in order to keep you all updated on my thought process and on the progress of my opening scene. I'm looking forward to this journey and I hope you enjoy it as much as I will. 

Before diving right into this process headfirst, I wanted to let you guys in on my initial thoughts going into this. 

Ideas I have: Going into all of this, I'm not sure exactly what I want to do. There's so much possibilities my brain just isn't able to pick one idea. However, I have a specific genre in mind. I started off by thinking what some of my favorite movie genres are. A lot of my favorite movies fall under the thriller/crime category (movies like se7en, silence of the lambs, fallen) so initially this was a big idea in my head. However, I don't think I could create something to the best of my abilities under this genre. So, after thinking about it long and hard, I cancelled that out. After some more process of elimination, I considered some of my other favorite movies, movies such as Moonrise Kingdom, mid90s and The Florida Project. All of these fall under the drama category, which seems a little more in reach. This is definitely a category that I could see myself doing and executing to the very best of my abilities. All of this is still up in the air and some research is definitely necessary but, I think it's a very good place to start. 

What I hope to gain from this: I hope to gain a lot from this project. Since I will be recording my every step in this journey, I hope to adopt very good research practices. I also hope to apply all of my research into my work in the best, most logical way possible. I hope to learn a lot about the genre I decide to go with and about what makes that genre so unique. We have learned that in class and done research on it but I hope to learn about it much more in depth, especially because I have to apply my findings into an actual film.  I also hope to get comfortable with all the techniques and methods we have learned about in class, at least enough to effectively apply them in my project in a way that makes it 10 times better and that gives it much more meaning that just a video. I think learning more about the application of these techniques and having to do it myself will help me when I have to analyze these techniques in other pieces of media. Another thing I hope to improve is my editing skills. The media studies course has already helped with that so much but I am determined to make this piece look as professional and as real as possible so I will need all the editing techniques and knowledge I can get. 

Challenges I may face: Right now, I think this is all looking very optimistic; However, I do have some concerns that I will be trying to steer away from in the process of making my film. Time is definitely a big worry. A couple of weeks does seem like a long time for this but those weeks are going to be full of intense research that will lead me to the final product. I need to make sure I stay on task and don't procrastinate to get this done as best as I can. Another concern I have is having my opening scene not get a clear message across to the viewers. In order to avoid this I will need to put in a lot of time into the small components of my film and make sure that everything is planned and done correctly. If I stay on task, I shouldn't have an issue.