Can you hear that?

For sound we have decided on doing several things:

1. Business Podcast: the guy is going to be listening to a business podcast that me and my partner Mateo are recording next week. We still have to work on the script, but we probably will have the mic from BECON TV.  Examples for inspiration: Start up, How I built this, The Pitch.
2. City: we decided we simultaneously want diagetic sounds of the city that I will record Monday. We want honks, car, etc. If I can't find it when I go, we will have to look in the sound effect library our teacher recommended.
3. Poem: We already have the guy that will do the voice for the poem, however, we are on spring break and we have to make sure our schedules don't have conflicts to record one day. The poem also has to be finalized.
4. Music: We also have the song  that starts as soon as he is approaching the train station. I have to see how I'm going to edit it so that it sounds faint and when he removes his headphones the podcast stops and he listens to the song clearly. 

Untitled

Name, name, name. What will the title be? It has to be meaningful, it has to make the audience interested in the film, making them want to watch it, and it has to have relevance (?), maybe not necessarily relevance.

Since we want our film to be in Spanish, the title should be in Spanish too. We want it to have something to do with impossible love, or love that can't happen or that consumes you.
We have the following options:

• Tulipán sin agua (tulip without water): the tulip is beautiful, but without water it won't survive, however, the water does not need the tulip at all, much like out characters.
• Nicotina (nicotine): something addictive, that you can't stop consuming even though it is bad for you. Like the guy with the girl.
• Fumar(Smoking): same as nicotine, this would contrast their relationship with addiction, shining it with a negative light (not sure if we want that)
• Mares y océanos (seas and oceans): this would contrast with the drowning mentioned in the song and the poem, and relate to their infinite ambitions, their personalities, and their complexities.
• Dolor exquisito or La Douleur Exquise (French)(Exquisite pain): The heart-wrenching pain of wanting someone you can’t have.If we do it in french, as pretty as it sounds, it wouldn't make much sense.
• Siempre tú(Always you): relating to the song 
• Ahogándome (drowning): relating to the poem, and the feeling he has of drowning in her 
• Como quererte (How to love you): more like a rhetorical question, relating to the difficulties he faces to understand her.

Hopefully we can decide on one soon, or come up with more

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coloring

The feel of a film can be perceived from the hues it presents. I believe coloring is one of the most important aspects in a film. Especially in indie films.
That is why my group and I are having some issues deciding which hues to focus on.
This were our initial options:

As you can see we’re in between pink And blue hues. The pink would give it that feel of a romance and set the mood for the love story to evolve, and it look aesthetically pleasing too. However, the blue would foreshadow, with the poem, the breakup after, and it also makes the colors in a few shots pop. Like this one : 

Blue symbolizes sadness and depression as Doctor uses in Inside Out to create the character of Sadness. Moreover, the term “feeling blue” represents the feeling of unhappiness, like Grad talks about in Why the color Blue is associated with sadness,  the custom of relating blue to sadness goes back to West African culture and “the blues”, as well as ships that would raise a blue flag when a captain would die at sea.  I thought the origin of the custom was extremely interesting. However, like Grad, I do not relate blue to sadness, I relate it to the sky, trust, and the sea, things that don’t make me sad. 

Pink. I’ve been obsessed with millennial pink, I just think it’s so pleasing to the eye, and it give me an innocent feel that I want my character to have. Like in Baker and Grants article, pink symbolizes innocent love and passion, which is what I want my romance to feel like. 

I created this color mood boards with Canva, PicsArt and VSCOX:

I fortunately, had the VSCOX subscription from before, so I will be using it to edit my shots. I'm still not sure if I will edit each individual shot, or just the final product. The later would be risky in terms of the brightness, since the lightning of each shot varies tremendously.

Here is a rough draft of the first minute. A lot has to still be done, but I just wanted to see the order of the shots, for when I edit in Final cut, since I have to go down to Miami. This was done in DaVinci Resolve, I had never used it before, but even though it is a great resource, I did not like it. It is very laggy, and to do precise cuts, its problematic. The transitions look rough, and it took me an unnecessary amount of time. It also takes very long to download the final product.

Anyway here it is:

     

Since I'm pretty sure I'm  doing pink, I want to draw inspiration from films with similar coloring. I did some research and I found a podcast by A24, were Greta Gerwig and Barry Jenkins, directors of Ladybird and Moonlight respectively, talk about the coloring of their films and their choices. Gerwig talks about the many choices when making a film, shooting on film, layering colors, using xerox, etc. and i thought it was interesting listening to this amazing directors, having the same dilemmas I'm having, obviously in a smaller scale. "It felt like the painted frames of early color films. Like those Isadora Duncan movies where she would paint her skirts". That's how Jenkins describes the coloring of ladybird, which is exactly the feel I'm trying to imitate. 

 
It is clear Gerwig contrast the use of blue and pink throughout the film, which makes ladybird stand out with her hair. I am not sure i can achieve the same vibrance of both colors, without looking too intense for one with VSCOX, so I'm going to be playing with the filters to see.
Jenkins those the same in Moonlight:

We'll see how it turns out, but hopefully I can achieve something similar.

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Baker, Logan. “Manipulating the Audience's Emotions With Color.” The Beat: A Blog by PremiumBeat, Shutterstock Premium Beat, 13 Sept. 2016, www.premiumbeat.com/blog/manipulate-emotions-with-color-in-film/.'

Grad, Laurie Burrows. “Why The Color Blue Is Associated With Sadness.” The Huffington Post, TheHuffingtonPost.com, 26 Nov. 2017, www.huffingtonpost.com/laurie-burrows-grad/color-blue-sadness_b_13233778.html.

“All The Way Home with Barry Jenkins & Greta Gerwig.” A24, a24films.com/notes/2018/02/episode-01-all-the-way-home-with-barry-jenkins-greta-gerwig.

Gerwig, Greta, director. Ladybird Trailer. IMDB, 2017, www.imdb.com/title/tt4925292/videoplayer/vi1325840665.

Jenkins, Barry, director. Moonlight Trailer. A24, YouTube, 11 Aug. 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NJj12tJzqc.

ACTION!

Sunday is the day!!
We left weston at around 3 to shoot in Miami. We got there at around 4. Like I said before, we did not have the drone for today, so we shot a few establishing shots with the camera just in case as a backup. We set up her little spot, and it looked super cute! We had her buddha, her vase, a polaroid camera, a book, the speaker, and a mandala rug. We shot her scene first.
We started by setting up the mic in the camera, and had some issues, because you could listen to a radio station, but we figured it out. Then she started dancing and we shot different angles, here are some pics of the shots:

Then, we shot some more close up artistic shots like this:

And some shot of the view, her set up, etc.

Then we started with him, and we shot in a building near by, as he was walking to the station, and the camera was following him. We did not have a stabilizer but hopefully, the shots don't look shaky. We shot different angles as he got to the station, and he saw her. 

However, because of the busy time, there was a lot of people, and we could not shoot the ending, so we decided to change the end and shot in a nearby market. 

But, It didn't convince me, so we might go back and shoot the ending another day. I'll start editing to see if we can work with what we have though, hopefully shooting another day isn't necessary, but we'll see.

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makeup, accessories

Accessories are key for presenting the character's personality. So when choosing the girl's accesories, we had to be really careful to choose the right ones. Same thing with makeup. 

We decided on doing simple makeup, but with a bold eye and blue eyeliner, to show her boldness and care free spirit. She wore eccentric earrings, colorful and big, for the same purpose. And the necklaces were different colors and big. Her hair was loose, to show her wild spirit. And her dress was flowy, to show her free spirit, that could also be seen in her being barefoot. 

For the guy, he was wearing glasses to show his intelligence, and give a business like look. The dress shirt had different colors, to contrast his wish to be more free than his corporate job. He had headphones to show he was listening to a business podcast. He had a fancy watch to showcase his formal attire. 

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