Hazel's Costume Design

Hi friends! Welcome back to my blog! Over this weekend, Elly and I discussed what clothes we want our main character Hazel to wear. We want her to have a quirky, aesthetic vibe, thus we will put her in quirky, aesthetic clothes. Right now, the 2000s fashion is becoming trendy again. All the cool kids are wearing shrugs, cute little hairstyles, etc. Hazel will be emulating this style becuase we think it will make her appear "cuter'' and girly. This will help to play up the "love-stricken" aspect of the short film. 

I have many of these types of clothing because I myself like this style. I also have a terrible shopping addiction which meant I had a myriad of options to choose from. Thus, instead of going to the mall, I walked 3 feet to my closet to look for some fits. Elly and I previously discussed wanting to incorporate the color yellow into our film because it will add that the "quirky" factor as yellow is often associated with that. I noticed that I do not have many yellow tops but I found a couple that we can choose from. Hazel is going to need a couple of outfits so here are some of the clothing options for her!

SO CUTE RIGHT?

Script is Coming A Long

Hi, in the midst of this corona-virus induced mayhem, I have some good news. The script is a comin' a long. Wow, who would have thought we would get to this moment. Tuesday, Elly and I began writing our script on Celtx. While we only have the first scene down, it is a wonderful start I would say. Scriptwriting on celtx has been pretty easy. The interface is very easy to work with and it makes what we wrote look super-duper professional. We feel like scriptwriting queens.

What we have written so far is the opening scene in which Hazel and Lucas exchange numbers. In the opening scene, we want to establish the idea that Hazel is a "quirky", love-stricken girl and Lucas is a super-chill, laid-back kind of guy. We wanted the opening scene to have a bit of humor in it as well to set the tone for our short film. Elly and I couldn't stop laughing when we wrote the dialogue of "Hey, so when do you wanna do it?" "Do it...Like right now." This adjacency pair really helps to establish the dilemma for the rest of the film. 


We obviously have way more to write... but hey... at least we have the beginning done!

GO AWAY CORONA YOU ARE NOT WANTED HERE

Hi, today Donald Trump declared a National Emergency because of the Corona Virus. While I am concerned about my health and my loved one's health, I am worried about how this is going to affect my project. My dad did not even let me go to school today, and that was before Trump even declared a national emergency. He is worried about me going out and interacting with large groups of people. 

Essentially, he is quarantining my entire family in my house until further notice just to be safe. Elly and I have not yet finished writing our script but there are scenes that occur outside of my house....so I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the project deadline being so close. Oh, did I mention? School is closed this week and next week is spring break. I'm not even sure if we will be back in school after the break ends. Elly and I do not want to have to change our idea because it already took us so long to even get to the idea(you would know that if you read my other blog posts). 

I'm very nervous now because how are we going to shoot in a school if the school is closed?? Maybe we can stage a classroom but I do not have 30 desks and an empty room to stage one. Maybe we could go somewhere else like the library, but that is probably closed as well. I am very stressed. I do not want to have to change my idea. In summation, there is no summation. 

Some memes that made me a bit happier:

Casting Issue

Hi, lovely blogger. I hope you are feeling splendid today.  Today my partner Elly and I met with our teacher today to discuss an issue. in our short film, we are going to have a few scenes that take place at school. These are the scenes where Hazel gets Lucas' number, the end of the film where they meet at school again, and possibly a few other scenes that we have not yet written. We were considering making my boyfriend, Dylan,  play the part of Lucas because he is very accessible and I would consider him to be a very good fit for the role of Lucas. One issue, however, is that Dylan does not go to my school. He graduated last year and he is in the fire academy. 

We wanted to utilize the classrooms at school but bringing Dylan onto campus may be an issue because my school has super strict ID rules. We then considered maybe shooting these scenes after school because they don't check IDs then, but we would have to convince a teacher to let us use their classroom after hours. We may choose to get an actor for Lucas who already goes to our school as then we won't have to worry about this issue. However, they may not be as accessible and if we need them in other scenes, there may be immense scheduling difficulties. Once we are done with the script, I think we will have a better understanding of when and where we need to shoot and can worry about solving this issue at a later date! Goodbye for now!

Beginning to Write...

Hello, blog reader! I hope you are feeling marvelous :)

We are now at the stage of creating our script. My partner and I wanted to create an outline of our story before we write the script so we can get an idea of how we want our short film to move.

We already know that our main character is going to be Hazel, a quirky, love-stricken girl, and Lucas, her laid-back crush. It's going to be divided into three parts, as stated in a previous blog: the conversation, hazel fixating over the conversation, and then the resolution.

My partner and I decided that we want our characters to meet because they are put into a group to do a project. This will cause each other to share their numbers with one another. While they are exchanging numbers, we had the idea to have Lucas turn around and ask for her number with hazel imagining him do this in an extremely flirty manner. We think it will be funny to portray Lucas being unaware that hazel likes him. This will, in turn, make hazel appear more irrational and ditsy.

Next, we want to show hazel getting a text message along the lines of "Hey, can we talk?". This message is what will cause Hazel to spiral and overthink.  Then, we want to show Hazel going about her day. Elly pitched the idea of her getting ready in the morning but I told her that may come off as a bit cheesy. Then she suggested that we could make it super raw, showing Hazel look kinda gross in the morning. This would add another humorous aspect to the piece. We created a list of things that people do in the morning, even down to going to the bathroom. We aren't going to show anything graphic, maybe just a trickling sound.

At the end of the piece, we will have Hazel and Lucas meet up. The audience will in this scene find out that Lucas didn't mean anything significant by the text message. His calm relaxed demeanor will be highlighted and it will be funny seeing his reaction after all that hazel went through worrying.

With the outline near finished, we will write the script soon. Elly and I want to work on it together next to one another so we can bounce ideas off each other. We are planning to coordinate this very soon! Bye for now!

Character Development is Crucial!

Before writing the script, my partner and I thought it would be super important to decide and develop the characters for our screenplay. We ended up deciding to make our main character a girl named Hazel and a boy named Lucas.  We decided that we wanted to make Hazel a teenage girl who is a tad bit shall I say crazy and bit quirky. We would be able to convey this with mise en scene elements such as room decor and her clothing. We want to make Lucas a laid back, super chill dude. He doesn't really care about much and just goes with the flow. My partner and I created a list of character traits that we wanted our characters to have. This will help us in scriptwriting because knowing the personality of our characters will allow us to write dialogue that matches the character. in our film, the dialogue is going to be super important. Our whole film revolves around a conversation after all.

When developing Hazel's character, we sort of based her off of the one and only.....me! It was then easy to develop Hazel because my partner and I just started writing down things about me. My partner is one of my best friends so it was easy for her to identify my character traits. 

When developing Lucas, we thought of those nonchalant guys who just "show up". They do everything so effortlessly and you wonder how they don't stress about anything. This type of personality contrasts with Hazel's so this will make for some very interesting dialogue!


As we were character-developing, Elly suggested that we created mood boards for our characters. Elly is a Pinterest mom so we want on her account and selected photos that would invoke further inspiration for character development.

As you can see, for Lucas we were inspired by cute film and television characters such as Archie from Riverdale and Aaron Samuels from glee. Both these characters have girls swooning over them and they have a typical "boy' style. What I mean by that is they don't dress too nice or too sloppy. They wear jeans and a t-shirt, maybe a jacket if they are feeling crazy. They have a relaxed demeanor and don't have to try to get girls, they just come to them.


As for Hazel, we were inspired by these photos as they had the "quirky' aspect in them. We really liked the outfits these girls were wearing and think that they would be perfect for hazel to wear. The yellow and pink tints also are something we may want to include in our from. We also like the flowers because they represent feminity, something very important to Hazel's character, allowing us to contracts her from Lucas.

I'm super excited to soon write a script based on the aforementioned!

Story Time!

Hi lovely blog reader, today was an extremely productive day. I am currently patting myself on the back because I am so proud of my partner and me. We now have an actual STORY, not just an idea.

Since at our last Socratic seminar the bell rang in the middle of our turn, we were able to get feedback from our peers again today.  One of my classmates offered the idea that we should make our short film about a petty fight that gets blown out of proportion. This would be very comical, something that I and my partner wanted out of our short film. This is something that is super relatable as well. I mean, I got in a fight with my friend the other day because she replied K instead of okay and I thought she was super pissed at me so then I got really pissed at her and it became a whole thing when it was really nothing to begin with. Do not worry that has been resolved. Anyway, we discussed with our classmates how we could structure our story.

Notes taken during the discussion

One person offered the idea that we could have the fake conversation occur in our character's head and then they would eventually "snap out of it' and then go back to reality. The issue with this is that this may appear a bit boring and not engaging. Then someone elaborated on that response and said: "why don't you film the character going about their day fixating on the conversation." My partner and I really liked this idea because it will allow us to get a myriad of shots and will be much more entertaining and engaging for the viewer. After a bit more conversation, one of our classmates offered the idea of our main character getting a text message along the lines of 'hey can we talk?" Then, our character can then overthink and question what the other character wants. This is something that I have done a plethora of times because it can be very difficult to gauge the tone of text messages.  we then asked for help with the structure for our piece.  We would begin with the conflict, the character getting ready pondering the conversation, and lastly the resolution. Technique is going to be super important in creating this short film because the concept is very simple. We are going to have to play with color and obtain different types of shots such as tilts, over the shoulders, and pans. Our teacher also. suggested that we download an app called Filmic pro because it has a neat zoom feature that you can time out. Sounds pretty neat! After the discussion was over, my partner and I discussed what the conflict should be. We thought the most realistic conflict would involve a girl and her crush. This is something that many people can relate to, even you, blog reader! Right before class ended, my partner had the ingenious idea of titling our film "Out of Proportion"(because our main character blows the situation "out of proportion." We could also have fun designing the title because we could make all of the letters different sizes, almost out of proportion you could say. What a successful day!