We book out a project room (Room 127) at GNWC, and begin white-boarding some ideas. There is lots of discussion over how we can arrive at our central image – that of a man dangling from a ledge being supported by another man who could decide his fate.
The group brainstorming
We decide to pursue the idea of a perceived love triangle – that of a story of two best friends and the wife/girlfriend of one of them.
Al whiteboards some ideas
The story involves Dave returning home early from work to find his wife/girlfriend Mia in a compromising position with his best friend Mike. We will learn later (through a set of flashbacks) that a series of events have led Dave to become suspicious about their relationship. And so Dave lurching at Mike in a fit of rage leads to a struggle that ends with Mike crashing through a balcony, with Dave holding onto the hand of his best friend – this will be our central image.
Anshul and Nick trying to get an idea what our shot will look like
We determine our roles right away – Al will be our project manager and audio director, Shahrzad will take care of photography and post-production, Anshul will be our technical director and take care of Flash programming, Milim will be our creative director, working with Photoshop to manipulate our green screen images, Jeff will be our producer, helping Anshul with programming, and Nick will be the writer, fleshing out the story, script and writing the blog. We also determine the actors playing the roles – Nick will play Dave, Al will play Mike, and Milim will play Mia.
Someone didn't get enough sleep!
We still have no idea how we’re going to arrive at our main tense image, though, and we bandy about a number of different ideas and possible tangents our characters can take.
We also determine a group name, after much deliberation. We settle on Team Hotspot (one of the many names we gleaned from random things we saw on our laptops…
Before our third meeting this week, we have a class with our instructor George Johnson that totally changes the way we’re going about our story. We learn about crafting plots and stories by first forming the end (d’oh!), and it suddenly seems so obvious! Our vision becomes a lot clearer from this point, and even if we still haven’t cemented much, we know what clutter to discard.
Visual Story instructor George Johnson offers great advice
We knew we want three possible endings for this photo-film (which we have now dubbed “Unwritten”) – one where the best friend, who we name Mike, falls to his presumed death, one where he is pulled up by his best friend, Dave, and one where Mia, the wife/girlfriend of Dave, accidentally falls after attempting to assist the two.
An early look at our storyboarding
Our final shot for all three endings, we decide, will have the credits running as Dave & Mia’s answering machine plays – it will be a cheery message from a party guest coming to Dave’s surprise birthday party – which Mia and Mike have been secretly meeting for to plan.
White boards are completely erased and started over, the setups for each flashback is discussed at length, and later in the week, we run through our skeleton of an idea with George. He gives us the go-ahead, while also suggesting some great additions.
He suggests beginning our story with Dave and Mike’s fight and coming back to the setup afterward. We all love this idea and adopt it immediately.
Anshul and Jeff devise a mathematical formula around the flashbacks we present, which will give the user an ending depending on which of these three characters they would like to know more about. The way this works has to do with numerical values we assign each flashback – from +2 to -2, and so the sum total of each series of flashback will lead to an ending.
Anshul maps out a formula for our three endings
i.e. If the sum total is greater than or equal to +2, Mike falls, if it’s less than or equal to -2, Mike is saved, and if it is -1, 0 or +1, both Mike and Mia fall.
0 Responses to “Week 2 – Sept. 21 to Sept. 27 (3 meetings)”