Film Reflection - April 29, 2010

Since the last lesson, which is the lesson where we had a lot of trouble deciding on a song, we have come up with a solution to our agreement problem. Last night, we held a conference call and discussed our reasonings for our ideas and finally resolved on deciding to Harry's idea for a music video on politics.

So today, since we are already running a bit behind the rest of our class due to our slow decision making, we went straight to work on writing up a shot list. We all started to share our ideas for different scenes and wrote them down in the order that they came to mind rather than in sequential order as we figured we could decide that later, but first get all of our ideas out. After about 20 minutes of writing down all of our ideas, we started to notice how repetitive our scenes were getting in terms of location, shots, acting and theme. Therefore, I said that we needed to come up with a proper outline of the narritive structure of the music video.

So I wrote down on a piece of paper - conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. And I said that we needed to fill this in so that we at least knew what the story was and would therefore be thinking up the right types of themes. That is when we came up with this idea of "white-masked" people and a good plot behind it. We then discussed endings, as we want an interesting, unexpected ending and we have come up with several ideas. I really enjoyed this creative part of the process, although I feel our group generally needs to work on being more open-minded and appreciative of other people's ideas.We have an issue of continuously interrupting each other, and this needs to stop too.

Today, I learned more about how to make a music video and how it you don't realize how much thought and creativity needs to be put in to create a story in such a small period of time with as little dialogue as possible. I still think our group needs to work on being more open-minded, but I feel I, personally, was a lot ore open-minded, more "principled" from the IB learner profile.

I am very excited to begin filming, but before the next lesson, my group and I may need to meet up once more to catch up so that we can have a ready to hand in script of our film by the next lesson in a week's time.