Transitioning into the Portfolio Project!

    Ok, so we are finally transitioning to the fabled portfolio project. I have to admit, I am a bit intimidated by the whole thing. It looks like a lot of work, but I am sure breaking it down into smaller parts will definitely make it more manageable. The project is due on March 25th, so from now until the end of March, all of my blog posts will be centered around this project. The requirements (for the blog section) are to do four posts per week, excluding this week where we only need to do two. These posts will document the entire journey in great detail, from planning to post-production and reflection.

    Now, the past two weeks have been dedicated to preparing for the beginning of this great process. Last week, we studied the topic of film openings. In that lesson, we learned about a variety of approaches to making a good film opening and also viewed several examples of film openings. This allowed the class to begin brainstorming some ideas on the plot and technique of our projects. 

                                                     Below are my notes for this lesson:

  

    This week, we went over the actual outline of the project itself, including what is/isn't allowed. The film opening must be an original fictional story, and be two minutes long. It can only go a maximum of five seconds less, or fifteen seconds over. It must include opening credits, and credit any copyrighted music within them. It must contain the title of the film, which surprisingly many students forget to include. All images and text must be original, which basically means no AI or stock images. There are three film openings that are off-limits: getting up and ready in the morning, stalking, and kidnapping. This is because many students do these and it is quite frankly getting old for both my teacher and the people at Cambridge. Most of the sound should come from Foley, but we can use some sound effect libraries. While the final product is important, the blog is the most important part of the project, which needs to document/detail everything.

My notes for this lesson:

    For this project, we are allowed to work in a group of up to four people. I decided to work with the same group as the music video project since we all work well together. We have brainstormed a little bit on what we want the project to be about. There is one idea floating around that has piqued my interest, but that will be elaborated upon in the next post. As far as I can see, the approach that will supplement this idea the best would be to establish the main character. This will be achieved through the dialogue of the scene, so if we go with this idea we will need to dedicate a lot of the pre-production to coming up with an interesting conversation for the protagonist to have. The goal of the dialogue would be to explore who our character is, and how they interact with others.