Story Update after Group Meetings

My group and I have had many problems agreeing upon a story as I have mentioned in my last blog post. I made a shared google doc that has a story summary and other information about our short film to try to organize our thoughts. The group meetings have also helped us come up with some ideas for our story. Here is what we have so far:

• Title: Pupa
• Underlying message: Loneliness will drive people to do crazy things
• Main character-Amber (Female):
• Lonely:
• In the house by herself
• Watching TV by herself
• Walking by herself
• Has a dog to try to cure her loneliness
• Summary: Amber is a very lonely individual who operates independently in everything she does. She is very awkward when she does converse with people, and feels most comfortable at home. She even got a dog to try to cure her loneliness, but it didn’t work because she is truly lacking human interaction. She has a doll that she has had since she was little. This doll is creepy looking, and seems to randomly disappear. Amber becomes scared when the doll seems to have a mind of its own.  Amber hears noises in her house and even her dog starts barking at nothing. One day when she walks into her room, the doll is sitting on her bed staring at her. Amber is very scared and runs out of her room, but the doll then appears in the living room where Amber ran to. Throughout the film, there are shots of the doll being there, then a girl who is tied up and looks scared. At the end of the film we find out that the doll is what Amber is hallucinating, and the doll is actually someone Amber kidnapped. Amber kidnapped this person to combat her loneliness, by forcing someone to be her friend. The film ends with Amber finally realizing that the doll is really the person she captured.
• Schedule:
• Next class: Storyboard
• Film hopefully by next weekend

Joanne suggested the title of Pupa because it means "puppet" and "doll" in Latin. It is also catchy with the repeated "p" sound. We have also finally decided to focus on one message that we want to leave the audience with.

This google doc has really helped because we are basically forcing ourselves to agree upon a story. I wrote this summary and Taylor and Joanne are going to edit it some more. In one of my next posts I will talk about any revisions they made to it. That way we can finally have a finalized story to work with.

We want to move on to storyboarding next week because the weekend we were going to film is not going to work out. If we can't film by next weekend we are going to still film before spring break, but during the week. We already know we are going to film at my house, and are going to talk about other locations when we storyboard. On the next blog post, I am going to do copious research on our genre and films similar to ours. During the group meeting, they mentioned that the movie The Boy is a good example of the editing techniques we want to use with the doll disappearing and reappearing. I am going to research more about it and the specific scenes they talked about.