Lighting

I do not think anyone in my group owns a camera, but despite this challenge, I think lighting will be something that we will be able to capture the way we want using the resources on the iPhone. 

In the beginning of our production when we are outside, we will do a couple shots of the same scene on different directions of the sun to see what we like better. 

In this example, by sliding my finger up or down, this will be able to adjust and work with the lighting. When we are filming the soccer scenes outside, I think the lighting should be bright. This can symbolize the happiness that our main character has when he is playing his soccer and that it brightens up his day.

When the opening transitions inside the house, I think the lighting should be a little darker and not involve the natural light as much. Instead, it could feature lights inside the house, but not as many light coming from the sun through windows. The reason for this is to illustrate the way that the family is. The parents are very closed off and do not support their son playing soccer which is an outside sport. Therefore, by having indoor lights instead of sunlights coming through windows, it will be able to showcase this by making it seem like the parents like to keep themselves very closed in.

Another aspect to the lighting which we mentioned would be important from the beginning is when our main character goes into his room we would like it to be darkest lighting of all the scenes. In order to do this we may have to close the window blinds or film during nigh time for this. We want really dark lighting for that scene because it will illustrate how the character is at his lowest point he feels like. 

Overall we should be able to handle the lighting challenges well and also assure that every lighting choice does have meaning. 

Setting

 Our setting for our film is pretty simple. For the most part, we plan on using a soccer field and one of our groups houses. However, there are things that needs to be considered especially when selecting our soccer field. There are a few soccer fields in Weston that I think we can use. 

The first soccer field that we could use is the soccer field at our high school. The pros of this is that it is convenient for all of the group members because it is at our school. The cons of it though is that it is used for other sports and is not solely made for soccer. It also would be difficult to go along with our story with this setting.  

Another soccer field we can use is Vista park. These fields are made just for soccer which is a pro and is right outside of school which makes it a fair location for me and my two other partners. Again, the problem with this is that it doesn't really fit our story because it doesn't provide that family atmosphere. 

The soccer fields that I like the best that I think we should use is the fields at Regional Park. These fields are nice just like at Vista and they provide more of a family type atmosphere. They aren't as fenced in and it is common to see families or friends playing soccer at these fields which we need for our storyline. The one problem with this setting is that all of our group members will have to drive a little bit, but it probably won't be over ten minutes. 

Here is a picture of the fields at Regional Park to see what we plan on working with. 

For our other setting that I mentioned earlier is going to be one of our houses. Since our group is composed of two boys (including me) and one girl, we will more than likely use my house or my other boy partner's house because the main character of our story is a boy. 

What I like with these settings is that they are all found in our hometown and we do not need to travel great distances to get the job done. 

We Made A Script!!!

 Today ended up being a pretty productive day in class. Gabriel wasn't in class today, but Julia and I made the most of our class time and made sure to get something done. With our time, we dedicated it to creating our scripts. If you read my previous post, we made some changes to our story and chose to include this within our scripts. We also added in stage directions to make it just a little bit easier when it comes time to filming. 

Making the script was an interesting process since it is not writing something formally. Julia and I had to write our dialogue as if two friends were talking to each other. This first draft was completed in decent timing and was able to be completed by the end of class. 

One of the aspects of it that I found really neat was how each character was different and their speech should reflect that. For example, the mom is very strict and should be viewed as the villain in this opening so I wanted to make sure that whatever she would say would make the audience get upset at her or feel like she is being rude to her son. For the main character Gabriel, I wanted him to be portrayed as the average nice kids who deal with some problems so I never made him make too many bold statements just a couple. His best friend and teammate Daniel is always very uplifting and really supports Gabriel, so I made him always try to say something positive. Finally, for the Dad, I thought it would be interesting to have him still support the mom, but still be a little kinder to his son. I think it is unusual for parents to both act exactly the same towards their child or children so that is why I made this choice. I did not expect to summarize every single character's speech in this blog post but here we are. 

Anyways, here is our script. Expect some revisions in the future...

  

Story Change

 I didn't even realize how soon we would change the idea to our story. While creating the story board, Julia and I realized that it may be difficult to recreate a whole soccer game atmosphere due to casting and resources so we made an adjustment to making it be both our main character, who we named Gabriel, and his friend Gabriel kicking around a soccer ball and having a discussion. This will make it easier to film for us to just have it be these two characters in the beginning. 

We wanted to establish that Gabriel's parents aren't supportive of him, so to symbolize this we are going to have the camera show parents playing soccer with a young boy at the practice field next to them to illustrate this. There wasn't much symbolism planned in our initial idea, but having this is definitely a start to adding a deeper meaning to our shots. 

Another creative idea that we came up with was instead of having it end with Gabriel receiving a phone call from a college coach and the mom tells him to the mom not telling him. Gabriel's mom will pick up the phone and then lie to the college coach and say that Gabriel is unavailable or isn't interested in pursing soccer at this time. This will be a better way to add suspense and future development to the rest of the movie because the audience would wonder how Gabriel would be able to pursue this dream. 

Target Audience

 Not everyone loves sports, but the sports market is massive. With this, we want to tap into this major market by clearly identifying our target audience as sports lovers. People who love sports don't just play them, but also watch them. By doing a movie with sports it is bound to gain a lot of views from this audience. 

According to this graph on statista.com, sports viewership will continue to rise from 2021 at 57.5 million and will eventually make its way to 90.7 million in 2025. Therefore, this is a market that enjoys watching sports and this content. 

While many people may say that sports is being heavily consumed by males, if we go the route of making our main character a girl this can open up the audience of sports lovers even more. Females also enjoy sports just as much as males and this continues to become more prevalent in society today. 

  

According to this graph, it is common to sometimes see more women playing sports rather than men. Therefore, if we make the main character a female this could be even more enticing.

Regardless of the gender of the character, both males and females can enjoy watching this movie because both genders are starting to like sports. Sports is also something that people of all ages enjoy, which keeps this market broad. 

As long as we make sure to heavily incorporate and focus on sports, this is something that will be entertaining for any sports fan. 

Introducing Our Athlete

 The main character in our opening is going to be an athlete who comes from a white collar family in a suburban neighborhood. This character is something that hasn't really been seen in a sports movie before since our character is from a successful family and doesn't need athletics in order to improve the quality of life for the family. Most sports movies have a character from an urban area, so we wanted to try something different. 

We are not sure whether we want the character to be both a boy or a girl, but I think at the moment either would work just fine. 

I created a mood board to illustrate the concepts of our character. 

The items in this board are able to illustrate the athletic side of things by including a Nike bag that players use before their game, cleats, a Gatorade bottle, and a soccer ball. The inclusion of the Lexus is his parents car. The car is very nice and illustrates that his parents are doing well financially. Our character having a nice iPhone, which was included on the mood part, also helps to illustrate the point that the character comes from a middle-upper class background. Finally we included the school books on the mood board because even though our character does play a sport and take it seriously, academics are also very important as well. However, sports does make it difficult sometimes to balance both so our character doesn't do as well in school as the parents would like him to do. 

The Start of Our Story

 It's time to get down to the nitty gritty and discuss the plot of our film opening. We are still in the process of planning and brainstorming so our plot is no where near done, but after today I think we have a general gist of it. 

The sport that we chose to do is probably going to be soccer but might be basketball. Our story is going to be about a talented athlete who just lost a big game and whose parents are not supportive at all. There will be people saying "good game" and expressions like that to the main character as he or she walks off the field to illustrate that this athlete is really serious about their craft. However, the family is a white collar family and the parents do not even show up to the game but instead just lowers their child's self esteem in the car ride home and back in their house. The parents would prefer to see more academics as the priority and only that instead of sports since it is dangerous and such a risky career path. 

To make it seem like there is development in our story, it will end with a phone call from a college coach where the mom will walk into the main character's room with the phone. This will provide anticipation since the parents do not want their child to play a college sport but instead have a more normal career path, but there is a lot of potential for our main character to be a star athlete and there are college coaches that believe in him. There will therefore be a controversy between these two viewpoints. 

What makes this story line interesting is that it is different compared to other well known sports films or TV shows. For example, a lot of them have the aspect of people playing sports in order to improve their lives and to help out their families, but in this,  it is someone playing a sport because they love it and their family doesn't need the money or to get out of a bad neighborhood. This is also relatable to something that happens in the real world today of athletics where a lot of parents aren't supportive of their children's athletic dreams. This could be something for both youth athletes to enjoy but also to teach parents how to support their kids dreams even if it's not sports. 

Here is a tweet illustrating how parents can ruin an athletes mental health and the overall joy of a sport. 

Overall, our story is something that modern athletes can relate to and can teach lessons to all involved. Hopefully this continues to develop on the right trach.

Genre Planning

 The genre that my group has selected is the sports genre. I don't know about you, but I love sports and I think that having this as our genre for the movie will be great for all sports lovers. This can also help us in targeting a specific target audience to sports watchers.  Sports films can fall into the overall genre of categories such as action, comedy. We are still brainstorming and discussing which overall genre we are going to use but these elements in sports movies will certainly be heavily present. 

There was a recent movie titled American Underdog. This movie is a depiction of the story of Kurt Warner; a quarterback who overcomes the challenges of earning an NFL job, MVP, and Super Bowl champion. The movie generated $26.3 million in the box office. 

Another popular sports movie that is one of my favorite movies of all time is Remember The Titans. This movie takes place in the 70s in Virginia during the peak of the racial injustice era. It follows the story of football coach Herm Boone who was recently hired to take over the team when the school was forced to integrate black people into their former all white school. Despite the team and players not liking this at first, through great coaching and the togetherness of sports, the team learns to love each other and instead see every person the same instead of white or black. This movie is both able to include the aspect of sports and football but also relate to society and teach a theme to love all people as well. It featured well known actors such as Denzel Washington and Ryan Gosling. On a budget of $30 million it earned $136.8 million in the box office proving its success. 

What makes sports movies so popular and is why we want to do this genre is because so many people love sports. With this aspect alone, it makes a certain niche of people already intrigued in watching the movie just because they see their favorite sport on the movie poster or in a trailer. It is not just the aspect of the literal sport that makes these films so special. I believe that sports can teach many life lessons such as teamwork, confidence, never giving up, and many more. What is cool with sports is that these themes can be hidden in an entertaining and appealing way to sports viewers. While our film opening is not supposed to be a full story, we will make sure that there is a theme or some sort of development of a theme within our opening. 

Sports today feature many stars that become household names. For example, when I say the name LeBron James everyone knows who I am talking about (if not you live under a rock). A popular characteristic to these sports films is that the protagonist is heavily focused and someone that the audience ends up rooting for throughout the film just like how they root for a favorite team or player in a real life sports game. We will make sure that whoever is our protagonist is someone that the audience can fall in love with and hopefully if we do it right they will. 

Portfolio Project: Intro

Hello! My name is Isaac Fleischer and I will be creating a two minute film opening for my AICE Media portfolio project. I'll be honest, I'm a little bit nervous about how this process is going to go. I love creativity and making projects, but editing has never been my strong suit and I know that this will be an important aspect to making the best film opening I possible. Even though this film opening will be fiction, a goal of mine is to make it relate or have some sort of meaning in the real world today to help illustrate what changes we need to make in the world. Something that I find near and dear to my heart is school and how it affects students mentally. This is a topic that I would like to incorporate within my film opening, but I am still open to other ideas and am still in the creative process. 

I have chosen to work with a group of people of either one other partner or two. Both of these people I have worked with in the past so I know that they are capable of producing high quality work. Having these partners will allow us to be able to combine all our talents and utilize them to the best of our abilities. The first steps would be through communication and brainstorming to come up with the perfect story and techniques we would like to use. We would need to make sure that everything we do is very detailed and well thought out because this is a very big portion of our grade. 

I look forward to this process and documenting my journey here on my blog!

Music Marketing Blog Post #2

 The experience of being a part of the marketing group "Cameleon Brothers" to help market the new Alternative/Indie artist Iris was very interesting.  To start the process off, we started researching popular artists in the Alternative/Indie genre and learned about the uniqueness of this genre. We chose to do in depth research on the groups Daft Punk and Foster the People. Even though both of these artists fell in the same category of music, what makes the genre Alternative/Indie so different is that every game can be different. We wanted to make sure that our artists had this same uniqueness feel so we made sure fashion of our artist was heavily incorporated in our music video by having our artist wear some interesting clothing. 

In order to make the music video entertaining but also showcase our artist we added a story element about a girl who broke up with her boyfriend and wanted to enjoy herself combined with some clips of our main artist doing the song. This choice helped to introduce fans to who the new artist is and also make the music video fun and showcase that our artists songs can get people to have a good time. 

For filming the artists we had the artist at two locations outside to perform the song. This made the video seem more light since it was filmed outside in front of pretty backgrounds. When it came to filming the story it was filmed in multiple settings and also incorporated a time change where it ended up becoming night which added tot he story element. To be more efficient, we decided for the artist to film their part by themselves and have the person filming the story part to do it separately. This allowed for a very efficient film process. 

When it came down to choosing how to market we chose to incorporate social media pages like Instagram and Twitter to get out name out there. A big part of an artist is their performances. Since our artist is brand new we wanted to perform sometimes online incorporating Instagram Live. Using Instagram Live would allow the artist to showcase their musical talents but also interact to fan's comments. We also made sure that our artist would have opportunities to perform live such as being one of the first performers at music festivals like Coachella or opening for popular artists in the Alternative/Indie genre such as Twenty One Pilots. These tactics may not seem like the most promotional however it is hard for a new artist to be able to host their own concerts and have a big enough fan base so this would allow our artist to market themselves more and start to begin that fan base since there is still a decent crowd at the beginning of music festivals or to watch openers perform. Another marketing strategy we picked was to collaborate with well known energy drink brand BANG. This collaboration is something our older sector of our target audience of young people ages 13-30 would enjoy. Since our music tends to incorporate an "Electric Feel" to it using technology, a drink like BANG also gives its costumers the same feeling. We called our drink "Circuits" which is the name of our song that we realized. We also did some more basic strategies like make a website and create merchandise but these were some of the more unique strategies that we chose. 

The final part of this project was the presentation. We created the presentation on Google Slides and used similar colors to the vibe of our artist on each side. The presentation was simple but elaborated by each speaker which made it easy on the eyes and clear but also very informative. Each slide provided information about other successful artists in our genre and also about our own marketing strategy. 

What I learned from this project is that there are a lot of miner details that are involved in marketing a musician. For example, not every brand is a good idea to collaborate with an artist but that certain brands are better than others. When it comes time to do my portfolio project, I am going to consider a lot of the miner choices that we made for our music video that were really important such as the clothes. I will also make sure to think about the variety of types of shots that we used to help make our music video more entertaining and enjoyable. 

Overall, I enjoyed this project and being able to help promote an unknown artist. I am able to have more respect for marketers that promote anybody because every single thing an artist does more than likely had a choice behind it and everything is done very meticulously.