Abdullah's Film Blog

    F ilm titles are immensely important, and we chose "Search" for ours. It's short, snappy, and leaves a lot of thinking to be done left for the user. We chose it to represent that the rest of the movie will mainly focus on the lengths the driver of the car in the introduction goes through in order to retrieve his friends who disappeared in the first scene. We came up with it after our first day of filming and thought it worked well.

A photo of Alejandro filming the driver's mental breakdown for the final scene of our movie      Today, February 26, 2022, was our first day of filming. We met up at 3:00 PM at Miramar Regional Park to film there, and we immediately ran into a problem, which was that not everyone came. Two of the people were missing, having other more important things to attend to. We decided to start our filming with just four people. Alejandro was the main guy taking care of the camera movements and techniques, with his prior experience in this field.     Our first scene went well, as Alejandro conducted his arc shot around the car going clockwise as we all got into the car. We didn't even have to try again. Our third scene of panning inside the car also went well, although not each shot was perfect, we made enough takes that we probably have a few good options that we can use. Last but not least, our final scene, which involved the driver of the car running outside and having...

Miramar Regional Park, where we plan to film      Right now, our plan is that our first day of filming will be on Saturday: February 26, 2022. While this is a little bit later than it should be, this was the first available day that we were able to get everyone else we'll be filming with onboard and available. At least, that's the plan, we'll try to get six people. This should make things easy and natural to create, especially with our four major scenes, and also in adding diegetic background ambient noise that can both sound like it fills up the room while also being understandable.      Our location of filming is going to be Miramar Regional Park, which is an easily accessible area near the school. I myself live close enough that I can reach it on foot. Right now, the plan doesn't call for leaving the park, but if we find a good place with an underpass outside the park (especially since the park doesn't have one), we might travel to it in order to get the...

The main character in our upcoming project is very clear, being the driver of the car who witnesses all of the passengers in the backseat disappear. While we don't quite flesh out the main character's personality or characteristics, because she'll mainly be focused on the events happening around her, there are some things that we've decided she'll be and she'll do. For instance, we've decided the main character's costuming will be differentiated from the passengers, as to be dressed in white, as to symbolize her survival. This is opposed to the grays and blacks the passengers who disappear will be dressed in. Her communication style and personality will initially be unaffected until the event where she realizes something horrible has happened. We definitely know what her mental state is going to be. While it starts out normal and cheery, after she realizes all her friends have disappeared, it will quickly deteriorate as she has a mental breakdown. Her mo...

 Planning our Film process, where we're gonna do our film. Filmmaking is an incredibly complicated process with lots of moving parts, so it'll take a while before we have a final complete plan but we do have many ideas in mind. Arturo will largely focus on acting and pre-production, Alejandro will largely focus on the camera movements and techniques as well as costuming, and I'll largely focus on the editing and post-production. Of course, we'll all help out for each component, but we'll also have broad roles in the group. Moreover, we've got some actors who are willing to help out, but we're still working on organizing a proper time for everyone to meet up. As for locations, we'll be searching around our general area for good places to film that can be used. Relatively empty places that will fit the theme well and will help, especially for the end, when we'll need a place to stop.

 Costuming really isn't my thing... So perhaps it's a good thing I was out sick the day our group decided on the costuming. Leave it to the experts, right? Anyway, I've been caught up to speed, and our group is really going to try to use a casual costuming regime, like hoodies and stuff. We aren't really going to buy much or get anything special for this project. Overall, we're gonna use simple colors, like black, and gray for the regular passengers, and a different color, maybe white or something that stands out, for the driver. The symbolism we're trying to achieve with these is that it shows and separates the passengers' unlucky future from that of the driver, which although is safe, is still riddled with problems as he'll have to search for the passengers later on. Here are some examples of black, gray, and white hoodies of sorts that we might be using:

 Storyboarding is an important step in the creation of nearly every film. Before you make a film, you might think that you'd be able to just go out there and make it, without a plan in mind, but the truth is, if you're going to have a relatively long film and you aren't exceptionally talented in making the perfect on-the-spot decisions, it can be useful to map out your project before it actually happens, to draw out the scenes, where you want things to be. It's useful to think about the sound, the lighting, the camera position in order to convey whatever message you want the viewer to see. As for our storyboard, we made it while working together. There was a lot of discussion as to exactly how we could make the most compelling intro for our film, and we decided on many things while creating our story. Firstly, we decided to make things simple and condense the story into four "Scenes" (for lack of a better word). The first scene was before getting into the car,...

So now that we're coming up with the general idea for our project, I've created a moodboard here that I think encapsulates the general feelings of our idea pretty well. The main themes I tried to express here were fear, confusion, isolation, shock, searching, and surprise. I also included a definite car and road-theme as well in the moodboard:

Even though we didn't address this earlier, we did end up changing the genre of our film. Initially, although it was supposed to be humorous and comedic, meant to make people laugh. However, over time, our project slowly morphed, and by the time that we'd created our mood boards and our storyboard (which I'll blog more about tomorrow), it wasn't really a comedic movie anymore, but a horror flick. This definitely has many implications for our project overall. The main difference is that we'll have to shift the tone of our movie. Whereas we originally planned to use bright overhead lighting and happy, upbeat music, now we'll have to shift. Instead, we're probably going to make use of many dark environments with the absence of lighting. Any sound effects we have will be dark and send chills down your spine (if we use much non-diegetic audio at all), and background music will probably not be incorporated to a great extent. I'm just posting this to ensure tha...