Short Film Brainstorm

    In attempting to create a better concept for my short film, I decided to do what I always do, and start writing down any words that came to mind when I thought of what I wanted to do for my portfolio project. I started out with writing the names of of media pieces that have been on my mind a lot recently and that I wanted to use as inspiration for my short film.   

Bojack Horseman

    The first was the Netflix original series,

Bojack Horseman.  I thought of this show in particular because I recently started re-watching it while I was home sick. I really like how it portrays really deep issues like addiction, as well as existential dread, which is shown through a lot of the main cast, especially with Bojack himself. I like how the show is existential and even unsettling a at times in terms of its visuals. I want my piece to be something that forces the viewer to look internally, maybe even get a little uncomfortable in terms of thinking of the existential. 

Opal

    The second was the work of YouTuber Jack Stauber. Particularly his animated short film Opal. This short is by far my favorite of Stauber's work, and I love how unsettling and dark it is. The short follows a young girl Opal who lives in a very cheery household where her family sings about how they see her and love her and they eat cheese burgers. All this while reminding Opal to not pay attention to the house across the road, Opal however, becomes increasingly drawn to the house. She eventually goes to the house and goes inside, encountering the horrifying residents that live there, one by one. From this piece I really like the atmosphere of it all. I, unfortunately, can't do an animated short film as I am not an artists in that manner. However, I want to create a similar atmosphere in my short film, one that is weird, and once again slightly unsettling. 

World of Tomorrow

    While I had written both of these pieces down, I still had no idea what I was going to do, and how I would incorporate the color elements into my short film. When I asked my friends in class about it, an kind of told them how I wanted to make something weird but that still had a message of some sort, my friend Ace recommended I watched the short film World of Tomorrow by Don Hertzfeldt. He said that it was very colorful and had a sort of atmosphere that I was talking about. I immediately decided to watch it, taking notes on techniques that stood out to me and that I'd like to incorporate into my project, like the heavy use of foully sound. Besides that however, I was not getting much that could help me draw ideas, that was until future Emily described her first job of working with robots on the moon, and programming them to fear death as a way to keep them in the light side of the moon. This sparked an idea.

 Short Film Concept

    For my short film, I've decided on creating a psychological film about the different views of death. The idea is that death will be represented as a person who will start off in all black and white in an empty room. As they move about the room, different people appear in front of them, reacting to them in extremely different ways, this being representative of the various ways people view death and the after life. This can vary from coming to terms with death and being at peace, being in denial about eventually dying, being mortified of the idea of dying, and feeling depressed and like nothing matters because they will eventually die anyway. All of these would manifest in different and very extreme ways like drug/alcohol addiction or  Each person will be characterized visually by a different color. As "death" moves between each person, they will gain the color of the last person they spoke to, until at they end they are colorful and have adopted the color of every single person they encountered. The adoption of color is meant to be a visual symbol of how death is whatever anyone thinks it to be, that any ideology on death is equally valid.  

    For the colors I was thinking of using colored lighting, costuming, and editing to make the drastic color differences. For the black and white to adopting color I am thinking I will rely a lot on editing, however I need to figure out how exactly I would go about it. While I still have to solidify how exactly I am going to execute the color changes and changes in color, I’m very excited for this project and how it will turn out.